So today's passage is taken from Book of Acts chapter 9, verse 19 to 31.
! You can follow along your own Bible.
If you don't have a Bible, you can grab one in the front of the stage or the back of the hall or near the entrance.
It's on page 863.
Acts chapter 9, verse 19 to 31.
Let's hear the God's word today.
Verse 19.
And has he not come here for this purpose, to bring them bound before the chief priests?
But Saul increased all the more in strength and confined the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ.
When many days had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him, but their plot became known to Saul.
They were watching the gates day and night in order to kill him.
But his disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall, knowing him in a basket.
And when he had come to Jerusalem, he attempted to join the disciples, and they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple.
But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared to them how on the road he had seen the Lord who spoke to him,
and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus.
So he went in and out among them at Jerusalem, preaching boldly in the name of the Lord.
And he spoke and disputed against the Hellenists, but they were seeking to kill him.
And when the brothers learned this, they brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.
So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up.
And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.
Let's believe and respond to God's true and living word.
Henry, do you want to come on up?
Henry, you probably don't need much of an introduction, but let me just introduce you in case some people don't know you.
So those that have recently joined Watermark in the last two years or so might not know Henry and Florence.
Henry and Florence were wonderful, wonderful members of the Watermark congregation for about three years, two years or so,
before they relocated back to Europe and moved to Europe two and a half years ago and are back in Hong Kong visiting.
And when I heard that they were visiting, I said, Henry, we'd love to have you to continue to open up God's word.
So Henry's going to be preaching this morning.
But just if you think, who is this person I've never seen before?
Where did he come from?
And I might not see again for a couple of months.
Henry and Florence, great to have you back with us this morning.
This church family have missed you guys the last two years, and it's lovely to have you with us.
So Henry, thank you for opening up God's word to us.
Thank you, Kevin.
Thanks for that.
Welcome and thank you for asking me to preach.
It's a great privilege and honor to do that, of course.
It's just great to be back in Hong Kong.
Kevin didn't say that I'm Irish.
My wife is French.
We're now living in France, but we lived more than half our lives in Hong Kong.
So Hong Kong is our real home.
And it's wonderful to be back in Watermark, to see so many of you that we do know and many others that we don't know.
But, hey, that means the church is growing.
And what a great venue you have here.
Wow, it's fantastic.
We've been praying for that as well.
And may the Lord bless you as a church and as a community of saints, of God's people who meet and worship here.
And as you minister and serve the Lord, may this be a great venue to do that, that his work may grow and that his kingdom would be extended.
So our passage this morning has already been read to us by Sherman, Acts 9, verses 19 to 31.
A couple of years ago, I took a course in theology.
And this particular course was entitled Conversion and Transformation.
One of the assignments of that course was to write an essay about my own conversion and transformation and ongoing spiritual development.
In doing some research for the essay, I came across a simple but profound statement in one of the required textbooks.
In that book, a church historian called Alan Crater wrote,
Conversion to Christianity involves a change of a person's belief, belonging, and behavior.
The phrase really stuck with me.
Conversion to Christianity involves a change in a person's belief, belonging, and behavior.
You know, in many ways, the book of Acts, certainly the second part of the book of Acts,
could read like an extended reflection on the conversion and transformation of Saul of Tarsus.
Throughout Luke's narrative, it's abundantly clear that Saul's conversion involved a massive change for him
in his belief, in his belonging, and in his behavior.
And so here in Acts 9, 19-31, we discover what happened to Paul after his extraordinary conversion on the Damascus Road,
his encounter with the risen Christ.
Saul's conversion itself, I take it, was not really typical.
People do not normally fall to the ground, are blinded by a blazing light,
and hear the audible voice of the risen Lord Jesus as part of the conversion experience.
But what happened afterwards is typical, or ought to be typical,
of genuine Christian conversion and transformation.
Kevin last week dealt with Saul's conversion on the Damascus Road.
He had the five Ps, remember?
Today I've got the three Bs.
But he talked about how God deeply changes us when we know Christ.
And today, we're going to be looking at what does a transformed life really look like?
What does it mean to be a Christian?
What are the principles from Paul's post-conversion experience,
his story, that apply to each one of us who say that we're Christians?
Let's find out how belief, belonging, and behavior are changed, are reshaped.
Because we belong to Jesus, we say we're Christians.
But first of all, a little bit of the background of this story from Acts 9.
We should note that Luke actually compresses the story, the timeline.
He uses phrases like several days in verse 19, or after many days in verse 23.
