And the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.
Acts 11:26b
“What is a biblical Christian?” In other words, according to the Scriptures, when does a man, woman, boy or girl have the right to the name “Christian”?
One must not make the assumption lightly that he or she is a true Christian. A false conclusion at this point is tragic and fatal. Therefore I want to set before you four strands of the Bible’s answer to the question, “What is a biblical Christian?”
 2. A biblical Christian is one who has seriously considered the one divine remedy for sin.
In the Bible we are told again and again that Almighty God has taken the initiative in doing something for man, the sinner. The verses some of us learned in our youth emphasize God’s initiative in providing a remedy for sinful man: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son”; “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins”; “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us” (John 3:16; 1 John 4:10; Ephesians 2:4).
A unique feature of the Christian faith is that it is not a religious self-help scheme where you patch yourself up with the aid of God. Just as surely as it is a unique tenet of the Christian faith that Christ is the only Savior for sinners, so it is also a unique tenet of the Christian faith that all of our true help comes down from above and meets us where we are. We cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps; God in mercy breaks in upon the human situation and does something which we could never do for ourselves.
When we turn to the Scriptures, we find that God’s divine remedy has at least three simple but profoundly wonderful focal points:
(a) First of all, God’s remedy for sin is bound up in a Person. Anyone who begins to take seriously the divine remedy for human sin will notice in the Scriptures that the remedy is not in a set of ideas, as though it were just another philosophy, nor is it found in an institution, but it is bound up in a Person: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son”; “And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (John 3:16; Matthew 1:21). Jesus himself said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
The divine remedy for sin is bound up in a Person, and that Person is none other than our Lord Jesus Christ—the eternal Word who became man, uniting a true human nature to His divine nature. Here is God’s provision for man with his bad record and his bad heart: a Savior who is both God and man, the two natures joined in the one Person for ever. If your personal problem of sin is ever to be remedied in a biblical way, it will be remedied only as you have personal dealings with the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Such is the unique strand of the Christian faith: the sinner in all his need, united to the Savior in all the fullness of His grace; the sinner in his naked need, and the Savior in His almighty power, brought directly together in the Gospel. That reality is the glory od’s Good News to sinners!
b) Secondly, God’s remedy for sin is centered in the cross upon which Jesus Christ died. When we turn to the Scriptures we find that the divine remedy in a unique way is centered in the cross of Jesus Christ. John the Baptist uses the Old Testament image of the sacrificial lamb when he points to Jesus and says, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Jesus Himself said, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28).
True preaching of the Gospel is so much centered in the cross that Paul says it is the word or message of the cross. The preaching of the cross is “foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). When Paul came to Corinth—a center of intellectualism and pagan Greek philosophy—he did not follow their prescribed patterns of rhetoric but said that he “determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).
The cross is not to be thought of as an abstract idea or a religious symbol; the meaning of the cross is what God declares it to mean. The cross was the place where God, by imputation, heaped the sins of His people upon his Son. On that cross there was substitutionary curse-bearing. In the language of the apostle Paul, “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13), and “He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
The cross is not a nebulous, indefinable symbol of self-giving love; on the contrary, the cross is the monumental display of how God can be just and still pardon guilty sinners. At the cross, God, having imputed the sins of His people to Christ, pronounces judgment upon His Son as the representative of His people. There on the cross God pours out the vials of His wrath unmixed with mercy until His Son cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:l; Matthew 27:46).
At Calvary, God is demonstrating in the visible world what is happening in the invisible, spiritual world. He shrouds the heavens in total darkness to let all mankind know that He is plunging His Son into the outer darkness of the hell which your sins and my sins deserve. Jesus hangs on the cross in the posture of a guilty criminal; for Him society has but one verdict: “Away with Him”—”Crucify Him”—”Hand Him over to death”—and God does not intervene. In the theater of what men can see, God is demonstrating what He is doing in the realm where we cannot see. He is treating His Son as a criminal. He is causing Jesus to feel in the depths of His own soul all of the fury of the wrath that should be vented upon us.
(c) Thirdly, God’s remedy for sin is adequate for all men, and it is offered to all men without discrimination. Before we have any felt consciousness of our sin, it is very easy to think that God can forgive sinners. But when you and I begin to have any idea at all of what sin is, our thoughts are changed. We see ourselves as little worms of the dust, creatures whose very life and breath are held in the hands of the God in whom “we live move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
We begin to take seriously that we have dared to defy the God who consigned angels to everlasting darkness when they rebelled against Him. We confess that this holy God sees the effusions of our foul, corrupt human hearts. Then we say, “O God, how can you be anything other than just? If you give me what my sins deserve, there is nothing for me but wrath and judgment! How can You forgive me and still be just? How can You be a righteous God and do anything other than consign me to everlasting punishment with those angels that rebelled?”
When we begin to feel the reality of our sin, forgiveness becomes the most stubborn problem with which our mind has ever wrestled. It is then that we need to know that in a Person, and that Person crucified, God has provided a remedy adequate for all men and offered to all men without discrimination.
