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What is a Christian? By Herbert M Carson

And in considering this question this evening, we shall be looking again at Acts chapter 11 and the latter part of verse 26.
And the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.
And the question that we are considering this evening is, what is a Christian?
And there are very many who would be saying that this is really an irrelevant question to consider together.
If there is one thing that seems to agitate the minds of a great many Christians today, it is this word relevance.
They are always deeply concerned lest they should not be relevant in the contemporary situation.
And they would say to us, there are very many much more important questions that you ought to be considering.
You ought to be considering the whole question of communication. How you within the church communicate your message to the world outside.
You should be concerned about the big issues that are agitating the minds of theologians and the minds of church leaders in these days.
What is the point of considering a question like this, which after all is one upon which we are all agreed.
But I would suggest to you that we need to consider this question because far from there being such complete and facile agreement, there is a great deal of confusion.
There is confusion even with those who would basically be agreed as to what a Christian is, but who are confused in working out the implication of their basic affirmation.
And I want to begin this evening by suggesting certain reasons why I consider this question to be a vitally urgent one and one that we need to consider.
First of all, because of the situation in which most of us find ourselves in local churches, we are concerned with the preaching of the gospel.
We are concerned to reach the men and women of our generation with the saving word of Christ.
But we face a situation in which there is a great deal of misunderstanding as to what precisely a Christian is.
I'm sure many of you will have had this experience in visiting from door to door or in the chance contact which you may make with men and women.
Ask them, what is a Christian? And of course, you get a variety of answers.
But I would suggest that the answers tend to reduce themselves to a couple of basic answers.
There are those who tend to react in terms of morality.
In fact, if you question them as to whether they're Christians or not, they seem to think that you're reflecting upon their character or upon their honesty, upon their moral standing in the community.
When you ask them, are you a Christian, so often their instinctive reaction is to say, well, of course, I pay 20 shillings in the pound.
I've never done anyone a nil turn. I always try to be helpful.
And as far as they are concerned, to be a Christian is to be generally moral living, to live up to the standards of the Christian ethic,
even if they're fairly vague at times as to what the Christian ethic may be.
A Christian indeed is, by and large, a decent fellow, a good neighborly type of person, a person who's kind and helpful and so on.
Well, of course, the attitude of the man in the street so often reflects the attitude of the theologian.
And this very wooly attitude of the man in the street reflects a very false theology which has been recurring in the Church of Christ right down the centuries.
Those of you who've read early church history will remember the great theological battle in the early church between Augustine and Pelagius.
On one side stood Pelagius with his emphasis upon man's ability.
Man had it within himself to do something about his own moral and spiritual predicament.
Man could do something towards lifting himself from his present condition.
And Augustine, with all the power of his mighty intellect, and even more important, with all the arguments which he brought from the Word of God,
demonstrated that a man is saved not by his own abilities, but essentially by the grace of God.
Well, the Pelagian position has kept recurring.
Sometimes it's been a full-blooded Pelagianism, sometimes it's been a semi-Pelagianism,
in which there has been a sort of nod of assent towards the statement that a man is saved by grace,
but at the same time a great deal of emphasis upon what he can do.
And a Christian thought of in these terms is essentially a man who contributes a great deal towards his own salvation
in terms of his own earnestness, his own moral endeavour.
And it's against this background that we preach our Gospel.
It's against this background that we seek to tell men what a Christian truly is.
Now, what is the other reaction you tend to meet from the man in the street?
Well, this is becoming increasingly a minority reaction.
There was a time when it would probably have been the reaction you would have got from a great many people.
Now it tends to come, for obvious reasons, from a comparative view.
A Christian is a member of this or that church.
That type of person is usually quick to don their denominational label and to tell you from what background they come.
A Christian is one who has identified himself with the Christian community.
A Christian is one whose name is on a church roll.
A Christian is one who belongs to a certain religious group.
And again, this popular idea has its reflection in the theological conception
that a man becomes a Christian by being incorporated into the Church of Christ.