But he doesn't give exact dates.
He doesn't say how long this period lasts for.
But two of Paul's other writings, in Galatians and in 2 Corinthians,
we get little glimpses of the same story.
And we can put it all together to fill the chronological gaps.
We might also note that we're talking about Saul of Tarsus.
That's who Luke refers to him as in this passage.
Up to about chapter 13 in Acts.
And then after that, he becomes Paul.
Paul the Apostle.
Paul was his Roman name, of course, and Saul was his Hebrew name.
And it's the same person.
And I might swap and change the names around a little bit, depending on context,
as we talk about Saul this morning.
Let's piece it together initially from Acts.
After his conversion, Saul stayed several days with the disciples in Damascus.
And then, he started preaching in the synagogues where the Jews met for worship.
He proclaimed that Jesus is the Son of God.
That was his message.
Jesus is the Son of God.
Verse 20.
And as time passed, his arguments grew increasingly powerful.
And he proved that Jesus was the Messiah.
So Jesus is the Son of God.
Jesus is the Messiah.
That's what Paul was doing.
And eventually, after some period of time, the opposition against him by the Jews in Damascus
reached such a crescendo that some of his friends had to help him escape through a hole in the wall.
And he left Damascus and went to Jerusalem.
Luke then tells us that, yeah, he went to Jerusalem.
And there he attempted to join the Christians in Jerusalem.
But remember, Paul had left Jerusalem sometime before.
And he was persecuting the Christians.
So they were a bit afraid of him.
Was this a trap?
Who's this guy that's coming back in?
Saul of Tarsus.
He's got a pretty bad name in the Christian community.
Should we?
What's going to happen here?
So a really good guy.
A senior kind of guy in the church.
Barnabas.
His name means encourager.
He said, this man is genuine.
His conversion is real.
God has really entered this man's life and transformed him.
You can welcome him.
So over a period of time in Jerusalem, Saul met with Cephas.
That's Peter.
He met with James, the brother of the Lord Jesus.
I'd love to have heard those conversations.
Can you just imagine what they sat down and chatted about?
And he was welcomed into the community.
But actually, it's from a passage in Galatians that we get the chronology here.
And so this is what it says.
Then after three years, I went to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him 15 days.
So it's pretty obvious.
Three years, he had been north in Damascus or the general vicinity.
But his time in Jerusalem only lasted two days.
And during those two weeks in Jerusalem, Saul again spoke boldly in the name of Jesus.
And he debated with the Hellenistic or Greek-speaking Jews in Jerusalem.
Again, opposition against him intensified.
There was another plot to kill him.
That's the second plot now, Damascus and now Jerusalem.
And so the Christians in Jerusalem escorted him to Caesarea on the coast where he got a ship and sailed to his hometown,
which of course was Tarsus in the province of Cilicia in modern-day Turkey.
It's also from Galatians that we learn that during those years, we don't get it from Luke in Acts,
but Galatians tells us that during his time in Damascus, he spent time, an unspecified amount of time, in Arabia.
By Arabia, he means the Nabataean kingdom.
And that would be modern-day Jordan and its surrounding regions.
Perhaps Petra is the best-known ancient Nabataean city today.
And Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians, so this is piecing it all together, Acts, Galatians 1, 2 Corinthians 11,
that he was escaping Damascus from the governor of King Aratas, who was the Nabataean or Arabian king.
So putting it together, Paul had upset the Jews in Damascus by preaching that Jesus is the Messiah,
Jesus is the Son of God, and he must have upset the Nabataeans in Arabia somehow as well,
because they were chasing him, and they were trying to capture him in Damascus.
So that's when he escaped from Damascus, went to Jerusalem, and spent two weeks in Jerusalem.
This map that will appear on the screen shows us basically what happened.
Jerusalem to Damascus, that's with the letters, to persecute the Christians in Damascus,
to capture them, imprison them, bring them back, and maybe even kill them in Jerusalem.
He became a Christian on the road to Damascus, stayed with the Christians there,
went to Arabia, came back to Damascus.
That period of time was three years.
Went to Jerusalem, spent a couple of weeks there, and then eventually,
well, not eventually, after two weeks, he's chased out of Jerusalem again,
goes to Tarsus through Caesarea, and then it's about another 14 years probably before he went back to Jerusalem.
So that's the chronology.
That gives us a little bit of the background story.
But our focus this morning is to look at Saul's example of conversion and transformation.
There's an overarching principle here, that to be a true Christian,
there must be a change in our lives, a change in our beliefs, a change in our belonging,
and a change in our behavior.