If any conditions were placed on the availability of Christ we would say, “Surely I don’t meet the conditions; surely I don’t qualify.” The wonder of God’s provision is that it comes in these unfettered terms: “Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Isaiah 55:1); “The one who comes to me I will by no means cast out” (John 6:37).
See the beauty of the free offer of mercy in Jesus Christ! We do not need God to step out of heaven and tell us that we, by name, are warranted to come; we have the unfettered offer of mercy in the words of His own Son, “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
HT:Eternal Life Ministries
Chief of sinners though I be,
Jesus shed His blood for me;
Died that I might live on high,
Lived that I might never die,
As the branch is to the vine,
I am His, and He is mine.
2. Oh, the height of Jesus’ love!
Higher than the heavens above,
 Deeper than the depths of sea,
Lasting as eternity.
Love that found me–wondrous thought!–
Found me when I sought Him not.
3. Jesus only can impart
Balm to heal the smitten heart;
Peace that flows from sin forgiven,
Joy that lifts the soul to heaven;
Faith and hope to walk with God
In the way that Enoch trod.
4. Chief of sinners though I be,
Christ is All in all to me;
All my wants to Him are known,
All my sorrows are His own.
Safe with Him from earthly strife,
He sustains the hidden life.
5. O my Savior, help afford
By Thy Spirit and Thy Word!
When my wayward heart would stray,
Keep me in the narrow way;
Grace in time of need supply
While I live and when I die.
William McComb 1864
1 Timothy 1:15
And the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.
Acts 11:26b
There are many matters concerning which total ignorance and complete indifference are neither tragic nor fatal. I am sure that there are few of us who can explain all the processes by which a brown cow eats green grass and gives white milk—but we can still enjoy the milk! Many of us are totally ignorant of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and if we were pressed to explain it we would really be in difficulty. And not only are we ignorant of Einstein’s theory but most of us are quite indifferent; yet our ignorance and indifference are neither tragic nor fatal.
There are some matters, however, concerning which ignorance and indifference are both tragic and fatal. One such matter is the answer to the question, “What is a biblical Christian?” In other words, according to the Scriptures, when does a man, woman, boy or girl have the right to the name “Christian”?
One must not make the assumption lightly that he or she is a true Christian. A false conclusion at this point is tragic and fatal. Therefore I want to set before you four strands of the Bible’s answer to the question, “What is a biblical Christian?”
1. According to the Bible, a Christian is a person who has faced realistically the problem of his own personal sin.
One of the many things which distinguishes the Christian faith from the other religions of the world is that Christianity is essentially and fundamentally a sinner’s religion. When the angel announced to Joseph the approaching birth of Jesus Christ, he did so in these words, “And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew l:21). The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 1:15, “This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.” The Lord Jesus Christ Himself says in Luke 5:31-32, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” A Christian is one who has faced realistically the problem of his own personal sin.
 When we turn to the Scriptures, we find that each one of us has a two-fold personal problem in relation to sin. On the one hand, we have the problem of a bad record and, on the other hand, the problem of a bad heart. If we start in Genesis 3 and begin with the tragic account of man’s rebellion against God and his fall into sin, then trace the biblical doctrine of sin all the way through to the Book of the Revelation, we see that it is not oversimplification to say that everything that the Bible teaches about the doctrine of sin can be reduced to these two fundamental categories—the problem of a bad record and the problem of a bad heart.
What do I mean by “the problem of a bad record”? I am using that terminology to describe what the Scriptures set before us as the doctrine of human guilt because of sin. The Scriptures tell us plainly that we obtained a bad record long before we had any personal existence upon the earth: “Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).
When did the “all” sin? We all sinned in Adam. He was appointed by God to represent all of the human race. When he sinned, we sinned in him and fell with him in his first transgression. That is why the apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:22, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.” Man was created without sin in the Garden of Eden; but from the moment Adam sinned, we too were charged with guilt. We fell in him in his first transgression and we are part of a race that is under condemnation.
Furthermore, the Scriptures teach that after we are born, additional guilt accrues to us for our own personal transgressions. The Word of God teaches that, “There is not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin” (Ecclesiastes 7:20); and every single sin incurs additional guilt. Our record in heaven is a marred record. Almighty God measures the totality of our human experience by a standard which is absolutely inflexible. This standard touches not only our external deeds but also our thoughts and the very motions of our hearts—so much so, that the Lord Jesus said that the stirring of unjust anger is the very essence of murder, and the look with intention to lust is adultery (Matthew 5:22,28).
God is keeping a detailed record. That record is among “the books” which will be opened in the day of judgment (Revelation 20:12). In those books are recorded every thought, every motive, every intention, every deed, and every dimension of human experience that is contrary to the standard of God’s holy law, either failing to measure up to its standard or transgressing it. We have the problem of a bad record—a record according to which we are guilty. We have real guilt for real sin committed against the true and the living God. This is why the Scriptures tell us that the entire human race stands guilty before Almighty God (Romans 3:19).
