THE ESSENCE OF BEING A CHRISTIAN
I John 2:3-7 "And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him. He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked. Brethren, I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which ye have heard from the beginning."
I John 4:15-17 "Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God. And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world."
These passages catch and express the very essence of Christianity; which is Christ-likeness. Even the world understands this. Failure on the Christian’s part to measure up to the moral, ethical and scriptural standards taught, lived and commanded by Christ, will bring immediate condemnation by the world. The charge of hypocrisy will be justifiably sheeted home to the culprit caught in conversation or conduct that does not commend Christ or coincide with His character or conduct.
It is well know that followers of Christ in the local church at Antioch, located in the modern country of Syria, were first scornfully and derisively called Christians because those in their world recognized their apparently successful attempts to pattern their lives after their teacher and guide, Jesus Christ. They evidently exuded the essence of the Christ-life in their every day walk before men. Perhaps they were not touched and tainted by the stench of the world nor did they smell of the unsavoury odors associated with worldly living. In this context, the condemnation and carping criticism of their worldly contemporaries can be correctly considered Godly commendation.
We have all heard a number old sayings on this subject many times. Such as, "I’d rather see a sermon, as hear one any day, I’d rather one would walk with me, as merely show the way." Or, "If you were accused and brought to trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?" Or, "You’re living a gospel, a chapter each day, by the deeds that you do, and the words that you say. People are reading your gospel, whether faithless or true. Say, what is the gospel, according to you." The very fact that the old cliches come so easily to mind confirms the validity and importance of the proposition they propose to the Christian.
But these two strong and uncompromising statements, "He that saith he abideth (lives) in him ought TO WALK EVEN AS HE WALKED." And, " ..."as he is, SO ARE WE IN THE WORLD" clearly confirm that Christ-likeness is the absolutely essential essence of the Christian’s existence.
We are told to look to Jesus as the only real pattern. He is the author and finisher of our faith. Our vision is to be Christ centered. We are not to look to the right or the left. We are to be vertically focused and oriented, not horizontally. When our Saviour was confronted with those who were critically comparing themselves and their calling and conduct to other believers He said in effect, "What has that to do with you? Follow thou me!" Our thoughts and affections are to be focused upon Him Who is far above all the worries and anxieties of this temporal world.
Impossible you may say? Of course. But all things are possible with God. In previous and following verses the writer admits this and deals with all the ramifications of the frailty of our sinful flesh and our daily need for forgiveness and cleansing as we walk through moral muck and mire of this messed up world. It is in such a context that he urges Christ-likeness as the Godly plan and pattern for countering the calamities of our natural condition.
It is natural for man to be a copy cat. We hear about copy cat crime. We know the terrible tragedies that can be attributed to the lack of good adult role models. We know the problems involved in placing impressionable young men and women in the midst of a prison population of hardened and experienced criminals. The resulting high rate of recidivism should come as no surprise. We also know the terrible decay and destruction being harvested by cultures whose role models have become degenerate rock stars and television and sports idols, Hollywood actors and the fantasy characters portrayed in the ungodly television and cinema fare of our day. It is unreasonable to assume that such media will not result in the promotion of an immoral and destructive life-style. After all, advertisers pay billions for the same stars and media to promote conduct that will result in increased sales of their products!
How does a child learn to walk? Talk? Read? Write? Primarily by copying others who do these things well and have mastered them well enough to teach others. The writing pattern in a copy book needs to be as perfect as possible if the child is to develop a good hand writing by repetitively copying the example. It is then easy to see the importance of our emulation of Jesus if we are to be true living love letters in the world in which we live.
I once read that in St. Peter’s church in Cologne Germany there are two beautiful paintings purportedly portraying the crucifixion of Peter upside down. Why two? As the story goes, Napoleon’s troops ransacked and looted the city, taking away the original painting. Fortunately the artist was still living and he painted another portrayal of the same scene. In time the original was returned. Even experts find it difficult to distinguish between the two. This is what the Holy Spirit through the Word of God seeks to do with us. The Living Christ is at the right hand of God the Father. But He wishes to show Himself and express His love to the world through each of us as the spiritual portrait of Christ is painted upon our hearts and portrayed through our walk and witness to the world around us. Yes, the very essence of being a Christian is to be like Jesus. We can look at a number of areas of Christian living to determine if we are really like Him.