This is indeed the basic error of the Church of Rome.
It's the error of Rome's sacramental approach.
Rome thinks essentially of the grace of God being mediated to men through the sacraments.
And of course the Church is the agency which administers the sacraments.
So the grace of God comes through the Church via the sacraments
to the man, the woman, who by means of the sacraments is incorporated into the Church.
And so a Christian is a man who has thus been initiated,
thus been joined to the visible community of those who profess to be Christians.
And by this incorporation he can now claim to be a Christian.
And I say again it's with this background and meeting this kind of person that we preach our Gospel
and we emphasise what a Christian truly is.
There is another reason why I believe we've got to consider this question.
It is because of the problem that confronts us in the evangelistic situation, if I may use that phrase.
We are invited constantly, many of us, to engage in this or that united enterprise.
And we are told that we face a desperate situation.
We face a country which is increasingly pagan and godless.
And therefore it behoves all who name the name of Christ to stand together.
It may be that we have secondary disagreements, at least the term secondary.
We may differ on certain doctrinal issues.
But after all the need of the people is so appalling that we must be together in the Gospel.
And so we are invited to engage in such united evangelistic enterprise.
I remember once sitting in church house Westminster listening to a debate of the church assembly.
And there was an evangelical taking this line, we may differ.
And of course there was the difference between evangelicals on one side and Anglo Catholics on the other.
But the great theme was we can be united in the Gospel.
We can be united in evangelism.
And I listened to another evangelical saying the same thing and I thought I had to challenge him.
I said but in what way are we united?
Basically all we're united in is certain techniques, certain ways of doing things.
If you're not united in the content of the message that you present, there is no unity in an evangelistic enterprise.
It is a unity which is based on a common acceptance of the Gospel.
And it's because of these kind of pressures that I believe we've got to study this issue.
As to what it means to be a Christian. How do you become a Christian?
It is utterly pointless to engage in a united enterprise when there are differing understandings of what it means to be a Christian.
If there's an epidemic of some serious illness, clearly the local doctors are going to be over wept.
But we would be highly surprised if they suggested bringing in some of the local quacks in order to help them because the situation is so desperate.
There's a housing shortage and a very serious housing shortage in many parts of the country.
People desperately need houses.
But we don't expect that the standards for housing should be dropped.
We don't expect that reputable builders should be encouraged to call in jerry builders in order to help them to provide homes for the people.
Even if those homes are going to be built in very unsuitable places and with very, very shoddy materials.
And yet we're being told that although we disagree with others about what the Gospel is and we disagree on some of the fundamentals of the Gospel,
yet we should be together in evangelistic enterprise.
And a third reason, and it's allied to that second one.
It's the reason which was very much to the fore in the address which Mr Greer gave this afternoon.
The whole ecumenical pressure of the present time.
Ecumenism like the poor is always with us and it will continue to be with us in the decades that follow.
And what is the pressure, the ecumenical pressure at the present time?
Someone asked the question this afternoon.
What is the attitude of the ecumenical movement and of the Church of Rome to conservative evangelicals?
Well the answer is very simple.
The approach is in terms of welcome.
They are ready with open arms to welcome conservative evangelicals.
I remember quite a few years ago when I was on the staff of the InterVarsity Fellowship,
reading a memorandum which had been circulated amongst staff of the student Christian movement.
You might wonder how members of the IVF staff were reading that memorandum, but nonetheless we were.
And as long ago as that, that must have been the best part of 20 years ago,
the SCM staff were being encouraged along this line.
And remember the SCM has been the training ground for the great bulk of the ecumenical leaders in this country.
They were being encouraged to think along these lines that the conservative evangelical witnesses represented in the IVF
had got to be brought in to the total witness within the universities
because it was a standing scandal that the university witness should be divided.
They must be brought in and indeed there was a strong emphasis on the contributions which they would bring,
their spontaneity in prayer, the warmth of their fellowship, their missionary concern.
