Sermon Date: 2009/1/11

Sermon 1/11/09
SCRIPTURE READING: II Corinthians 5:14-19.
SERMON: New Being In Christ.
讲道题目: 新造的人
We have entered into a new year. We all wish each other a happy new year. Is happy New Year that easy to achieve? Yes as Christians we are assured by God that we can achieve it. The question is: Do you really want to be a Christian? If you do I have good news for you. The Bible said, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new person. All old things have passed and everything is changed to new ones.”In other words, if you are a Christian, you are a new person. Your old days are gone. Everything you have will begin from scratch once again. But what are Christians who can be so assured by God? How can I become one so that I can enjoy the blessed assurance for the New Year? Before I talk about what a Christian is, I want to talk to you first of all, what a Christian is not.
1. A Christian is not any person who lives in a country founded by Christians. Canada is a country founded by people from Europe who professed themselves as Christians and not heathens. But being a Canadian does not make you a Christian.
2. A Christian is not any person who belongs or not belongs to a certain denomination. Our church belongs to a denomination called the United Church of Canada. But belonging or not belonging to the UCC has nothing to do with making you a better or worse Christian.
3. A Christian is not any person who accepts a certain creed or form of belief. It is perfectly true that Christianity, from one point of view, is a way of believing about God, about Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection of Christ, about sin and the forgiveness of sin, the Christ like life, and heaven and hell. Yet we all know how easy it is for many people to assent to all these articles of belief with their minds and repeat them with their lips, while their real character and their daily life show plainly that the spirit of Christ has never taken hold of them, never captured them.
4. A Christian is not any person who observes a certain worship format or rite. Our church performs worship services to Christians week after week on Sundays. Some are appreciative about the format while others are critical about it. Nevertheless our format does not make you a Christian. You may, like the dying thief on the cross, have none of this thing and still be a Christian. “But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man has not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.”(Romans 8:9)
5. A Christian is not any person who strives to live the good life. People can not make themselves Christians by efforts of their own, by building up a kind of reservoir of virtuous deeds, and then saying to God, “In view of all these good things I’ve done, don’t you think I deserve to be called a Christian?” “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.”(Titus 3:5)
6. A Christian is not any person who says in his lips that he believes in Jesus. If your belief in him is just an attitude of mind or a disposition of reverence, it is never enough. The important questions are: What does your will say? Do you give yourself up to his will and his way? There are people to whom Christ must still speak the words found in Luke 6:46. “And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?”
So much has been said about what a Christian is not. What is a Christian then? My definition of a Christian is this: A Christian is a person who, realizing that he is a sinner and therefore not right with God, trusts Jesus Christ as his Savior and, united to Christ by faith, devotes himself to a life of loving obedience to God.
How does a Christian realize he is a sinner?
1. We begin with something unpleasant, something ugly. We begin with a sense of need, a feeling of failure. It may be your keenest feeling will be that of guilt. It may be that it will be a sense of unrest and a longing for peace. It may be that it will be the desire for strength to break out of the shell of an old self into the clean, open space of a new self.
2. Whatever feeling is uppermost, one thing will be true: you will see and confess that it is you—not simply your past deeds—who are wrong. You have tried to live with your thoughts, desires, and decisions as the center of your life, when all the while it is God’s thoughts, desires, and will that should be the center.
3. Where do you and I begin to be Christians? At the point where we take sides with God in what he says about us! “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”(Romans 3:23.) “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availed anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.”(Gal.6:15.) C.S. Lewis once said, “If I’m a field that contains nothing but grass seed, I can’t produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short, but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper down than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sew.” Admitting that marks the beginning of being a Christian.
How does a Christian trust Christ as his Savior?
1. The word “Gospel” means “good news.” What is there about Jesus Christ and his Cross that make good news? Telling people that they ought to try to be good is not good news. Telling people to recite the statement of faith is not good news. You give them the good news only when you stop talking about what they are to do and begin to show them what God has already done in his great mercy to provide for their salvation. “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.”(Romans 3:24-26.)
2. God, in the death of Jesus Christ, has dealt with your sin and mind, judged it, condemned it, made atonement for it. He has borne the cost of salvation—the cost of forgiveness, the cost of cleansing, the cost of the new life he imparts—in himself. And he forever wears the scars of his sacrifice.
3. This being so, forgiveness of sins is yours if you will receive it. A new life is yours if you will take it. And faith is trusting Jesus Christ to do in you what he has already done for you.
Let us welcome the happy New Year with the blessedness of being a Christian. Confess that your need of Christ is like the need of a bankrupt businessman for new capital with which to pay off his old debts and start his business anew. Trust him as a child trusts a father into whose arms the little one jumps with laughing confidence. Begin to witness before others that you have made this choice of Christ and that henceforth and forever you belong to him. “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold all things are become new.”(2 Corinthians 5:17.) Amen.