Our general subject is what it means to be a Christian.
Last week, we were occupied with the immense significance of the Christian life—its setting in the eternal counsels of God. This evening, we are going to consider what happens when we become Christians.
May I repeat what I said at the commencement last week, so that we shall be proceeding together in cooperation? In addressing these meetings, I have three classes, or categories, of people in mind.
There are, in all probability, some here who have no definite experience of the Christian life. They have not yet begun. They may be in all conditions, but they form one class.
Then there are those who are but newly in the Christian life; they have not a great deal of experience, or none. And then there are the old stagers who know all about it.
Now, if something, or a part of what is said, does not seem to fit your position, do not despise it; it may be for someone else. You enjoy your portion, and try to enjoy someone else’s as well.
I say that because it might just be that somehow you would feel, “No, that is far too elementary. We left that long ago,” and you might feel bored. But remember, someone else might just live there. You will be very helpful to me if you will please take that attitude.
What happens, then, when we become Christians?
We shall proceed this evening along the same lines that we took last week, not spending time on pointing out the misapprehensions, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations of the Christian life, and their causes and reasons. Rather, we shall proceed to present the Christian life positively—to see what it is according to God’s thought—and leave you to make the comparisons and any necessary adjustments.
The only thing that I will say in that connection is this: we are seeking to be pre-eminently practical.
That is, we are not occupied with the presentation of Christian doctrine in itself. Christian doctrine will be here, but in the abstract we are not interested in presenting the doctrines of Christianity, important as they are. What we are concerned with is to make everything practical and experiential—something that can be immediately put to the test.
So that, as we advance, it becomes clear as to what things are, where they belong, and what the issues are.
There is, of course, a difference between the facts and truth of the Christian life and the explanation of them.
It is possible to have the experience, and therefore to have all the facts present in the life, without the person concerned being able to explain those facts. That is a part of our business: to explain the facts and to challenge as to the facts.
The explanation of the Christian life should be corroborated by the experience. That is, it ought to be possible for you to say, “Well, I could not have explained it like that, but I know exactly in my experience what you mean. That just does express my own life.”
So the explanation must not go outside the experience; the experience must corroborate the explanation.
And for this matter of what happens when we become Christians, we shall spend some of our time getting back behind this matter of becoming a Christian, to certain facts revealed in the Bible and true to human experience. This is where you will be able to give your own verdict upon the situation.
In the first place, then, getting back behind becoming a Christian, we come to man as we know him, as we find him by nature.
The situation with man by nature is that his relationship with God is completely dislocated.
We Christians say “dislocated” because we believe the Bible teaches that things were all right once, and they have gone wrong.
If, for the time being, you prefer to waive the word “dislocated,” it does not make any difference to the situation. Things are not in order between man and God, whether they never were or whether they were and have got into the condition they are now in. We will come to that presently.
But the fact is that the relationship between man and God is in a broken-down condition. That is the basic, fundamental fact. The relationship is disjointed; it is in a state of strain. There is distance between man and God.
The relationship—or non-relationship—is a very unhappy thing. The situation is by no means a happy one where man and God are concerned by nature. The relationship is altogether unproductive. Nothing comes from it. It is quite barren and definitely unfruitful.
But that is more or less negative. It is worse than that. In many cases, it is positively antagonistic.
Man is in a state of antagonism to God in his nature, and often in his mind, his attitude, and his reference to God. There is a state of conflict. There is much suspicion in man’s mind or heart as to God. A great deal of resentment exists in many human hearts.
And we can go further, for the Bible goes this far, saying that in some cases—perhaps not a few—there is even hatred in the human heart toward God. Well, we meet that sometimes: this very positive thing of antagonism and hatred.
That is the first fact: the relationship between man and God is all chaotic, broken down, dislocated, and marked by these characteristics which I have mentioned.
That is not all. We need to get inside of that and go further.
Man has a set of senses which belong to his spiritual being, which are not functioning—a set of senses corresponding to his physical senses.
The physical senses, you well know, are seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling. But man has another set of senses, not physical, which belong to his inner man: the counterpart of those five physical senses.
