How do you know if you're a Christian? I guess you could say like, well I go to church or I do religious things or I buy Christian products or I vote the way the most

Christians vote but come on we all know those answers are lame and incomplete this is a much more complex, robust to the level of the soul

existential transformation of everything you value and think and trade in

according to Jesus himself again the guy for whom the religion is named

so he puts out this invitation in Matthew chapter 7 he's like hey there's this narrow

little road over here that points to me and there's this broad road over here and it points of predictable places.

If you want to follow me, look for this narrow road and Jesus acknowledges,

not everybody's probably going to get on that road, which is kind of freaky, but okay, I'm glad I'm not in charge of that.

So then the natural question, which is the one you and I were wrestling with yesterday,

as we were processing through all of this, is how do I know if I'm in how do I

know if I pick the narrow road how do I know if I'm a Christian if I'm a

kingdom citizen if I'm actually participating in this thing and there is a

beautiful answer to this in a tight little book toward the end of the New Testament called First John,

where John, the disciple, the beloved disciple, breaks down the whole question of am I a Christian or not into what I believe could be called a threefold test

that gets repeated several times as John just bangs this drum of threefold test of orthodoxy throughout first John.

So yesterday we looked at the introduction to the letter of first John where John lays out the idea

that he is a reliable witness to everything that's happened with Jesus to what he said and what he did,

and that all of the threefold test, all of the whole Christian thing in general, flows out of

a right understanding of Jesus. You get the understanding of Jesus wrong up front,

the rest implodes calamitously. And what I gotta say is that whether you're talking about a more

eastern expression of church, a more Western

expression of church, or even those groups that were kind of on the fringes that never really fell neatly

...