Greatest Hits: Who or (What) Is a Christian?

Ask the Pastor with J.D. Greear

J.D. Greear

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.9 • 624 Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pastor J.D. answers a question about what it really means to be a Christian.

Show Notes:

* Everyone has a different assumption of what it means to be a Christian. In the Western world, a lot of people have the assumption that if you’re not a Jew, not a Muslim, and not an atheist, you must be a Christian.
* Some people think it means a certain amount of “religiosity”—a certain amount of church attendance, a desire to live by the Golden Rule, to do good to others, etc. The problem there is, “how much is enough?” At what point do you become good enough to be a Christian?
* There are two defining marks of a Christian to point out:

* First, a Christian is born again. To be born again means that you’ve come to a point where you recognize that your sin has separated you from God and there’s nothing you can do that would ever make you good enough to be accepted by God. Then Jesus, in your place, lived a life you were supposed to live, died a death you were condemned to die, and was then resurrected from the dead. He wants to take away the penalty of your sin by applying his death on the cross to your account and put the new life of his Spirit into you.
* Second, a Christian is a disciple of Jesus—which means you follow him, do what he did, live like he did, and obey his commandments. You devote your life to him. That’s what it means to make him Lord of your life.

Jesus came to seek and save the lost, which means we should live our lives as disciple-making disciples.

Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody. I am at love. Welcome to Ask the Pastor. We've been counting down. We're in our like top 40 countdown. So this is the closest I'll ever get to being a radio DJ. We're doing the top 10 episodes, most listened to two episodes in Ask the Pastor history.
0:22.9	All right? So we've been doing this podcast for 2018, six years of podcast. These are the most
0:27.1	listened to episodes in the history of the podcast. So we're at number six. This is a really
0:31.6	simple, basic question, but it is a place where having a clear definition and clear understanding is also really important.
0:39.3	And again, this episode resonated with a lot of people.
0:42.0	So number six, who or what is a Christian?
0:53.1	Actually, I do get that question quite a bit.
0:56.0	A lot of times it happens, I guess, on airplanes or in coffee shops, or at least you find people with a different assumption.
1:02.9	Here in the Western world, in the United States, there's the assumption that if you're not a Jew, not a Mosul, not an atheist, then, well, you must be a Christian.
1:10.3	And it just means that
1:11.3	culturally you align with a certain set of beliefs or come from something. Obviously, that's not
1:16.0	what we mean. Some people think it means just a certain level of religiosity, a certain amount of
1:23.4	church attendance, a desire to do good and live by the golden rule, the Ten Commandments,
1:28.4	the sermon on the Mount, something like that. You know, that's not what a Christian is either.
1:34.0	I guess the inherent problem there is always asking, like, you know, how much is enough?
1:39.5	At what point do you go from being just a, you to being a real Christian the Bible has a very clear
1:45.5	answer on that um i think what's instructive is that the Bible never uses really the term Christian
1:52.4	the way that we do uh what it uses is the word disciple um the word disciple
1:58.3	occurs 281 times in the New Testament the word word Christian just a, I mean, two or three times. And the times that it's given, it's given about believers, you know, from somebody else. And you say, well, you know, who cares? What's disciple, Christian? I mean, you know, it kind of means the same thing. Well, what's happened is the focus
2:18.0	used to be on your relationship to Jesus and now it's on more of a cultural identity marker,
2:23.2	you know, kind of your branding. If I were going to answer the question, what does it mean to be a
2:28.0	Christian? There are two, there are two kind of statements of Jesus that I would look at. The one is
	...

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