By nature, these other senses are not functioning. The Bible speaks of all these senses in a spiritual way in relation to God.
The Bible speaks of a seeing of God which is not physical at all.
The pure in heart shall see God.
That is certainly not a physical matter: seeing.
Again, hearing. There is a spiritual hearing of God which is not audible through the natural or physical ear. It is something in the heart. It is not a voice, but it corresponds to that in a spiritual way.
People are able to say, “I heard the Lord speak to me,” though they never heard anything with their natural hearing.
Tasting? Yes, the Bible says:
O taste and see that the Lord is good.
And no one thinks that to be a physical matter.
Smelling? That seems to be difficult, perhaps. But you see, after all, we know things without any physical factors coming in, and we say, “We are sensing something.”
We go into a room, and it is not physical through the sense of smell, by the organ of our noses, but there is something in the air. People have been talking; we see looks on their faces; and when we go in, they suddenly become quiet and look at one another. We sense something.
And it is possible to sense the presence of God. See what I mean?
There is a whole set of spiritual faculties which relate us to God in their proper order and function. In the natural man—the unregenerate man—those senses are not functioning at all.
There is no seeing God in that way. There is no hearing God speak to them. There is no feeling God—feeling God, not with your hands, but in an inward way. There is no tasting that the Lord is good. There is no sensing God in the natural man.
All these things are out of order. The Bible speaks of them a very great deal. If you like, go and look it up again.
The Bible teaches man’s condition, and man’s condition confirms and corroborates that teaching. Where God is concerned, man is blind. Man is dead. Man is numb. Man is insensitive to God.
I said we are being practical. Is that true?
That is the trouble with any one of you who may not have had a true Christian experience. You do not see God in this way. You do not hear God. You do not feel God. You do not sense God. God is unreal, remote, far off—if He is at all. You do not know Him.
But the Bible goes further still. Man, by natural birth, is lacking in that other thing which corresponds to his—I use the phrase—biological existence. That is, life.
We have a biological existence which we call life. It is, of course, a very significant thing that the New Testament puts two different words over two different classes of people. It uses one word, bios, for natural life, but it never uses that word of the life of the Christian. It uses another word entirely, which means something altogether different.
The Bible says that man by nature lacks not only those functions of his spiritual senses, but he lacks that which corresponds to his natural existence: life.
In a word, the Bible says that man is dead—not only blind, deaf, and insensitive to God: he is dead. Death hath passed upon all men, says the Word of God. Man is dead to God by nature.
He is dead to the true meaning of his own existence. By nature, he does not know why he was born, why he has his being. He has all sorts of accounts of his being in the world—explanations, excuses, evading responsibility, and so on—all proving that he is entirely dead to the real meaning of his own existence.
He makes the best of it, and sometimes there is a very good best that a man will make of his life. But after all, when set in relation to God and set in relation to eternity, he does not know why he is alive, why he has his being. He is dead to that.
He is dead to eternal and heavenly things.
What a futile and hopeless thing it is to talk to man by nature about the things of heaven and the things of God. He looks at you; he gazes at you; he does not know what you are talking about. That belongs to a world with which he is not at all acquainted—far off, something different—and he is utterly bored.
He may be a very good man from certain standpoints, a very educated man, perhaps occupying a position of high esteem and respect among men; and he may be a very religious man.
There was such a man who came to Jesus: a standing specimen of the best product of humanity outside of Christ. Over him was suspended one big question mark. He was full of interrogation: “How? How?”
Jesus said, in effect, “Well, there is no use talking to you about heavenly things at all. You do not belong to that realm. You are dead to it.”
Well, that is on the negative side. Now, is this true?
I said at the beginning that you can put everything to the test. This is not just a statement of abstract Christian doctrine. This is a statement of fact which is verifiable.
Some of you may know it now in your own experience. Many of you did know it in time past, but thank God, you know it no longer.
Man is dead, according to the Bible. Where God is concerned, there is no response. It is useless to speak to a corpse; you will get nothing there. There is no correspondence, no interchange, no communion, no fellowship. That is exactly what the Bible and human experience say as to man’s condition by nature.
That surely brings us to a very practical point in approaching this question: What happens when we become Christians?
