Experiencing Spiritual Transformation

You become a Christian when you accept God’s gift of grace and make a conscious and deliberate choice to believe in Jesus Christ. (See Chapter 3 to find out how all this works.)

When you become a Christian, something changes inside of you. It’s not like signing up with a guild or having an intellectual change of perspective, but it’s something far deeper and significant. This transformation that a new Christian experiences occurs on two levels:

New spiritual genetics: As I discuss in Chapter 4, Christians believe that sin ruins the spiritual DNA of everyone who walks the face of the earth. Therefore, when you become a Christian, God gets rid of that old sin-laden DNA crapola and gives you new spiritual genetics, so to speak. Your spiritual heritage is forever changed as you’re now considered born of God (John 1:13) through your rebirth by the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5). Paul even calls a Christian a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17) and a “new self” (Ephesians 4:23).

This new spiritual heritage isn’t based on how good or bad a person is before he chooses to become a Christian. In fact, it doesn’t matter whether the person seemed like a saint or a devil before making the decision. God wipes all sins away – few or many – as part of his free gift of grace.

Indwelling of the Holy Spirit: Not only are you a new creation, but in some mysterious and unexplainable way, the Holy Spirit lives inside of you as well (Galatians 2:20, Colossians 1:27, John 14:16-17). You still have a sin nature (Romans 7:18), but you’ve also acquired something new – the indwelling of the Lord. Therefore, because the Spirit is living inside of you, you now have the power to not allow your sin nature to control you anymore (Romans 8:9). The reality of Christ’s presence in the lives of Christians is what prompted Paul to write, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

This spiritual transformation that occurs in the life of a new Christian isn’t just mere symbolism or a feel-good metaphor. On the contrary, Christians believe it’s real – as literal as a heart transplant is to a child with a deformed heart.

For many people, the decision to become a Christian is an emotional one and leaves them on a spiritual high for days or even weeks. But don’t confuse the real changes that occur inside of a Christian with the passing emotions. The inner change of a new believer may or may not be a touchy-feely experience; every person is different. The danger is when a person links emotional feelings with his newfound Christian faith and comes to think of the Christian life as one big emotional high. If so, when the high goes away, he questions whether anything really happened to him at all. When this happens, he may think of his conversion experience as nothing more than a passing phase.

Fellowshipping with a Church

I recently came across an interview of a Hollywood star who said that, although he was a Christian, he never went to church. Because faith is a private matter, he reasoned, he doesn’t believe that a Christian needs to be involved with other believers. Within a society that celebrates self and promotes individual expression, it’s not surprising that this belief is quite commonplace.

Considering why biblical Christianity says church is necessary

This individualistic thinking is the norm today, but it’s not authentic biblical Christianity. St. Augustine wrote, “He cannot have God for his father who does not have the Church for his mother.” Many Christian thinkers agree, saying that Christianity doesn’t even exist apart from the Church. This perspective isn’t surprising coming from the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, given the relatively strong role the Church plays in Catholic and Orthodox Christians’ lives (see Chapter 8 and 10). Yet, Protestants, who reject any role that the Church as an institution plays in personal salvation, agree as well. For though salvation is between an individual and God, a key part of living out the Christian faith is being involved in a church home.

If you’re skeptical, take a read through the Bible – church involvement is a given. Jesus certainly worshiped regularly with others (see Luke 4:16), and Hebrews 10:24-25 emphasizes the importance of participating in a church:

Let us consider how to spur one another to love and good works, not giving up on our meetings together, as the custom of some is, but exhorting and encouraging one another.

In fact, when you take the New Testament as a whole, you easily see that neither Jesus nor any of the apostles envisioned a stand-alone faith, much less spoke about it.

Consider the following parallel, which sheds some light on the importance of the Church in a Christian’s life. Imagine, for example, you’re an orphan who’s adopted into a new family. Your primary relationship is with your new parents, but because you live in a family environment, you still live day-in, day-out with your new siblings. (That is, unless you’re part of some twisted new reality TV series.) You won’t set up shop in private rooms and live completely apart from each other. No, you develop your relationship with your parents at the same time you develop them with your brothers and sisters. In the same way, although Christianity centers on a personal relationship with God, it involves more than that. When someone becomes a new Christian, he’s immediately part of a new community, the Family of God. As such, a vital part of a Christian’s life is getting hooked up in that community.

Although Christians believe that worshiping together regularly is important (see Chapter 12 to find out why), the New Testament model of a church is more than a group of people meeting together for an hour on Saturday night or Sunday morning in which they file in quietly, stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up, and then head for the exits. Instead, the biblical concept of a church involves koinonia, a Greek word that literally means “communion together in God’s grace” or simply “fellowship.” Biblical Christianity says that God designed Christians with the need for fellowship to be able to grow in their faith. Therefore, when Christians meet together, they are to

Love one another, being bound in unity (Colossians 3:14)

Provide opportunities to serve one another (John 13:14)

Bear one another’s burdens (Colossians 3:13)

Encourage each other (Hebrews 3:13, 1 Thessalonians 4:18)

Be accountable to each other (Proverbs 27:17)

Challenge each other (2 Timothy 2:42)

Obviously, if you go to a large church, it’s not possible to talk with every person in your congregation. That’s why meeting together in small groups with other Christians is so critical, whether that interaction is in a Bible study, a home group, Sunday school, or an accountability group.

See Chapters 10 and 11 for more on the differences among the various Christian churches. Chapter 10 deals with Catholic and Orthodox beliefs, and Chapter 11 focuses on Protestant beliefs.