So we look at belief, first of all.
Saul of Tarsus was a zealous Pharisee.
He would have won the gold medal for being a zealot Jew,
Orthodox Jew, and as a member of the Pharisees.
He regarded Christianity as a dangerous heresy.
The Torah, the Jewish scriptures,
with the Jewish traditions and observances,
were central to his worldview.
Keep obeying God.
Do the commandments.
Not just the Ten Commandments, but the 623 or whatever number of commandments it is in the Old Testament scriptures.
Do all of those, and you'll be right with God, he believed.
He thought Jesus was a fraud.
A crucified Messiah was impossible in Saul's mind.
I mean, who ever heard of the Messiah being crucified, being put to death?
The scriptures told you that was impossible.
It said that cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.
So how could Jesus of Nazareth possibly be God's anointed one?
How could he die under a divine curse?
It was a joke.
I mean, nobody believed that your God died on a cross.
Nobody believed that the one that God had appointed and anointed to be the Savior
would end up crucified by Roman soldiers.
Yet in Damascus, after his conversion, Saul began preaching that Jesus is the Son of God
and the Messiah.
Saul's beliefs had changed.
Saul, along with all the other Jews, had expected a Messiah.
He knew what the Messiah ought to look like, he thought.
He would be a figure of hope, a political liberator for the Jews, a son of David, a king chosen by God
who would rule in righteousness and a peaceful kingdom with the Jews elevated once again throughout the world.
He would inaugurate that kingdom of justice and prosperity and harmony,
and the hated Roman occupiers would be gone.
They looked for the Lion of Judah.
And who did they get?
They got a slain lamb.
They expected the kingdom to be established by violence and force and power.
Instead, it was established through self-sacrificial love.
They expected salvation, God's salvation, to be for the Jews, exclusively for them.
And instead, it was international.
It was for everyone.
It was for the whole world.
God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.
So what changed it for Saul?
What happened?
Why did his beliefs change?
On the Damascus road, Saul encountered the risen Christ.
He became convinced that the crucified Jesus had been vindicated by God through the resurrection.
The very fact that disqualified Christ or Jesus in Saul's mind, his crucifixion,
was the very thing that became central to his new faith.
This is how one author describes it.
F.F. Bruce says,
Paul found himself instantly compelled by what he saw and heard.
To acknowledge that Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified one, was alive after his crucifixion,
vindicated and exalted by God,
and was now conscripting him, Saul, into his service.
What a radical change.
What a transformation had happened.
Years later, Paul puts it together when he wrote one of his letters to the believers,
the Christian believers in Corinthians,
and he said,
this is the core of the Christian gospel.
Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.
He was buried.
He was raised on the third day.
And he appeared to many witnesses, 500 at one time.
He appeared to Peter.
He appeared to James.
And Paul says,
he even appeared to me.
I have seen the risen Lord Jesus.
My beliefs have changed entirely.
This is the message, Paul said,
and it's of first importance.
Conversion involves a radical reorientation of belief.
For Saul, it meant accepting that the crucified one was now the risen Lord.
That salvation comes not through Torah keeping.
Not through all those laws,
but through Christ's atoning substitutionary death on the cross.
That God's promises are fulfilled.
Everything he had read in the Torah,
in the Old Testament scriptures,
that he had heard from a child growing up,
everything is fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth,
the Christ, the Son of God.
Instead of blasphemy in Jesus,
Saul saw glory.
Instead of deception,
he saw truth.
Instead of a curse,
he saw redemption.
Theologian Alistair McGrath puts it like this.
He explains it.
Christianity holds that the life,
death,
and resurrection of Jesus Christ
have changed things.
The created order,
and above all,
humanity has fallen into disorder.
Things are not what they're meant to be,
and something has to be done about this.
The same God who made the created order,
therefore acts to renew it,
and reorder it.
The Christian doctrine of sin
gives an account of what went wrong.
The doctrine of salvation
deals with the restoration of the created order,
and humanity to its proper relationship with God.
This is what Paul,
Saul of Tarsus,
now believed.
Everything had changed for him.
Becoming a Christian was a radical reversal.
For Saul,
it changed his beliefs.
Jesus had become front and center in his life.
Paul could later write,
for me to live is Christ.
For me to live is Christ.
Jesus Christ was central.
It consumed Saul of Tarsus.
It consumed Paul the Apostle,
and he should.
He, the Lord Jesus,
should consume our thoughts,
our passions,
our lives.