There are two fragments of New Testament Scripture which, I think, sum this up for us very concisely and very fully.
The one is that statement, so familiar and yet so little understood, made to the man to whom I referred just now. He came with his big question, his multiplied “How?” Jesus did not try to answer his question at all. He knew how hopeless it is to talk to a dead man.
He looked at him and said:
Ye must be born again.
Or, literally and more correctly, “You must be born from above.”
The other statement is also very well known:
If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.
Those two words set out what happens: born and new creation. That takes us right over the ground which we have just covered, but in reverse.
When we become Christians—in this sense, and I do not know becoming a Christian in any other sense that is proper and right—it is not becoming a Christian just to accept the tenets of the Christian religion and give a mental assent to them, or to join some society called a Christian institution, though it might go by the name of church.
That is not becoming a Christian in the New Testament sense. The only true becoming a Christian is in these terms: born anew, a new creation.
You become a different species from what you were before, and from what all other people are who have not had that experience. And when we so become Christians, what happens?
A state of death gives place to a state of life—this other life, this resurrection life, which no man by nature has ever yet had, excepting Jesus Christ.
This life is given in the day of our faith exercised toward the Lord Jesus as Lord and Saviour. A new aliveness takes place.
It is the first wonderful, basic experience of the Christian: at that time, he enters into life and immediately begins to talk a new language about now knowing the meaning of life—what it is to live.
That is it. We have to begin right at the beginning. What happens when we become Christians? Well, we are alive from the dead. We come alive.
But it is not just a resuscitation of something. It is the impartation of what was never there before: a new life belonging to a new creation. That is a new order, a heavenly order, because this is being born from above.
Jesus never said a truer thing than that: “You must be born.”
If there is someone here tonight who has not had that experience, you know. You know, because of the truth of what I have said about the natural condition. You know quite well that, if you are going to see God in this way, hear God in this way, feel and sense God in this way, something has got to happen to you which is nothing less than that which corresponds to being born all over again in another realm.
You know it. You ought to confess that Jesus is right, at any rate, on that. It is true: you must.
It is not just the imperative of a command. It is not just a declaration that you have got to become a Christian to be accepted with God. It is the statement of a fundamental and constitutional fact: you can never even sense God in a real way—say nothing of having living fellowship with God—unless something happens that is absolutely constitutional.
You must have a new life, which is God’s own life, to make you understand what God is and to know Him.
This new life, then, immediately introduces a new consciousness about God. It is a new consciousness of God.
You are alive to God; you sense God. God becomes a reality—a living reality—no longer remote, far off, indefinite; now very near, very real, very wonderful: the greatest reality in your whole life. God, in a new way: a new consciousness of God.
Then, as the next aspect, there is a new consciousness of the meaning of your own existence.
Every Christian who is truly founded upon this basis—our beginning, our resurrection—almost immediately leaps into this consciousness: “Now I have got the explanation of life. I have got the key to life.”
“I know that I was born for something. I never before knew that I was really born for something. I know now. There is a sense of meaning in my being here, and a destiny wrapped up with this new experience. It gives an explanation to my own life.”
Is that not true? True Christians, it is just like that. Now we know why we are here.
And, to carry that just one step further, it is a new consciousness of purpose and vocation. Not only is there a meaning in our being alive, but there is a purpose that has come in with this new life—a sense of vocation. We are called for something.
You do not have to get a lot of instruction about that. You do not even wait for it. The true born-again child of God spontaneously, instinctively, begins to talk to other people about it.
You can test your Christian life by that. You just begin: you must tell them, you must talk about it, you must let them know. That is vocation coming out. You feel you are called for something. There is business on hand.
And that can develop, as you know, into specific vocations. But it is a consciousness of purpose, meaning, and vocation which springs up with this new life.
Then it is a new set of relationships, desires, and interests. We know that. This is what happens.
You talk to anybody who has not had the experience about these things. They have their relationships, their interests, and their desires, and they wonder why you are not doing what they do, going where they go, and engaging in the things which are everything to them. They do not understand you.
They think you have missed the way and lost everything worth having. But you know it is just the other way. You do not despise them, but you pity them. For this is a transcendent, superlative set of relationships.