These were things that ecumenical Christendom required and so they were to be encouraged to come in.
And this has been of course the great thrust of these past years
because of course the men who were staff members in the SCM in those days are now in a position of leadership.
And Rome? Well, you may remember when Cardinal Henon came back from the Vatican Council.
This was one of the points he made that he was interested in meeting and hearing from conservative evangelicals.
And very significantly, when Cardinal Henon convened a conference at Heathrop in North Oxfordshire not long ago,
a conservative evangelical was one of the speakers who was invited to participate in that conference.
They are anxious that we should join them and some of our fellow evangelicals have been prepared to join them.
And therefore we have got to be able to give an answer why we are not thus prepared to participate.
Now what is the basis of the invitation? What is the basis of a great deal of the ecumenical discussion?
And I ask these questions in view of the issue we are considering this evening.
It is that we are all Christians. This is the basic assumption. This is the issue which is not questioned.
In fact, to question that assumption would be looked on as being lacking in charity, being thoroughly divisive and separatist.
The basic assumption is that whatever differences there may be, and they are prepared to admit that there are wide differences,
but the basic assumption is that all who take part are Christians.
And because of that assumption, we have got to ask the question, well, what is a Christian and how do you become a Christian?
Earlier this year, I was engaged in a debate in Dublin in a Catholic university with a Jesuit professor.
After the confrontation between the speakers, we had questions from the floor of the house
and students with lively minds were ready to fire lively questions.
And one man asked the Jesuit, in view of what you'd said tonight, would you say that you were a Christian?
And he said, I would say that I was becoming a Christian.
Well, whatever precisely he might have meant by further development of that theme is rather uncertain.
But here is the issue. The assumption is we are all Christians and we have got to ask the question, what is a Christian?
Now, there are factors which have entered into this situation which make this matter a great deal more urgent.
And I've touched on it already. And that is the presence now within the ecumenical movement of the Church of Rome.
Now, there was a time, of course, when Rome had no interest in ecumenism.
But then, as so often has happened in the history of the Roman Church, you read its history, you will find that this is the policy so often has been adopted.
There has been opposition. And then when the thing has continued to grow, there has been a taking over
and an incorporating of that which was formerly thought to be an undesirable element.
Well, Rome has moved into a new attitude. Instead of the old refusal to have any truck or any cooperation,
there is now a readiness to take part in dialogue, in meeting together and in moving and working towards unity.
And in this whole discussion and debate, this issue of what is a Christian comes right into the forefront.
It has come into the forefront as a major problem for Roman thinkers.
Because, after all, in spite of all the mental gymnastics of some progressives within the Church of Rome,
they are still nominally committed to an acceptance of papal dogma and teaching.
And one of the basic statements on this matter is the long-standing cyclical of Boniface from the beginning of the 14th century,
that it is essential for any man to be saved, that he should be subject to the Roman pontiff.
Outside the Church of Rome, there is no salvation.
Well, how do you bring in the separated brethren when you have such a forthright and unambiguous statement as that?
Until the 19th century, Rome was quite happy that there was no ambiguity there. They were quite dogmatic and forthright.
A Christian was essentially one who had been baptised and was in membership of the Church of Rome.
He was subject to the authority of the Roman pontiff.
Then in the 19th century, they began to make tentative attempts to find some place for those who were not formally within the Catholic Church.
But somehow they must be found a place, and so there emerged the concept of invincible ignorance.
The theory was, and it was typical of the arrogance of Rome at that time, that if you hadn't accepted Rome,
it was clearly because you hadn't understood what Rome stood for.
And the assumption was, if only you saw what Rome stood for, well, of course, you would embrace her tenets.
So the fact that you were in invincible ignorance didn't shut you out from the arc of salvation.
God in his uncovenanted mercy brought you within.
This, of course, militated very much against the separated brother who did some thinking.