So it changed Saul's beliefs.
It also changed his belonging,
transformed his belonging.
Previously, Saul had belonged
to the inner circle
of the Jewish religious authorities.
He had a mandate from the high priest.
His mission to Damascus
was to persecute the Christians.
He was an enforcer of Jewish orthodoxy.
But after his conversion,
Saul's allegiance changed.
It shifted completely.
Before he was raising havoc
among the Christians,
now he was one of them.
Now he was preaching boldly
that Jesus was the Messiah.
He even called him Lord.
What a reversal.
What a change.
In the various letters
that Saul,
Paul,
Paul the Apostle,
wrote
that we have in our New Testament,
over a period of about 20 years,
he repeatedly emphasizes
this new allegiance.
Firstly,
Christians belong to Christ.
He is Lord
and Master
of our lives.
And then,
maybe somewhat surprisingly,
Christians also belong
to one another,
to the community of saints
expressed locally
in an individual church.
Paul describes it like this
in Romans 12,
verse 5.
In Christ,
we though many
form one body
and each member
belongs to all the others.
Let that sink in.
Each member
belongs to all the others.
That's church.
That's what it's all about.
Christians don't just associate
with one another.
They organically make up
the body of Christ.
As Christians,
we're interconnected
with one another.
We're responsible
for one another.
We love one another.
It's a mutual belonging.
It's a communal existence.
At first,
as we already know,
the Christians in Jerusalem
were skeptical about him,
but Paul,
Saul,
was invited
into that circle
of Christians
in Jerusalem.
And we think
that he stayed there
at this time
for just two weeks.
But he identifies openly
as a disciple of Jesus,
as a follower of Christ.
He preached about him.
He got into big trouble for it.
They wanted to kill him.
His belonging
had entirely changed.
The last time
he was in Jerusalem,
he was with the high priest,
with the Jewish authorities.
Now,
he's with
kind of the underground church.
church.
But he wasn't keeping
his head down.
He was preaching boldly.
And so,
he,
the persecutor,
became the persecuted
in Jerusalem.
This new belonging
came at a cost
to Saul.
The Hellenistic Jews
wanted him dead.
And so,
he quickly left
for Caesarea
and then on to Tarsus.
As we think
about belonging,
remember that
belonging
to a church
is not the same
as belonging
to a club.
I've got friends
who are members
of golf clubs
or they play bridge
with a group
of acquaintances
or they're part
of a running
or a hiking group
or a theatrical society
or a book club,
whatever.
And they think
that I belong
to a church
in the same way.
It's just a group
of like-minded people
and I spend some time
with them
on a Sunday morning.
So,
that's church.
It's like a club.
That's what my friends,
my non-Christian friends,
think.
But that's not
what this belonging
is about at all.
Here,
it's far more
like a family
who love one another,
who care deeply
for one another,
who carry one another's
burdens,
who share their lives
together,
who show hospitality,
who make loving sacrifices
for each other,
whose lives are
embedded together.
That's church.
Paul explains this
belonging in one
of his letters
in 1 Corinthians.
He says,
you are the body
of Christ
and each one of you
is a part of it.
If one part suffers,
every part suffers
with it.
If one part is honored,
every part rejoices
with it.
We rejoice
with those who rejoice.
We mourn
with those who mourn.
That's what community
feels like.
Belonging to Christ
means belonging
to his people.
Christianity
was never designed
to be lived
in isolation.
There's no such thing
as a lone ranger
Christian.
It requires
commitment,
vulnerability,
shared life,
mutual care.
that's why church
membership is so important.
It shows that you
have intentionally
attached yourself.
You belong
to this group
of people
who also belong
to Christ.
It's why doing church
on your own
at home,
online,
doesn't really work.
It's not it.
Church was meant
to be
communal,
together.
We need to invest
our lives
in each other.
In France now,
Florence,
my wife,
and I host
a community group
in our home.
Actually,
I joke that they
really only come
because Florence
is such a good cook
and she prepares
the meal for them.
But it's mostly
made up of young people,
a little bit like
jars of clay
when we were here
and part of that
community group
in this church.
And the young people
in the 20s and 30s,
and we know them,
we've got to know them
and love them.
We share meals together,
but we also share
our lives together.
We know about
the struggle
some of them have
as foreigners
to get the right visa
to live and work
in France.
We know about
how disappointed
they are with
the state-appointed
lawyers who mess
up their cases.
We know about
the difficulties
of being a schoolteacher
where you might be
threatened in the classroom
verbally or even
physically by a teenager.
