Armstrong I'm a Christian-Now What?

A Guide to Your New Life With Christ
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-68359-672-1
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 168 Seiten

Where to begin when you've begun with Christ If you are a new Christian, you are on a new path. But where are you going and how do you get there? As an adult convert, Aaron Armstrong had to face these questions himself. In I'm a Christian-Now What? A Guide to Your New Life With Christ, Aaron helps you take those important first steps, including: - How to read the Bible and pray - How to think about your favorite TV show - How to find the right church - How to disagree with other Christians - How to rethink sex and marriage You probably have a lot of questions. You might not even know which questions to ask. This practical and friendly book helps make sense of your new life with Jesus. It ends with suggestions for how you can take the next step by helping other new Christians. I'm a Christian-Now What? is a perfect handbook for new believers and those who want to disciple them.

Aaron Armstrong is a Canadian living in the United States. He serves at his local church as a small group leader, a kids ministry teacher, and an occasional Sunday morning teacher. He loves to write, especially to help people grow as followers of Jesus. He is the author of multiple books and the writer of several documentaries.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Armstrong, Aaron

Leseproben

1

WHAT IS LIFE

MAKING SENSE OF LIFE WHEN EVERYTHING IS THE SAME—EXCEPT YOU

Imagine waking up one morning and being you, but not. You get out of bed and look in the mirror. What’s different? you wonder. You still look like you—you haven’t magically switched bodies with your best friend or your teenage self. No new gray hairs as far as you can tell. A six-pack didn’t appear overnight. You lean in as close as you can to the mirror, so close that you’re about to leave a mark. Still, there’s nothing different. You’re the same you as you were before you woke up this morning.

Back in the bedroom, your unmade bed is where you left it, with the same sheets and blankets you slept in the night before. The same clothes you’ve always worn hang in your closet. The same pile of laundry—the one you’ve been meaning to get to for the last week—languishes in the corner of the room. You get dressed in clothes that fit the way they always have. You grab your usual breakfast, which tastes the same as always. You take the same car on the same route and get to work at the same time you always do. Your workday is the same: the same tasks, meetings, and coworkers. Everything seems the same, but you can’t shake this feeling that something has changed. And something has. Even though everything is the same as it ever was, you have changed. You are different.

You’re still the same you, but you are not the same you that you were before.

You’re not imagining it. This is really happening. It began the moment you became a Christian. Whether it was a few days, weeks, or months ago, something happened to make you realize you needed to believe in Jesus—a man who is also God, born a little over two thousand years ago without the involvement of a human father, who performed miracles, taught people what it meant to live as people who love God, offended just about every religious leader he came into contact with, loved people his society rejected, was crucified, and rose from the dead on the third day following his burial (1 Corinthians 15:3–4).1

Now what? What does it mean to be the same person, but not? What does this mean for your life, your relationships, your job, your everything?

The short answer is that it means everything to your everything. But to get why that’s true, let’s make sure you understand what exactly happened when you believed in Jesus and why you’re now in this you-but-not-you situation.

SO WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU, ANYWAY?

If you believe in Jesus, you are a Christian. But what exactly does that mean—and how does believing in Jesus change everything about your whole life? Here is the quickest way to understand it:

When you believe in Jesus, you become a new person.

In John 3, Jesus speaks with a man named Nicodemus, a well-respected Jewish leader, a teacher very familiar with the part of our Bibles we call the Old Testament. Nicodemus goes to see Jesus to find out what his deal is. He and the other religious leaders know Jesus is doing and teaching things that only someone sent by God could. But who is he, really? Instead of discussing his identity, Jesus changes the subject: “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God,” he says (John 3:3).

Nicodemus is confused. After all, how can a person who is already born be born again? What does that even mean? And for that matter, why do we need to be?

Here’s the big idea of what Jesus was getting at: to be born again is to be given new life by the Holy Spirit, who, like Jesus, is also God but is not Jesus. It’s complicated, but Christians believe that there is one God who created everything and that this one God exists simultaneously as three distinct persons—God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit. The Father, Son, and Spirit are all fully and equally God, with none lesser or greater than the others, but are not one another. Throughout the New Testament, you see these three interact with one another in different ways, such as in Jesus’s baptism (Matthew 3:13–17). If you’re still confused, don’t worry—you’re in good company.

