How Do I Know I Am A Christian?

Originally preached at Trinity United Methodist Church, Danville, VA
Circa 2003
by R. Joseph Ritter, Jr.

Scripture reading: 1 Corinthians 2:6-16

Am I a Christian? How do I know I am saved? I am a very logical person and analyze just about everything that comes my way, sometimes without knowing it. In the weeks before I received Jesus Christ into my life at the age of 13 or 14, I logically thought out the reasons why I should or should not give my life to Christ. The one thought I remember having is this:
If I choose to remain a sinner and not accept Jesus Christ, I stand to lose everything if the Christian faith is indeed true and if one day Jesus really will be the judge of all people.
If I choose to become a Christian, I stand to lose nothing if it turns out to be false; but I would have gained being a better person in society because of the way I lived, but otherwise gain nothing.

I’m not a gambler, so I’d rather risk gaining nothing than risk losing everything.
That was one among many turning points for me that led me to turn my life over to Jesus. However, I have to say that looking back on those thoughts, the Christian faith is not something our human minds can find logic in or analyze. What convinces me that I am a child of God is just what Paul talks about in this Corinthians passage: the Holy Spirit’s witness in my life, revealing things to me of God, and seeing God answer prayer.

Do you have thoughts toward Christianity? Do you believe in Jesus? Do you believe you are saved? Do you enjoy the hymns and Christian songs?

So many of us grew up with Easter, Christmas, regular church attendance and Sunday school. We knew of the Bible, Bible stories, and basic church doctrine. For those of us who grew up in the church, myself included in that category, it’s easy to read, listen to, and see Christian things, from the Sunday morning sermon to a song on the Christian radio station, and think of them as mundane, even commonplace or everyday things.

But what excites you? What moves you? For me, much of what moves me to action or arouses my deepest inward emotions is music. There is a song on Christian radio that gets me going every time I hear it, titled I Know My Redeemer Lives sung by Nicole C. Mullen, a Christian rock artist. When she hits the high notes in the chorus singing I know my Redeemer lives, I get charged up!

What so often happens to us is that we grew up with Christian teaching or have been a Christian for a long enough period of time that we think we are not praising God, or not sharing the good news of Jesus with others, or not doing what Christ told us to do. But it is precisely in the moments that we get caught up with a song, a book, a sermon, or just something so very simple that we are doing what the Bible tells us to do.

Riding in my truck recently, this song I Know My Redeemer Lives came on the radio. I turned up the volume a little and listened as if I hung on each word. It touched me so deeply, I needed to hear it. Then it struck me. If I had a fancy stereo and loud speakers and played this song so people a block away could hear it, they wouldn’t understand it! Just like when they drive by my house with stereos blaring, I don’t understand their music. This song means something to me, but it means nothing to others. That’s the Holy Spirit revealing God’s wisdom to my heart.

People who do not believe in Jesus cannot understand God’s wisdom, mostly because their hearts are so hard the Holy Spirit cannot work there. But what does that mean for you and I? I had a conversation with one of our members not long ago. The words “I believe I am saved, I hope I am saved” were spoken. It struck a chord with me because there were times in my life when I wasn’t sure. Jesus, God, faith, love, church were all words commonly spoken in my house when I was growing up. It wasn’t until I started my own life apart from the shelter of my parents that the things Paul is saying in I Corinthians began helping me to know that I am saved and I am a Christian.

As a person who has a passion for evangelism and having been trained in evangelism, I have to turn this sermon that way at some point, so here is that point. We all know Jesus Christ told us, even commanded us, to be his witnesses. Yet when we take the word literally, we get scared, or we feel we are not gifted enough, or we do not know anyone who needs to be witnessed to.

Let me encourage you by saying that you already are witnessing. Before you gasp or shy away from it, let me draw from another teaching in the Bible to make my point. Jesus and Paul so often taught that we should pray without ceasing. Remember my logical mind? My logic said that is not possible. How can I pray without ceasing when I have to punch a clock for 8 hours a day, sleep 8 hours a day, stop to eat, drive the car. Prayer has always been the focal point in my Christian life. I grew up a very shy person. College and seminary helped to change that. But I could sense that people needed help, so I would put them on my prayer list and pray for them. I had one man on my prayer list for 5 or 6 years, another 3 or 4 years. But then I would read the Bible and find I was not praying enough. On the other hand, I couldn’t find enough to pray for that would last an hour or two, or sometimes I would sit down to pray and wake up an hour later. I still do that sometimes. If you find me sleeping in my office some day, I probably started praying and, well, sleep comes easy for me.

Over time, though, I learned that the teaching to pray without ceasing does not mean we are to sit down and pray for 8 hours straight and do that every day. What it means for me, anyway, is to be in continuous communication with God. I will often find myself relaying things to God throughout my day, sometimes without realizing it. Or praying for someone or something, or maybe even having it on my mind as I go about my daily business.

So when it comes to witnessing, what does Jesus really mean? After all, we find his command to spread the gospel to every nation in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and another reference to be his witnesses in Judea, Samaria and every corner of the earth in Acts. If it bears repeating so many times, it must be something we should take note of.

Let’s first look at what witness means. A witness, as found in Acts 1:8, is one who services another by testifying what he or she has seen, heard or come to know. One who testifies bears witness to what he or she knows. We express this in the word evangelism, which is to be bearers of the good news. Evangelism is how we express our testimony.

Now let us consider that evangelism is a way of life.

If it is a way of life, we will so order our lives that people will like what they see, and people will want what we have. One of the best stories I have to tell is of a guy I worked with in a print shop in Florida between high school and college. I was offered everything from booze to a trip to the nudey bar. Saying no didn’t seem to mean anything to them because they would come back and ask on a regular basis. After about a year of this, one guy came up to me and commented that I didn’t drink, smoke, cuss and go to the nudey bar, and I replied simply with a no, it’s not something I want to do. Over the next few weeks, I learned that he was raised in a Christian home, but during his time in the Navy, he got in with the wrong crowd and, well, he saw his life as messed up. I answered all his questions, but I didn’t try to cram anything down his throat. Still a few weeks later during lunch, he said he had gone back to church and made things right with God.

I don’t remember ever saying even a word about my beliefs, but my lifestyle did all the talking. Even when he and I did begin to talk about why I lived the way I did, he saw something in me that made him want what I had, and he saw that a person can live a happy life, for he knew his life of booze and fast women was not very happy. It had nothing to do with the words I said. But everything to do with modeling Christ’s teachings in my daily life.

So, evangelism and witnessing are a way of life, not something we force ourselves to do. Leonard Ravenhill says this: Had Paul met only a preacher and heard only a sermon on the Damascus Road, he might never have been heard of again. But he met Christ! Sermons and preachers can be avoided, and often are, but Christ can never be avoided. He goes on to say that an experience of God that costs something is worth something, and does something.

Could a sailor sit idle if he heard the drowning cry?
Could a doctor sit in comfort and just let his patients die?
Could a fireman sit idle, let people burn and give no hand?
Can you sit at ease in the church with the world around you damned?

As Christians, we bear witness to what we know of Christ. How do we know we are Christians? We can know we are Christians by the testimony of our lives and the fruit we bear from our witness.