We know about
the financial worries
of some of these
young people,
the complicated families
that some of them
come from,
their financial troubles
that they can barely
afford good
and proper food.
We know about
setbacks in finding jobs,
about relationship,
heartbreaks.
We know about
health issues
and other everyday matters.
But there are
meals together.
We pray for one another.
together.
There's helping out
financially.
There's hospitality.
There's meeting up
for coffee or lunch
together.
There's going to
football matches
together.
There's going for
bike rides together.
There's attending
graduations and
attending baptisms.
Why any of this?
Why would we bother?
Why do we do this?
Because when you're
a Christian,
each member belongs
to each other.
We belong to
all the others.
There's a responsibility
that we have
to one another.
Being a Christian
involves changing
a person's belonging.
But it also
might mean adversity.
It's not a free ride.
Belonging to the
community of saints
might cause suffering
at the hands of others.
Maybe family,
maybe friends,
maybe colleagues
treated badly
because of your faith.
Saul's new identity
led to hardship
and rejection,
danger.
Belonging doesn't
guarantee ease,
but it does guarantee
a shared life
with the community
of saints
and with others
who are participating
in God's family.
So we've looked
at believing,
we've looked at belonging,
how these are changed,
and the third one,
the third change
is behavior.
It shapes
becoming a Christian,
being a Christian,
shapes,
reshapes
our beliefs
our belonging
and our behavior.
A few years ago
in Hong Kong,
I was talking
with someone
when we realized
that we had
a mutual friend.
The other person
asked me how I knew
this friend
and I said,
oh, it's because
we go to the same church.
And at that point,
the reaction
of the person
that I was talking to
was disheartening.
She said,
oh, I didn't think
from his language
he'd be the kind of guy
that went to church.
I found that sad.
Sad because
the Christian faith
is not just
merely intellectual
assent.
It's a lived
transformation.
My behavior,
my lifestyle,
my language,
my attitudes,
my reactions
are supposed
to reflect
that I belong
to Jesus.
Paul wrote,
follow my example
as I follow
the example
of Christ.
Christ.
The Christian life
is one of imitation.
We imitate
Christ.
We reflect
Christ's character
in our daily
conduct.
When your friends
and your colleagues
and your family
look at you,
do they see
Jesus?
Or would they say,
they don't look
like the kind of
person that would
go to church.
Who do they see
when they see you?
In Acts 4,
verse 13,
observers noted
that Peter
and John,
that they had
been with Jesus.
Would people
say that about me?
About you?
They've been
with Jesus.
Previously,
Saul had been
a violent
persecutor
of Christians.
Three years
later,
in Jerusalem,
he returns
as a bold
preacher of Christ.
His speech
had changed.
His goals
had changed.
His relationships
had changed.
His identity
had changed.
He had changed
from the inside out.
He was fully
committed to Christ,
believing that
the whole
universe
revolved
around
Jesus of
Nazareth,
Christ,
the Son
of the
living God.
Earlier,
Paul had thought
that Christ
was a
heretic,
if you like,
that he was
a fraud.
And now he
believes
everything is
centered in
Jesus.
He said,
in Christ
lives all
the fullness
of God,
and Christ
is all that
matters and
lives in each
one of us.
What a change.
Christ is front
and center.
Christ is
everything now
for Paul.
I live
for him.
You know,
there's
possibly,
probably,
I don't know
which,
maybe,
my favorite
verse in
the Bible.
I have been
crucified with
Christ and I
no longer
live,
but Christ
lives in
me.
And the
life I
now live
in the
flesh,
in the
body,
I live
by faith
in the
Son of
God,
who loved
me and
gave
himself
for me.
Christ
is
everything.
Christ
is in
us.
He is
in everything.
He is
all and
in all.
He is
the focus.
He,
all the
fullness
of God
resides
in
Jesus
Christ.
Do I
believe in
a crucified
God?
Absolutely.
It might
be mad,
it may be
a joke,
some people
might think
it's
blasphemous,
but my
God was
crucified.
And I
believe in
him.
And I
want to
tell others
about him.
And he's
alive today.
He might
have been
dead once,
but he
is alive
forevermore.
Christ
is all
and in
all.
And so
Saul
identified
with Christ
and he
wanted to
live a
life that
pleased
him.
Our
behavior
matters
because we
belong to
Jesus.
How we
speak,
how we
treat
others,
how we
respond under
pressure,
it all
reflects our
allegiance.
Let me
explain it
like this.
