The Glorious Christian Life - Part 1

What is the Christian life? And how does one embark on this glorious journey? How does one become born again and persevere until the very end and enter into God’s wonderful heaven? In the message Part 1, we will discuss these points and more. Please listen.

The message is the Glorious Christian Life. And the Christian life is very very glorious, there is no life like the Christian life. And as you know it stems from a person, and that is, Jesus Christ. And we all know Jesus Christ, we have heard of Him since we were so small. In fact, many of us were born into Christian families. So we are acquainted with God and His Bible to a certain extent or The Word of God; we have no doubt, heard it in the churches, in Sunday school and even in our homes.

God wants us to have that life as a living reality within our hearts and He wants us to know that He is Almighty God but He chooses to dwell even in our very human bodies. So we can have God dwelling in our bodies. In fact, if we are Christians, if we are truly in relationship with The Lord, we can say today, even tonight,  that The Almighty God who fashioned the universe, who created the stars, the sun and moon and everything, the earth and all the host; that Living God dwells in this human body. Your human frame actually has the Living God within, if you have a relationship with Him.

So the glorious life must have a strong beginning, it must have a proper beginning. And then we must continue with The Lord, and then we must finish well. So The Lord will speak to us, to show us how we can know for certain that we are going to have Him and that we are going to have a rich welcome when we meet The Lord. All of our lives, as you know are quite finite and, all the days of our lives are numbered.  So we have a relatively short period of time on the earth in which to show The Lord all our love for Him, in which to be a blessing to the world, to our generation, having God’s life in us. So we thank God for His Son Jesus Christ and that is the beginning. Regardless of what our denomination or church background is, we must settle on one thing, and that is, we must have a relationship with God and that comes only through Jesus Christ.

In John Chapter 3 and Verse 3, the Lord Jesus is speaking to one of the leaders of the Jewish Council in those days and He says to him, “I tell you the truth, unless you are born again you cannot see the kingdom of God". "What do you mean?" Nicodemus said, “How can an old man go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?" Jesus replied, "I assure you No one can enter the kingdom of god without being born of water and the spirit. Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life. So don’t be surprised when I say you must be born again. The wind blows wherever it wants, just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the spirit."

"How are these things possible?" Nicodemus asked. Jesus replied, "You are a respected Jewish teacher, and yet you don’t understand these things. I assure you, we will tell what we know and have seen, yet you won’t believe our testimony. But if you don’t believe me when I tell you about earthly things, how can you possibly believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ever gone to heaven and returned, but the Son of Man has come down from heaven and as Moses lifted up the bronze snake on a pole in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up So that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life."
And this follows with John 3:16 the very well known verse, which is the foundation of our Christian lives. That is Jesus says, "For God loved the world so much, that He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life or everlasting life. God did not send His Son into the world to condemn it, but to save it through Him. So this is the foundation and all of us must make sure, and must revisit, not to doubt it but to reaffirm that the only standing we have with God is through the blood of His Son. That’s the only way we have any fellowship with God. So we all have lives of grace and we are so thankful for that.

The Heavenly Father have loved us so much, He has given us everlasting life. So this is the foundation. And how does one become, this term Jesus used in John 3, the term born again? What does that mean? Is that a certain denomination; is that a certain facet of Christian society? It is actually scripture and the term simply means to be born the second time. As Jesus said the first time - we are born humanly, from our mother’s womb. The second time is through a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit working within our hearts. It’s not simply a profession, I like the Christian principles, I like the Christian idea, the Christian morality is good for me and my children, it will keep us hopefully happy. It is not that at all.

It is God, "I am a sinner, already condemned to go to hell because my nature is sinful; my actions, my motives, they are all tainted by sin; I need your precious blood." And so we come to him individually and we say, as it is written in Romans Chapter 10 and Verses 9 & 10 (I read in the New Living Translation) it says that God saves us, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

So when somebody asks this, "How do you become a Christian, do you join a church, do you get born into a Christian family, do you do good work? Hopefully God will accept you in the end time". But what The Scripture says was quite contrary. The Scripture says, it begins with an act of faith like a child in saying, "Lord Jesus, I believe that You are who you say, You are. You came down into this world, my world, You died on a cross for my sins, You knew all about me. While I was ungodly, all of my false motives, all of my jealousies, all of my anger, my wrath, all of the immorality, all of the things that I did that were not pleasing to you, You saw all of it Lord."