It was all right for the woolly-minded brother who didn't think at all, but when it wasn't a case of invincible ignorance,
when it was a case of a man having examined Rome's claims and rejected them, well, how did you find room for him?
So there came a further attempt, the attempt to distinguish between the soul of the Church and the body of the Church.
I think the late Ronald Knox developed this line.
A man might be in the soul of the Church and yet not in the body of the Church.
But the obvious fallacy from the Roman standpoint in that argument was that the body now became a secondary issue.
So whether you were subject to the Roman pontiff or not became a secondary consideration.
And what about Boniface and the extra-Ecclesian decree? So they had to try again.
And they tried again and they've tried now along their old and very well-tried line, back to the old Roman sacramentalism.
And if you read the decrees of the Vatican Council, if you read the directory on ecumenism which has recently been issued,
you'll find this strong emphasis upon sacramentalism.
All who have been baptized are within.
They may not yet have seen fully the implications of submission to the Pope.
They may in that sense have shut themselves out from the full privileges of membership in the Catholic Church.
But if they've been baptized, they're within.
You might say, well, what about the Quakers and the Salvation Army?
Oh, but Rome has an answer there as well. There is not only the baptism in water, there's the baptism of desire.
So they can be brought in under that basis.
And indeed it continues to reach out further because the baptism of desire can be an implicit desire and not necessarily an explicit one.
So that those who are right outside, those who by our judgement would not be turned Christians at all, are still within.
So that the elasticity of Rome's sacramentalism embraces very many.
And it's against this background and against the background that you and I are facing many Roman Catholics today who are in a state of confusion
and who themselves do not know where to turn and are asking what is the answer.
It's in this situation that we are considering the question, what is a Christian?
Because I believe that in our present situation with Rome in a state of ferment, with many of them turning hither and thither,
evangelicals are the only ones who have the answer.
Because it's the only possible answer, it's the answer of scripture.
The great tragedy of the moment is that so many Roman Catholic thinkers are turning from a dogmatic Romanism
towards the bypasses of modern radicalism.
And I say only the evangelical message is the answer.
But we ask the question at this point, what is a Christian?
And closely allied to this whole matter is something which again emerged this afternoon.
Closely allied to Rome's involvement in the ecumenical movement is the appearance increasingly amongst Roman theologians
of the old idea which has been present amongst Protestant liberals for a great time.
And that is the conception of universalism. I've already hinted at it.
The conception that all men will be saved.
If you read Charles Davis's autobiography, his record of how he left the Church of Rome,
you'll find how in the first part of the book he's very clear and definite as to the reasons for his break with Rome.
But then somehow he wanders into a wilderness.
And as I listened to him in the wilderness, I could listen to his fellow companion in that same wilderness,
the Bishop of Woolwich, and men of that ilk. They were talking the same language.
And what is Charles Davis saying there? Well, he's saying, and behind it, of course,
is the theology of incarnation without atonement, which is so prominent in liberal thinking.
Jesus has come into the world. He's made the whole of life sacred so that no longer can you distinguish between church and world.
All is sacred. And wherever you see in men of good will, kindness, helpfulness, sympathy,
there you see men expressing a Christ-centered urge, even if they themselves are not consciously Christian,
even indeed if they reject Christ. They are, in some sense, Christians,
because they are exhibiting in the very character of their dealings with their fellows the Spirit of Christ.
And so this universalism is increasingly taking hold, I would say, of Catholic thinking.
And it's in face of all this that we come back to our basic question, well, what is a Christian?
Is a Christian one who has been incorporated by some sacramental act into an ecclesiastical system?
Is a Christian one who, by his kindliness, his gentleness, his sympathy, exhibits the Spirit of Christ,
even if he may be like Archbishop Ramsey's atheist who will be in heaven with him,
or even if he's like those whom Charles Davis reckons to be within this all-embracing church?
What is a Christian? What is our answer to the question?
And so this evening I want to turn you to that verse, that verse in Acts 11.
The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.