According to the story of the Bible, humanity has a problem called sin, which is the wrong things we do and the right things we don’t do. This problem affects everything about us—what we desire, what we believe, who we think we are. Everything. It also puts us at odds with God because what we want, believe, and think as people affected and shaped by sin is opposed to the One who made everything. The Bible calls people left to our own devices dead in our sins (Ephesians 2:1), dying physically day by day, and existing in a perpetual state of spiritual death with no desire to love, honor, or worship God at all.

But when we believe in Jesus, everything changes. Belief, in this sense, is an act that goes beyond merely acknowledging Jesus’s existence (something even demons do, according to James 2:19) to trusting that what Jesus did in dying and rising again really happened and that he did it for us. Believing in Jesus is an act of faith. Through that faith—itself a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8)—we are born again, made alive with Christ (Ephesians 2:5). The old you is gone. No more. Done.

This is why you are a new you that is still you, but not. A new you brought about by a new birth that gives you new desires, a new purpose, a new identity, and a new future:

•New desires: you actually want the things God wants (Psalm 37:4; Philippians 2:13).

•New purpose: your whole life is meant to be about honoring, enjoying, and serving him (Psalm 73:24–26; John 17:22, 24; 1 Corinthians 10:31; Romans 11:36).

•New identity: you are a beloved child adopted into the family of God, and your Father is God himself, and your older brother is Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:5).

•New future: you are destined to live forever with God in a renewed and restored world (Revelation 21:1–22:5).

Y’know, little things like that.

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

What we experience before the age of five has a major influence on what happens through the rest of our lives.2 This time in our lives really mattered. In fact, it’s no stretch to say we are who we are in many ways because of what we experienced during those years. The same is true in our faith. Just as the early years of a child’s development are the most crucial, so too are our early years as Christians. In a very real way, when you become a Christian, especially when you’re coming to faith as an adult, you’re starting life over from scratch. You’re a grown-up in body, but a child in your faith, which means these early weeks, months, and years are a crucial time in your faith.

This is not meant to be insulting. Everyone who believes in Jesus starts out that way, no matter how old they are when they first believe. You are a new person, and because of that you are, at least when it comes to your faith, kind of like a child: a sponge, open to learning all you can, free to ask any question you want (something, I suspect, more established Christians might even be a bit jealous of). What you learn now will shape a great deal of your experience as a follower of Jesus going forward. This is no exaggeration. I went through it, too.

THE MESS JESUS MADE WHEN HE SAVED ME

I didn’t grow up in a Christian home. We were, more or less, your typical Canadian secular, single-parent family. There was no expectation of going to church. We didn’t read the Bible. We didn’t pray. We didn’t do much of anything that touched on the spiritual side of reality. And I didn’t really have a problem with that because God wasn’t on my radar.

As a teen, I started dipping my toe into Eastern philosophy and mysticism. This wasn’t because I was looking for any sort of fulfillment. I just wanted to impress girls with how deep I was. (It didn’t work.) Later, in college, I met a girl named Emily. She was smart, pretty (and I mean really pretty), and was into this religion called Bahá’í, which teaches that the figures of all the world’s major religions were part of a long chain of revelation from God, with their messages being authoritative for their specific time and place. Their founder, naturally, said he was the one to bring the revelation from God that would usher in an era of peace and prosperity for humanity, which his successor would lead. I went to a few of their events with Emily because, well, she was really pretty. For whatever reason, she liked me. After a while, she decided she’d rather spend her time with a borderline-nihilist agnostic than continue down the road of obligatory prayers, regular fasting, and ritual handwashing, because eventually she wasn’t a Bahá’í anymore.

Then, in 2004, God decided it was time for me to get to know him. I was home from work sick one day and decided to open an online messaging program (this was in the days before social media and widespread texting). My friend Adam asked whether I wanted to go to this thing at his church called Alpha, where you share a high-carb meal, watch a video, and discuss matters of faith. To his surprise, and mine, I said yes, registered, and forgot what it was about. When Emily came home from work, I mentioned I’d signed us up to go to some dinner discussion group thing at Adam’s church. Her response was, “Cool,...