Has the problem of your own bad record ever become a burning, pressing, personal concern? Have you faced the truth that Almighty God judged you guilty when your father Adam sinned, and holds you guilty for every single word you have spoken contrary to perfect holiness, justice, purity and righteousness? He knows every object you have touched and taken contrary to the sanctity of property. He knows every word spoken contrary to perfect, absolute truth. Has this ever broken in upon you, so that you have awakened to the fact that Almighty God has every right to summon you into His presence anct to require you to give an account of every single deed contrary to His law which has brought guilt upon your soul?
But this problem of a bad record is not our only problem. We have an additional problem—the problem of a bad heart. The Bible teaches that the problem of our sin arises not only from what we have done, but from what we are. When Adam sinned, he not only became guilty before God, he also became defiled and polluted in his nature.
This defilement is described in Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” Jesus describes it in Mark 7:21: “From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts”; and then He names all the various sins that can be seen in any newspaper on any given day—murder, adultery, blasphemy, pride. Jesus said that these things rise out of an artesian well of pollution, the human heart. Notice carefully that He did not say, “For from without, by the pressure of society and its negative influences, come forth murder and adultery and pride and theft.” That is what our so-called sociological experts tell us. They say it is “the condition of society” that produces crime and rebellion; Jesus says it is the condition of the human heart.
Each of us by nature has a heart that the Scriptures describe as “desperately wicked,” a fountain of all forms of iniquity. Romans 8:7 asserts, “The carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.” Paul does not say that the carnal mind, that is, the mind that has never been regenerated by God, has some enmity; he calls it enmity itself: “The carnal mind is enmity against God.” The disposition of every human heart by nature can be pictured as a clenched fist raised against the living God. This is the inward problem of a bad heart—a heart that loves sin, a heart that is the fountain of sin, a heart that is enmity against God.
Has the problem of your bad heart ever become a pressing personal concern to you? I am not asking in theory whether you believe in human sinfulness. You might agree that there are such things as a sinful nature and a sinful heart. My question is, have your bad record and your bad heart ever become matters of deep, inward, pressing concern to you? Have you known anything of real, personal, inward consciousness of the awfulness of your guilt in the presence of a holy God? Have you seen the horribleness of a heart that is “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked”?
A biblical Christian is a person who has in all seriousness taken to heart his own personal problem of sin. The degree to which we may feel the awful weight of sin differs from one person to another. The length of time over which a person is brought to the consciousness of his bad record and his bad heart differs. There are many variables, but Jesus Christ as the Great Physician never brought His healing virtue to anyone who did not know himself to be a sinner. He said, “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance”(Matthew 9:13). Are you a biblical Christian—one who has taken seriously your own problem of sin?
HT:Eternal Life Ministries
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16-17
 This book contains the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners and the happiness of believers.
Its doctrines are holy, its precepts are binding, its histories are true, and its decisions are immutable.
Read it to be wise, believe it to be safe, and practice it to be holy.
It contains light to direct you, food to support you, and comfort to cheer you.
It is the travelers map, the pilgrims staff, the pilots compass, the soldiers sword, and the Christians character.
Here paradise is restored, Heaven opened, and the gates of hell disclosed.
Christ is its grand object, our good is its design, and the glory of God its end.
It should fill the memory, rule the heart, and guide the feet.
Read it slowly, frequently, and prayerfully.
It is given you in life and will be opened in the judgement and will be remembered forever.
It involves the highest responsibility, will reward the greatest labour, and will condemn all who trifle with its sacred contents.
Anonymous
I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance
Luke 5:32
 J.C. Ryle One of the chief objects of Christ’s coming into the world, we have in the well-known words, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
This is that great lesson of the gospel which, in one form or another, we find continually taught in the New Testament. It is one which we can never have too strongly impressed upon our minds. Such is our natural ignorance and self-righteousness in religion, that we are constantly losing sight of it. We need to be frequently reminded, that Jesus did not come merely as a teacher, but as the Saviour of that which was utterly lost, and that those only can receive benefit from Him who will confess that they are ruined, bankrupt, hopeless, miserable sinners.
Let us use this mighty truth, if we never used it before. Are we sensible of our own wickedness and sinfulness? Do we feel that we are unworthy of anything but wrath and condemnation? Then let us understand that we are the very persons for whose sake Jesus came into the world. If we feel ourselves righteous, Christ has nothing to say to us. But if we feel ourselves sinners, Christ calls us to repentance. Let not the call be made in vain.
Let us go on using this mighty truth, if we have used it in time past. Do we find our own hearts weak and deceitful? Do we often feel that “when I would do good, evil is present with me?” (Romans 7:21). It may be all true, but it must not prevent our resting on Christ. He came into the world to save sinners, and if we feel ourselves such, we have warrant for applying to, and trusting in Him to our life’s end. One thing only let us never forget: Christ came to call us to repentance, and not to sanction our continuing in sin.
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