It was obviously in the first instance a nickname that was given to them.
This town of Antioch indeed became very famous for its satire and for its handing out of nicknames.
The emperor Julian was to discover to his caste that they were very good at that kind of thing.
And so here is this group emerging in Antioch, and they dubbed them Christians.
We don't know why. Precisely they so designated them.
One can appreciate the reason, the likely reasons.
If they listened to these Christians preaching, they would have heard them speaking constantly about Christ.
Paul, after all, could speak about his ministry.
When I came to Corinth, he said, I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified.
If they listened in on a Christian prayer meeting, they would have heard these men and women coming through Christ.
If they listened to them as they were having fellowship together,
as Bunyan years later was to eavesdrop listening to some godly women talking together,
they would have heard them talking about Christ and their experiences of Christ.
If they listened to their praise, they would doubtless have heard what Pliny had heard about
when later he wrote to Trajan that these Christians, they met and they sang a hymn of praise to Christ as to a god.
Christ seemed to be in the center of everything, and so they called them Christians, Christ's men.
But I would like you to notice that quite obviously these disciples were a recognizable fact in the city of Antioch.
The population gave them the nickname because they recognized these people as being different.
Now there were many clubs and guilds in any Roman city. It was a frequent phenomenon.
But here was a distinctive group. Here was a group which stood out and was so obviously different that they gave them a special designation.
But this was a church, as you discover in the Acts of the Apostles, in which God was moving powerfully.
This was not a church engaged in a weekly routine of formal worship.
This was not a church merely engaged in the general round of church activities.
The Spirit of God had come upon them. These were men who exhibited the joy and the power of the Holy Ghost.
From this church the gospel was going out with great effect. Men and women were being saved, and there was a living fellowship.
This was a church in a condition of deep revival, and that church was an obvious factor in the community.
It was noticed, and the ghastly tragedy of modern evangelicalism is that so much is trying to reverse this whole thing.
The great aim today is not to be distinct and different. The great aim today is to be like the world.
You must be with it. You must be like the world in your worship. You must be like the world in the way you do things.
You go to the advertising techniques. You go to the film world, to the television world. You learn how to do things.
And then you transform the whole life of your church, and then, so the theory goes, you make an impact.
And in actual fact what happens is that the world looks at you and assumes that you are just one more group amongst the many other groups.
We live in a world when people are bombarded with impersonal approaches.
Detergent coupons come through your door, and people scream the same message from the television screens.
Well, the Church of Christ has simply become one more of these bodies, trying, because of its limited means, to compete with the high-speed modern advertising methods.
What has gone wrong in this great endeavour to be like the world and in tune with the modern situation?
We've forgotten that the Church has always been its most effective when it has been most obviously different from the world,
when it has been a distinct, a peculiar, an obvious body.
These men were recognisable as utterly different from the society in which they moved.
That's why there was a reaction. The reaction was probably one of mixed scorn, hostility.
But there was a reaction. Our tragedy today is that there is no reaction.
The Church is simply, like the beef-eaters in the Tower of London, part of the landscape, and nobody pays any great attention.
Admittedly, at times, Church leaders make vacuous pronouncements on this and that issue, but of course one expects them to do that.
But by and large, the Church is simply an irrelevance in the whole situation.
These men couldn't thus be ignored. They made an impact in Antioch, such an impact that this pagan population took notice.
Something's happening here. Who are these people anyway? We'll call them Christians.
Christians because Christ was at the very centre of everything, and this surely is what constitutes a Christian.
A Christian is essentially, and above all else, Christ's man.
Oh, but having said that, you've then got to become more explicit and to say what precisely you mean by such a title,
because one of the disastrous facts in our present situation is that the great and glorious terms of Christian history have been evacuated of all meaning.
People agree that Christ is Lord. They don't mean what the New Testament means by that statement.
People agree that conversion is necessary. You discover they're talking about some psychological process.
And so when we say the Christian is Christ's man, we've then to become more specific and more detailed as to what's involved in this statement.