We, like Jesus, must be spiritually born of God. The virgin birth is an essential foundational doctrine of the Christian faith. The birth of the Son of God was different. He had no human father. The Holy Spirit was the initiator of Mary’s miraculous conception and the powerful consummator of the incarnation of our God into human flesh. When the fullness of time came all this came to pass as the prophets had foretold and as the angels announced to the parents. Jesus of Nazareth was empowered by the Holy Spirit and perfectly guided by the will of the Father every step of His walk in this world. He truly was the only begotten Son of God.
Our Saviour Himself repeatedly said, "Ye must be born again (or anew spiritually)." Like Jesus, our spiritual birth must be brought to pass by the powerful participation of the Holy Spirit of God. The incorruptible seed of the Word of God is essential for our conception, conviction and conversion when He powerfully brings into existence a new spiritual life.
No one can correctly and consistently conduct himself as a son of God unless He is born of God. No one can have the essence of the righteousness of Christ in his life without truly being a partaker of His divine nature and a new spiritual creature in Christ Jesus. Although Paul tells us salvation is entirely by grace through faith, in the same breath he emphatically states that sons of God are spiritually created in order to do good works and that God has foreordained that we should walk like Jesus walked.
Jesus’ sonship entirely depended upon the God nature being imparted by His virgin birth. It is entirely true with the child of God as well. One might wish to be of royal blood and be an inheritor of all the pride, prestige, popularity, power and privileges pertaining to such a noble position. He might be willing to work hard to achieve such status. He might even accumulate vast wealth and be willing to pay a tremendous amount to join the King’s family. All of this would be futile. In order to be a child of a King you must be born into the King’s family. To be a child of the King of this universe and a joint-heir with Jesus we must be born again spiritually.
If we are to capture the essence of the life of Jesus and walked as He walked in the world, we must be baptized like Him. The New Testament allows no debate on the matter. The pattern is so abundantly clear. The gospels record the beginning of His ministry being marked by His willing submission to the ordinance of baptism being administered by John the Baptist in the river Jordan. When the baptizer was humbled by the very presence and person of the Messiah of Israel and expressed his unwillingness to be so bold as to aspire to the honor of baptizing the very Son of God; our Saviour, the Way shower, insisted and encouraged Him by simply stating He had to fulfill the righteous pattern and show the way for sons of God in the future.
If He felt it necessary to pictorially portray His passion and resurrection, even before He performed it, how much more vital is it for us who have been saved by such grace to pictorially portray the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, by submitting ourselves to be buried in and resurrected from a watery grave? If we are to be like Him and have the approval and blessing of God the Father and the Holy Spirit upon our life, we should follow His footsteps into the sacred waters of immersion. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove and the audible voice of the Father speaking of His good pleasure with the obedience of His Son, should be enough to convince anyone who may doubt the importance of scriptural immersion in the life of those who would be like Jesus.
Those who would be like Jesus will fellowship with Him and His people in one of His assemblies. As Jesus walked along the shores of the Sea of Galilee He called the apostles and other disciples to literally lay everything else aside and join with that first assembly of immersed believers. Even a cursory examination of the Gospels and the Book of Acts will confirm that only those who had been immersed by John the Baptist, who had been especially commissioned to prepare a people for His calling out, or by Jesus, through His apostles and followers, comprised that company.
It would seem they fulfilled all the criteria involved in the scriptural definition of a New Testament Church. They were baptizing with His authority. They were learning and following His teachings and the pattern of the all things He later spoke of in His commission. He spoke to them and told them that the building of His church had begun and would continue until end of the age. He gave them specific teaching on principles governing relationships within the local body; especially servant-hood and church discipline. He instituted the Lord’s Supper before He was crucified. This assembly selected an apostle to replace Judas. The Holy Spirit added to this assembly of immersed believers on the day of Pentecost.
If Jesus has promised His special presence in each true body of baptized believers in every age, and has promised to meet with them as He did with that first assembly, then surely those who would be like Jesus would have an overwhelming desire to regularly fellowship with and support the assembly of Jesus. In this same letter John said, "We know we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother, abideth in death."