All of us including myself can say that we are sinners before God. But God came to take sin away from our lives; the domination of sin was broken when Jesus came into our lives. And so we confess with our mouth and say Jesus, "You are Lord," and second we say," I believe in my heart God raised You Jesus, nearly two thousand years ago, from that grave, from that tomb in Israel, you raised Jesus from the death."

God says if you just believe that and you confess with your mouth, a true confession; It’s implied it has to be a true confession, not simply a statement, you believe in your heart and you confess; He says supernaturally in Verse 10, for it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God. Hallelujah, we can be made right with God instantly by believing in our hearts that Jesus is the Lord and that He died for me, God raised Him from the dead. It is by confessing with your mouth that you are saved. So the first thing to start on the glorious Christian journey is to believe that Jesus Christ is everlasting life.

In the epistle of John it is written, he that hath the Son hath life, he that hath not the Son hath not life, in the King James Version. So when we have Jesus, we can be confident. "Lord, no matter what the storms in life, no matter what Satan brings against me, no matter what adversity comes, I know that I am safe in Your Arms. Because I have a living faith, a genuine union with You through the Blood of Jesus. Lord, I thank you, I am secure. God, the economy may go down, my help may fail, things may go wrong even in the families, but I am standing for You on this foundation Jesus Christ. I have you Lord and with You, I will overcome." Praise God!

That’s the faith that the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit imparts into us, when we become truly born-again. When we become born-again, God says to us, "I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have loved you and I have a purpose for your life. The purpose in your life is not to live your life like the rest of the world. It is to live to glorify Me. You will have a glorious Christian life, when you live to honor me." How do I honor God? Well, we can say how the world dishonors God and by watching that, just by watching that, we can know that those things if we do, we also will dishonor  God. So, when we watch for that in our lives and we must send it out of our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit, we cannot do it on our own strength but it is only by the power of the Holy Spirit. But we must, we must cooperate.

The epistle of First John Chapter 2 Verses 15 through 17 gives a clear prescription of how to please God and hold on to the eternal life, and then enter into the Kingdom of God finally, on that judgment day. It says here very clearly, "Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world you do not have the love of The Father in you. For the world offers only a craving for a lust, (in the King James Version) a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, in pride, in our achievements, in our possessions. These are not from The Father but are from this world, and this world is fading away along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever.

When Jesus said, "Do you see all these buildings? All of these things will come down. Indeed the temple, He is speaking about the temple; He said, not one stone will be left upon the other." This was a response to the disciples saying, "Master, Look at all the beauty of this building." And in our days we have many beautiful buildings. In every major city, there is some erection or edifice that is so glorious. And indeed the person who builds that, and the person who worked there or lived there and the people who pass by will admire it and all had this feeling that this can never be shaken, this can never come down. So the Lord says, "If you know for a fact that everything in this world is going to perish very soon, then what are you living for?" The Lord says, "If you belong to me, I have a glory far greater than this what you see, therefore do not live for the things you see."

It says in another scripture, the things are seen are temporal and the things that are not seen are eternal. When we become born again, dear friends, we become a living spirit that is one with Christ, and when God shakes everything in the end time, even the stars of the heaven will fall. It says in the end of Mathew 24 and so on, everything will be shaken, but there are some things that cannot be shaken. Praise
God!

In Hebrews it says that some things will not be shaken. You know what those things are, everything in the Kingdom of God; God himself and every one that belongs to Him.

A glorious Christian life is to say to the world and to the devil that I will live forever, not based on my merit but based on the blood of the Son of God who ransomed me and has given me an everlasting inheritance. Now I hold fast to that possession, holding that eternal life I say 'No' to the ungodly things of the world. Now some people think as long as you’re not grossly immoral, as long as you do not go with another man’s spouse or another woman’s spouse, you’re ok, you are basically moral. Are you not?
The Lord Jesus says in Mathew Chapter 5 that if you so look at a woman to lust after in your heart you’ve already committed adultery with her. Same thing goes for the woman. As long as we crave for the things in the world in various degrees we are inviting back the old nature, same thing goes for anger and wrath.

The Lord says in Galatians Chapter 5 that there is a clear distinction between the Christian life and the life of the world. You know beloved, we can always know which side of the fence we stand on. God never leaves us to doubt. We have the Word of God and the Word of God is the mirror that shows us exactly how we look before God.

Shall we pray?
Our Heavenly Father we pray that many would come to the saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and they will persevere to the very end for your glory. In Jesus Name. Amen!

Please contact us at godofwondersradio@elbethelinternationministries.org

Until next time, may God richly bless you!