He's Christ's man first of all because he has, by the regenerating work of God the Holy Spirit, by a supernatural work of God, he has been united to the Lord Jesus Christ.
He has been brought into an intimate union. No, it wasn't enough for him to be joined to the Church of Christ by letting his name go forward for a membership role.
This has been a miracle, nothing less than a miracle of the grace of God.
God has reached down to him, found him dead in trespasses and sins, incapable of understanding the Gospel, incapable of responding to the Gospel.
And God in grace has united him to Christ so that he shares the very life of Christ.
That's why Paul uses his vivid picture of the limb of the body.
My arm is in my body, not by some artificial nexus or junction. It shares the very life of my body and it's under the direction of my brain.
The Christian is knit to Christ, united to Christ. He's not one who's attempting to follow out the Christian ethic.
He isn't one who has an admiration for Jesus as the great exemplar whom he hopes to follow.
He is a man in whom the Spirit of God has worked a great miracle.
He's a man who can be described only in terms of the great phrases of the New Testament.
He's a new creation. God has found a creation in ruins and has remade him.
He's been born again. He was outside the family circle of God.
No claim there, no rights in God's presence, and God has imparted life to him.
He's been born again. He's Christ's. He's a limb in the body of Christ, sharing the very life of his Savior.
Christ's man? Yes, there's another aspect of this great truth. Through Christ, we have been accepted, justified by faith in the Son of God.
A Christian is a man who has begun to think seriously about himself.
He's been delivered from his old, facile approach, in which he tried to evade the searching requirements of the Gospel,
or in which he made excuses for himself, measured himself by the standards of the community in which he lived.
He's had his eyes opened, and he's begun to see something of the blazing purity and holiness of God Almighty.
He's caught some echo of the seraphim as they cried, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.
And in face of that vision of God's holiness, he's begun to see his own sin.
His mouth has been stopped. The old evasions and excuses have been shown up in all the triviality.
Like Adam, he'd sculpt back, but God had found him. Where art thou?
And he stood before God, naked and ashamed, in his guilt and in his filth.
But by God's grace, he's been unable to look to one who hung on Calvary's cross,
and one who triumphantly came from an empty tomb, and has been exalted at God's right hand as a prince and a savior,
for to give repentance and remission. And he's seen in this Christ his hope.
Here he is with the law of God, speaking of those searching demands.
And he looks at himself. What can he produce? His own righteousness.
There was a time when he was very proud of it. His attainments, his church loyalty and all the rest.
But now the prophetic indictment is not simply a word that he hears.
It rings deep in his own heart and probes his conscience. Your righteousness is filthy rags.
And the great issue that confronts him now is, how may I be right with God?
How may I, a guilty sinner, be accepted before the eternal judge?
And he sees Christ, sees him as he never saw him before. There is righteousness.
There is one who kept that law of God, kept it in letter, kept it in spirit.
One who positively carried out the demands of the Lord to love the Lord his God with all his heart,
and to love his neighbor as himself. There is righteousness.
Oh, but he's looked again and he's seen something more. Because of that was the only thing that he saw.
It would mop all his endeavors. Here is righteousness incarnate.
And here in my own life I find only sin and guilt and impurity and shame.
Oh, but I see the Son of God going for me to Calvary, taking my very nature, becoming like me,
and going to the cross. The law keeper taking the place of the law breaker.
The sinless one being made sin for us.
And the Christian is a man who from his own hopelessness, from his own self despair,
has looked in simple faith to Jesus Christ. And he's been accepted.
And he opens the epistle to the Romans. This is no mere theological treatise.
This is something that thrills his heart. Here is a man who's gone through the same experience.
Here is Saul of Tarsus, the self-righteous young Pharisee, so sure of his attainments
and then finding them all shattered as he stands before a holy God.
But a man who from the ruins of all his own hopes and attainments has through faith in Christ found acceptance.
He's been justified.