When I arrived in this great land some thirty years ago I found the existing pub and mate-ship culture difficult to understand. I would commonly find wives and mothers who would nightly await the arrival of the husband and father from the local pub. It was not uncommon to find that this was an almost nightly occurrence. The husband would routinely come home fairly heavily under the influence. The children would be in bed and often his wife would have given up her vigil in despair. The most puzzling aspect was that the wife would dubiously say she knew her husband loved his family and he would insist he cared more for his family than he did his mates. But in the years that have passed I have found that such assertions had little foundation in fact. The accumlative effect upon the family and ultimately the culture was predictable. The common contemporary response to the problem seems to be the establishment of so-called family pubs. This is a cynical commercialization of a social problem. Perhaps we should coin a new saying such as, "The family that drinks together can be damned together."
Of course, examples could be given in other cultures relative to excessive absorption in sports and other activites. It is easy to see the lesson here. How can one truly say He loves Jesus and wishes to be like Him and forsake assembling together with Him and His people?
If we would be like Him we will love like Him. This letter emphasizes again and again the essential nature of love in the life of those who would follow Him. Paul spoke of the love He has shed abroad in our hearts. He also spoke of the bonding of God’s people by that love. He had much to say about that love being the motive force that constrains and compels us to serve Him. We are to love Him for what He has done for us. He was rich but became poor for us in order that His poverty might make us rich. Paul devoted a whole chapter to defining and advocating the love of God, as expressed in the life of Christ.shi
By doing so He would clearly and graphically demonstrate the necessity of emulating His pattern and following His example at the very beginning of our walk with Him. If it was important for Jesus to announce His Sonship by this symbolic act before He began His public ministry, it is absolutely essential that we capture the essence of His walk by following His example and publicly professing to be a child of God in this way as we begin to walk like Him.
If we are to be like Him we must look to His cross to discover the quality of His divine love. "Oh the love that drew salvation’s plan. Oh, the grace that brought it down to man. Oh, the mighty gulf that God did span, at Calvary!" As Jesus faced that cross on the night before His crucifixion He told us that the characteristic that would mark us as being like Him would be to love each other as He had loved us. The world has no other reliable way of knowing who we really are. Lost people and others can imitate almost everything else a Christian does. They can outwardly obey the ordinances and commands of Jesus. The example of Judas shows us that they can even pretend to be a committed Christian and one of us. But there is one thing they cannot do. They cannot love as Jesus loved nor truly selflessly serve and sacrifice in the manner Jesus did. The example of Judas also confirms that as well.
If we are to be like Jesus we must love the lost and be fishermen of men like Jesus. We must hate sin, but love the sinner. The dirty, surging, sinful masses of humanity must be loved. He was criticized and condemned for loving the publicans, adulterers, thieves and harlots and offering them free forgiveness, salvation and eternal life. When criticized He said, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."
I like the contemporary Christian parable about the fishing club whose members did no fishing. It concludes, "How can you be a fisherman if you do not fish?" Well, I cannot truly say I like it, but am saddened by its obvious application to such a broad spectrum of Christians today. It is difficult to envision anyone truly being like Jesus who is not personally involved in sharing Him with the world around them.
Someone said of the great preacher and soul winner, Richard Baxter, "Baxter would set the world on fire while another was lighting a match. He preached as though he would never preach again, as a dying man to dying men." What was the secret of such a life and testimony? It must be that He understood who Jesus was and wanted to be like Him!
The question of "how to" must ultimately come to mind. It is obvious that to be LIKE JESUS is an impossible task for the human flesh. It is clear that if we expect to be like Jesus by acting LIKE HIM and doing LIKE HIM and obeying LIKE HIM we are doomed to failure from the outset. When Paul said, "They that are in the flesh, cannot please God.." he not only spoke of lost sinners, but also to those who would try to please God by keeping the law through the energy of their own flesh. Paul’s, and the Lord’s, solution is found in the same book. If we are to be like Him we will need to yield our life and very being to the Holy Spirit of God and allow our Savior to live in and through us. Perhaps this is why Paul said, "For me to live IS CHRIST..." And again, "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless it is not that live, but CHRIST THAT LIVETH in me..."
