When did I become a Christian? pt. 2

This is a question that I’ve been asking myself for the past year and a half or so when I wrote this blog. I don’t remember praying the prayer, but I can pinpoint a few times when something switched in my heart and I told God in all sincerity that I would follow him. There was the time when I prayed for healing and a person was healed, there was the time when I prayed healing over someone else and she wasn’t healed and there was the wrestling with God under the waterfall.

 

Soon I’ll be heading down to Nicaragua to help guide people to the Lord, yet I wonder of my qualifications. I know I alone am not qualified, but the grace and blood of Christ qualifies me to do even greater things than He! Yet I still turn away from him often. I consistently fail in the small things. There was a relationship that needed reconciliation recently which I was quite ready to ignore. The Lord convicted me of it and I knew I needed to make a phone call, yet I didn’t. Then by his grace and perfect timing, he brought the person to me and made it easy. Yet even after he does something like this, I am selfish.

 

I was thinking recently about the process of refinement God has put me through the past 2 years and considering my status as a Christian and when it began. So I asked him, “God, when did I become a Christian?” Half expecting no response, he answered me, “You are still becoming one.”

 

In the last bit of Acts 2 it says they (Christians) devoted themselves to teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread and prayer. And in return they were filled with awe and wonders and miraculous signs were done. They all had everything in common and were together, selling their possessions and giving to anyone with a need. They were glad and praised God with sincere hearts. While I can be pretty confident in saying I’ve got the eating part down, I still have quite a bit of work to become devoted to the others. If this is the measure of a Christian, I have quite a ways to go.

 

Yet I embrace the promise of the Lord that he who began a good work in me will continue until it’s completed. I think it’ll take me my whole life.

 

In the last bit of Matthew 28 Jesus commissioned the church to go make disciples. Earlier he described the cost of being a disciple as one who must give up everything he has, hate
his family and follow the Lord to the cross. I have so much further to go, but I’m on the move.

I was talking with a friend about discipleship and she was saying how desperate she was for someone to disciple her. I originally thought how great a shame it was that she, being a church goer, couldn’t think of a person she’d like to take on this role for her. This ought to be the primary function of the church, I thought. Then she said in an act of desperation she walked up to a local church’s front office and just asked the lady there for someone who would disciple her. “I’m sorry, we don’t have a program set up for that,” she said.

 

Programs, institutions, buildings, rigidly structured services – this has become our understanding of the church. Someone who prays and asks God to come into their heart – this has become our understanding of the measure of a Christian. What happened to community, service, death to self, living every day for the Lord and to the fullest and taking every thought captive? I have a long way to go to becoming the man of God that God designed me to be. Praise God for his grace!