And Saul of Tarsus, Paul the apostle, penned that letter to the Romans in which he declared,
What is a Christian? A Christian is a man who has been justified by faith.
A Christian is a man who can say with humble assurance there is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.
A Christian is a man who can look into all the uncertainties of the future and face even death itself
and say, Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Three centuries later, another man was going through the same kind of experience.
From an early period of immoral and loose living, he'd swung to an attempt to find peace with God.
He turned to Eastern religion. He turned to Neoplatonist philosophy.
Wherever he turned, he could find no answer till this word came.
The word that the apostle Paul had penned out of his own experience,
Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ. And Augustine was brought to simple faith in the Son of God.
And 13 centuries later, a man in an Augustinian monastery was wrestling with the same problem as had gripped the soul of Saul of Tarsus and Augustine.
And he found the answer as Augustine had found it in that same letter to the Romans.
Here was the man who by every attempt possible within the structure of the church had sought to find peace.
But Martin Luther discovered that there is peace only in Christ, in Christ crucified.
And three more centuries, there was a man in Aldersgate Street in London.
And it was the same problem again. How may I know that my sins are forgiven?
And the gospel thread stretched right across the centuries.
The epistle which had meant so much to Augustine and to Luther was to ring with new meaning that night.
Reading Luther's preface to the epistle to the Romans.
And John Wesley said, I felt my heart strangely warmed.
What had happened? He'd found that assurance is only to be discovered in faith in Jesus Christ.
A Christian is Christ's man.
Alive because God has wrought the miracle of uniting him to Christ.
Accepted because he's been justified by faith in Christ.
And a Christian is Christ's man because he is continuing to go forward in communion and fellowship with Christ.
Go back to Saul of Tarsus.
Now the apostle Paul, he's had his great experience.
He's found Jesus Christ as his righteousness.
But that's only the beginning.
Listen to him as he writes the letter to the Philippians.
For me, he says, to live is Christ.
Oh, but this life is only the prelude.
To die is gain.
I'm an astray, he says.
I don't know what's best, whether to stay here and to preach or to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better.
But it's Christ who looms so large in his thinking.
Now, the very atmosphere in which he moves, the very air he breathes is Christ.
Christ dominates his horizon.
Christ is his hope.
Christ is his theme.
And yet, as you read on in that letter, you find a man who's not yet satisfied.
Many ambitions for the churches, that they might grow in grass, that error might be resisted.
But here is his supreme concern, that I might know Christ.
He is Christ's man.
That's why he was such a missionary.
That's why he is such a passionate concern to see the gospel spread to the regions beyond.
Christ had gripped him.
Christ had mastered him.
His whole life was taken up with Christ.
And so he preached Jesus Christ on him crucified.
A Christian, he's Christ's man.
He's going on with Christ, living in communion with the Son of God.
The disciples, they were called Christians.
It was the world gave the nickname, but the world stumbled unwittingly upon the truth.
They themselves would have described themselves as disciples.
They were learners.
Learners who had been humble enough, or rather had been humbled by God the Holy Spirit,
to see that they needed to find the truth.
Truth? But this was a message that was despised by the contemporary world.
The Jews? Well, they found the gospel a stumbling block.
A crucified messiah? No self-respecting Jew could accept such a message.
And the sophisticated Greeks? The preaching of a crucified prophet.
Utter foolishness, the religion of a moron.
But these men had been humbled to realize that this was the wisdom of God.
This was the power of God.
They'd become disciples.
They'd had their minds enlightened to understand.
Many of them were probably like our 20th century intellectuals,
who imagined that they're in control of the situation.
They can understand.
They can submit this book to their scrutiny, their analysis, and their rejection.
But these men had been brought to realize that before God, we are utter ignorami.
No matter what our intellectual ability, or our academic background,
we know nothing, and we never can know anything.
Apart from the enlightening grace of God,
they were disciples because the scales had been taken from their eyes.