Christians know the meaning of that little phrase about the early servants of God. They were arrested because they were doing this very thing—fulfilling and expressing the sense of vocation, not keeping it to themselves. They were arrested, threatened, and whatnot; and, being let go, they went to their own company.
Instinctively, they went to their own company. Well, we know what that means. There is a new company, a new relationship, a new fellowship, a new set of desires and interests. No one else can understand or appreciate that; the Christian knows.
That is what happens. That is what happens.
And there is a new set of capacities.
This is a wonderful thing about the new-creation life—this born-anew life, this true Christian life. You get a new set of mental capacities.
Something different from, additional to, and transcending natural mental capacity: a new understanding of things.
It is a wonderful thing, this. One of the wonders of the Christian life is that you may find a person who has had no great advantages academically, educationally, or in any other realm—a very ordinary person—and yet, coming into real experience of the Christian life, they become remarkably intelligent, knowledgeable, and understanding.
They have an insight into things which a man of the highest education and the biggest brain is entirely incapable of grasping or understanding.
We Christians know this to be so true. Very often we think that a certain person, because of great academic achievements and qualifications, is bound to be able to understand and have some good interchange with us when we speak about the things of the Lord. Yet we speak, and they say, “What are you talking about?”
Here is this simple man or woman who knows. It is a new mental faculty, a set of capacities and powers for understanding the things of the Spirit of God—knowing what no natural man can know, not by way of studying but by way of communion with God.
Wonderful new capacities for understanding and for knowing. These develop and grow as the Christian goes on.
There are also new powers of action—of doing. The Christian has power to do things that other people cannot do: power of endurance, power of working.
Many of my friends here tonight will understand me when I say that sometimes, and very often, it seems that the Lord takes pains to undercut our natural ability for doing, in order to lead us into a life where we can do without any natural explanation at all.
You look at much that has been done through true Christians in the history of this world, and you will not be able to account for it at all on natural grounds. They were weakly, frail things—things discounted in this world—but look what God has done through the weak things and the things that are not.
Power to achieve, to accomplish, to do, without natural explanation altogether.
A new consciousness, a new set of relationships and interests, a new set of capacities—and a new hope.
A new hope is characteristic of the true Christian. An altogether new prospect has entered in. We shall see more of that later in the course of our evenings.
But here it must be said: the Christian, if a true Christian, is not one characterized by despair, hopelessness, final frustration, and disappointment.
A Christian is one deep down in whose very being there is rooted the consciousness that there is something wonderful ahead—something beyond.
The final argument for the future is not in any system of teaching about heaven or its alternative; it is found in the heart. It is found in the life. It is found in a mighty dynamic.
What is it that has kept saints going in the face of unspeakable difficulties, suffering, and adversity? What is it?
Others give up, let go, and fall into despair. The Christian just goes on—not because the Christian is of better natural calibre than others, with more tenacity and doggedness. Not at all.
It is so often the weak ones, as counted by men, but there is this going on. What is it? It is something that has gripped within: “This is not the end, and this is not all.” There is that which lies beyond. There is this which has come from the God of hope.
Now, when I have said all that, what is the explanation of it all? A new life, new consciousness, new relationships—all things new. I do not exaggerate the Christian life.
What does it amount to? What is the inclusive secret of it?
You see, it is not just that the Christian receives some abstract things. You may call it light; you may call it understanding; you may call it hope; you may call it power. But these are not abstract things.
The true born-anew Christian has received not abstractions, but a Person.
God giveth the Holy Spirit to them that obey Him.
The gift of the Holy Spirit is the inclusive explanation of it all. I say that in order to carry things into their right realm.
The Holy Spirit is God—God, no less than God. The Holy Spirit has all the intelligence and knowledge of God, all the power of God, all the eternal prospects of God, the elements of eternity and timelessness. All that is true of God is true of the Holy Spirit.
God gives the Holy Spirit to become resident inside a person. That person learns, like a babe from the beginning, day by day and year by year, to walk in fellowship with the indwelling Holy Spirit.