My wife
Florence
probably
won't
really like
this
illustration,
but it's
true.
You know,
you see
this kind
of outside
Henry Craig,
but my
wife and
others see
someone who
doesn't suffer
fools gladly.
I can be
abrupt with
people.
I can ignore
them.
I don't even
see them at
times,
but I have
learned from
my wife
learned from
her example
because Florence
speaks to
people in
a kind
way.
She
acknowledges
people I
don't even
see,
taxi drivers,
cashiers,
concierges,
delivery men,
shop assistants,
and she
doesn't mutter
under her
breath like
I do when
other people
do silly
things in
front of
her.
And the
reason she
gives for
her behavior
is always
the same
one.
I want
to be a
good witness.
I want
to be a
good witness
to my
faith in
Jesus Christ.
I want
to testify
to who
he is,
and I
want to
reflect the
character of
Christ and
how I
behave.
A good
witness to
the fact
that Christ
reshapes
your life.
And so
sometimes I
do suffer
fools gladly.
Sometimes my
behavior has
changed.
Why?
Because I
also want
to reflect
Christ and
I want to
be reshaped
by him in
my behavior.
Conversion and
transformation are
not about
perfection, but
they do amount
to a direction,
a trajectory
of your life,
a movement
toward becoming
like Christ.
Let's wrap
this up.
Saul's
conversion was
unique.
It was
dramatic.
We don't
all become
Christians the
way Saul of
Tarsus did.
But the
reshaping that
followed his
life should
be a model
for each one
of us as
believers.
Saul's life
tells us what
it ought to
look like as
a Christian in
the period after
we become
Christians.
Three
essentials.
New
beliefs,
trusting in
the crucified
and risen
Christ.
New
belonging,
identifying with
Christ and
with his
people.
new behavior,
living in a
way that
reflects and
honors Jesus.
You see,
many people call
themselves Christians
because they
accept certain
truths.
They say they
believe in
Jesus.
They know he
died for their
sins.
Yet their
everyday lives
tell another
story.
Christ hardly
makes any
difference in
their choices
or their
priorities or
their desires.
their faith
lives largely
in the mind
and not in
the heart.
It's
understood but
not embraced.
They live as
practical atheists
and call
themselves
Christians.
Others
faithfully attend
church.
They might even
readily identify
with some
Christian
denomination.
They belong
outwardly.
Yet beneath
the surface
there's no
personal trust
in God,
no quiet
assurance that
their sins
are forgiven.
No vibrant
fellowship daily
with Jesus.
They may belong
socially but
they still don't
have a believing
connection.
No deep
relationship with
God or with
his people.
So they don't
really believe
or behave.
They just
belong.
The first group
that I mentioned
just now,
they believe but
they don't really
belong or behave.
And then still
others live
upright,
respectable lives.
They're good
people.
They're kind,
responsible,
decent,
but they're
self-centered
and self-reliant.
They look to
their own
goodness for
their salvation.
They're their
own savior.
I'm a good
person.
I don't need
church.
I don't need
anyone else,
they say.
They behave
well but they
don't really
belong and
they don't
really have a
saving faith in
Jesus so they
don't really
believe.
You see,
to be a
Christian involves
all three.
Believing
and belonging
and behaving.
So here's the
question today.
What has
changed in my
life because I
follow Jesus?
What do I
truly believe?
Not just in
theory but in
the deepest part
of my being.
What would I
stake my
belief,
my life on?
What would I
be prepared to
die for?
I say that I'm
a Christian but
do I really
belong?
Do I live as
though I'm the
center of my
own world?
Do I love
fellow believers
in a tangible
costly way?
Is my life
intertwined with
theirs?
And then my
behavior, does it
reflect that I'm
a follower of
Jesus?
Am I seeking to
please him
occasionally or
always?
Do my
beliefs, my
belonging, my
behavior align?
Do they point to
the clear
conclusion that I
have been with
Jesus?
Conversion to
Christianity is a
fresh start.
It's a new
beginning that
continues to
transform our
beliefs, our
belonging, and
our behavior.
Christians are
those people whose
lives are being
reshaped by
Christ.
It's mine.
It's my life being
reshaped by
Christ.
It's yours.
Let's pray.
Lord, may the
words of my
mouth, our
mouths, and the
meditation of our
hearts be pleasing
in your sight,
O God.
And may we
ensure as we
examine our lives
that we believe
that we belong
and that we
behave in a
way that
shows the
image of Christ
in our lives.
Amen.
Thank you.