Blinded they had been by the God of this world,
but by this miraculous working of the Spirit, their understanding was opened,
and they could understand the truth of the gospel.
And they'd been enabled to obey,
enabled to receive what God had revealed in His word.
Disciples, learners in the school of Christ, Christ men.
But there are certain searching questions that inevitably follow
from this theme that we've been considering this evening.
And the first and the most obvious question which I have to put to the individual
is simply this, are you a Christian?
And most people might feel that it was almost an insult
in a gathering like this to put such a question.
But I've discovered it's not the first time
that within a gathering of people committed apparently to the gospel,
there are those who are yet groping and not sure of themselves.
I can always recall someone who came to me once quite some years ago.
She was troubled because of my evangelistic methods.
They weren't quite what they should have been.
As we discussed evangelistic methods, we discussed the gospel,
and she began to discover that what was wrong was not my evangelistic methods
but her own spiritual condition.
Someone else told me later, the pastor of the church,
where ultimately she went as a member,
that she described her experience rather vividly as post-dating her conversion.
And I believe there are many people like that who think they're Christians.
They've been carried along perhaps on the momentum of the fellowship
of an evangelical church, but they have never been brought
to the point whereby the working of the Spirit, they have looked to Christ.
And I speak to any such tonight, any who are uncertain,
even more to any who this evening as I've been speaking
have been asking themselves very seriously,
am I a Christian? What is my answer to you?
It's the answer that was given to the apostle Paul
by that vision which he received. Christ met him.
The answer which Paul through his epistle gave to Augustine and Luther and Wesley
and to multitudes of others, I simply point to Christ.
Christ is the answer.
It is through Christ that you become a Christian.
Through Christ you have peace with God.
Through Christ you know the blessing of fellowship with your Creator.
But many of us, most of us, would rejoice that by God's grace we are Christians.
What is the word then for us?
I believe we've got to be very sure about the gospel which we preach.
Does our gospel focus upon Christ?
Charles Simeon, that great 18th century evangelical,
summed up his preaching ministry in these terms.
To humble the sinner, to exhort the Savior and to promote holiness.
And the second ambition of the preacher is the central one.
Christ must be exalted and we must preach a full Christ
in all the glory of His deity, in all the wonder of His humanity.
We must preach His cross, His atoning death, His substitutionary death,
the propitiation which He wrought by His dying.
We must preach His bodily resurrection away with these pretentious television debates
in which theologians compete in producing their doubts.
We say Christ rose from the dead, we rejoice that we serve a living Savior.
And we preach Christ crucified, living, ascended, exalted, glorified, coming.
We must see to our gospel that we preach a full gospel with all the biblical content.
And we must look to ourselves, we must look to our own lives.
I believe our great need within the churches today is a new deep experience of Christ.
There are so many are being side tracked.
They're rushing here and rushing there.
This new experience, that new experience.
What really should be drawing us on is this ambition of Paul in Philippians,
that I might know Christ.
I remember reading someone's comment on Charles Haddon Spurgeon.
Now obviously a man like Spurgeon tends to stand on a rather lonely eminence.
He had quite unique gifts and powers.
But what was the real secret?
This man said, in Spurgeon's life Jesus Christ reigned.
He was king and that's why Spurgeon preached as he did.
And I believe what we need to pray for and learn that God would do for us
is that in our churches we might have such a visitation of the Holy Spirit
that Christ might reign supreme in our lives and in our churches,
that we might be seen and known to be Christ men.
Because the answer to this poor, sinful, groping generation in which we live
is not some new idea, some new technique.
It is simply the old and the eternal Gospel.
Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
May the Lord fill our vision with Christ.
May the Lord so enlarge our understanding
that we may grasp something of the wonder of the Savior.
Said Samuel Rutherford, there are curtains in the loveliness of Christ not yet drawn aside.
May the Lord in this day and generation of ours draw aside the curtains
that we may see the glory of the Savior
and fall down before Him lost in wonder, love and praise.
Amen.