That person is bound to grow in all these things that I have said—bound to know divine life, God’s own life within. Wonderful thing! Do you think about it? Not just something, but Himself: God in Christ by the Holy Spirit, our very life.
I do like the way the Bible puts it about God:
Thou art the length of my days.
Think about that.
That means that if God really is our portion resident within, our duration is not dictated by natural things. He is the length of our days.
We shall die when the time has come—not before. Things are in His hand. Until that time, the threats may be many, but His life persists. We rise again, and rise again, and rise again. We thought the end had come; yet we rise again and go on.
And so we go on because He is our life. It is a Person.
The Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of life. To be resident within is a very wonderful thing.
If He has all divine intelligence, and we are in His school, living with Him and keeping fellowship with Him day by day, we grow in this intelligence which no natural man has: growing in knowledge, growing in understanding, growing in ability to grasp things which no man, apart from the Spirit of God, can understand.
I want to lay the emphasis upon that: it is the Holy Spirit Himself.
I know Christians who believe in the Holy Spirit. The majority of evangelical Christians believe in the Person of the Holy Spirit. They put the article there: the Holy Spirit, whereas others speak simply of Holy Spirit.
But it is part of our Christian faith to believe in the Holy Spirit as a Person and to have some knowledge of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit—His work and His power.
But I find, dear friends, among Christians, a lamentable lack of understanding of what it means to have the Holy Spirit really dwelling within.
That is disclosed and manifested in the fact that they can act and speak so contrary to the Holy Spirit without being checked by Him.
You would be amazed how many Christians can speak in a way with which the Holy Spirit certainly does not agree, and yet they are not conscious at all of the fact that the Holy Spirit disagrees with them.
Something is wrong here about this practical expression of the indwelling Holy Spirit.
So many Christians can believe lies about others and repeat them, and never be checked by the Holy Spirit within, or never register the Holy Spirit’s disagreement. For He is the Spirit of truth. There is something wrong here.
Now, the true Christian life—and we have got to get to God about it if we are Christians—means that wherever the Holy Spirit is in disagreement with anything that we say or do, or with the way we say or do it, we should know it.
We should know at once. We should register it—not a voice, but a sense. The Holy Spirit, in effect, says, “I do not agree with you. That is not right. That is not true. That is not kind. That is not good. That is not gracious.”
There is a very great need for the reality of the indwelling Spirit to be expressed.
Now, I am not saying that failure to recognize, sense, and discern means that the Holy Spirit is not there. But I do mean that we are not walking in the Spirit if it is like that. Where we are concerned, there is necessary adjustment.
But, coming to the positive, the true Christian life can be like this; it can and should be like this: the Holy Spirit resident within, and then, if you or I say or do anything with which He does not agree, we know it at once.
We have a bad feeling right in the middle of us, and we do not get rid of it until we go to the Lord and say, “Evidently I was wrong in what I said. Lord, forgive me, and put that out of the way. And if it has done someone any harm, let us try to put that right.”
That is a life in the Spirit. It is very practical.
That is what happens when we become Christians. It begins like that.
Well, the beginnings are very simple. If you are just early in the Christian life, you surely must know something like this in simple ways. Perhaps you go to do what you used to do, and something inside you says, “Oh no, not now. That belongs to the past.”
Well, that is a simple beginning, is it not?
If you go on, you burn your fingers, and you know when you burn your fingers because you are alive. If you were dead, you would do these things and not feel them. But because you are alive, you sense.
Well, that is what happens when we become Christians, in brief and very simply.
While I know that many of you know all that, I do feel that, with many coming to Christ these days, it is important for them to know, at the beginning of the Christian life, really what they have come into and really what has happened to them.
They may be able to say, as I have said this evening, “Yes, well, I could not have explained it. I could hardly put it into words, but I know what you mean. That is quite true. That is quite true in my experience.”
But, you see, it is something more than just feeling. We have got to understand. There is a lot in understanding.
May God make us intelligent Christians—Christians who are going on in living fellowship with His Spirit within, and growing all the time.
Oh, God forbid that if there are any young Christians here, in five, ten, or twenty years’ time, you should be just where you are now—at the beginning. That is not necessary, because, you know, being born is not the end of things. That is only the beginning.