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My last post was about ditches. Not really. I just used a scene from my childhood as a way of talking about how we deal with issues as believers when there is a clear tension between options, and the Bible does not resolve it either way. The Bible lets them both stand. My grandfather used to tell me when I first started driving and was leaving for a Saturday night adventure, “Bo, keep it between the ditches.” It was his way of calling me to be alert and to stay in the middle of the road. He did not want me to veer too closely to the ditches that were on both sides of the more than a few dirt roads in our county.

What I addressed in the last post was one of the most familiar of the tensions in the Bible and one of the most controversial: the tension between God’s sovereignty in salvation and our responsibility before God to choose to commit our lives to Jesus as Lord. Both are found in the Bible. God chooses and we choose. God predestines but we must purposefully and passionately choose to pursue Jesus as Lord. This is a big one, but there are others that stand as well side by side in the Bible. For example, when we speak of the character of God, do we say that He is first and foremost holy and just, or do we say that He is first and foremost gracious and merciful. Or when we think about what are the first obligations of the church, do we focus on the worship of God or the witness to our world. Or when we address what is the primary priority of the church in outreach do we conclude that it is almost entirely evangelism and that is all, or do we see caring for the poor and helping the hurting as also extremely essential. All of these and many more stand side by side in the Bible. We are to hold them that way in our lives. Don’t get in either ditch on either side of the main road and from there to launch spiritual grenades at the other side.

BUT let’s not forget that there are many issues about which the Bible speaks clearly and conclusively. There are many issues for which “two roads do not diverge.” Only one way exists. We are not heretics when we hold tenaciously to the sovereignty of God in salvation; we are not heretics when we hold tenaciously to the reality that we must make a choice either to follow Jesus or to forsake Him. But we are heretics when we hold tenaciously to views that so clearly are opposed to what is in the Bible. Generally these issues come down to theology and polity, what we believe and how we behave as the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let me give you some examples. Here are two theologically: we cannot waver on the deity and the humanity of Jesus. He is truly God, truly Man. To see Jesus is to see God; To see Jesus is to see Man in all that Man is intended by God to be. Second, we cannot waver on the exclusivity of Jesus as the only means of access to God. There are not many ways to God, there is one way. And let me just add here that both these are grounded in the inerrancy, infallibility and full sufficiency of Holy Scripture from which to depart is to devolve into heresy. But we can also devolve into heresy through our polity. The Bible is clear about how a church is to be governed. The offices of a New Testament Church are two: Elders who give shape and substance to the Spiritual life of the church and deacons who give shape and substance to the practical life of the church. The Bible certainly gives some wiggle room for how we employ the diaconal ministry and whether or not a church has both ruling and teaching elders, but there is no wiggle room for the number of offices (two) and how they operate in the church. One would have to be very brazen or very blind to the Truth of God to profess Jesus as Lord and to stand against this very clear way of how the church is to behave. Or take the issue of church membership where the Bible is clear that to belong to Jesus is to belong to His church. Again, someone would have to be pompous or so poorly schooled in Scripture to profess faith in Jesus as Lord and not participate actively as a member of a local church.

Let’s watch out for the ditches. But let’s know that there are some dead ends from which we cannot escape except to say, “The Bible says it . . . that settles it.”

I grew up in an area with lots of dirt roads. There were not lines on these dirt roads, not in the middle or on the sides. The boundary markers for those roads were the ditches. The roads seemed always to slope toward the ditches, particularly on a dark and rainy night. Sounds like the beginning of an article about a monster coming out of those ditches on a dark and rainy night! Sorry to disappoint you, but this article is about how easy it is to fall into these ditches and how hard it is to keep our lives and our doctrine on the biblically defined straight and narrow way. My grandfather who lived with us all of my adolescent years used to say the same thing to me whenever I left the house to go out at night: “Bo (that is what he called me), keep it between the ditches.” Now how did he know that sometime before coming home that night I would be driving on a dirt road?

I want to speak to just one of those ditches here. I will address others in future posts. But just to help us understand what is being addressed, here are some of the ditches: one, is God primarily a holy and just God or is God primarily a gracious and merciful God; two, is God primarily interested in what we believe or is He really focused on how we behave; three, should the church be really concerned about how we worship God or should we be more concerned about how we attract people to worship God; four, is the primary priority of the church evangelism/discipleship or is it making sure that we care for those who need care and execute justice in situations where justice has been miscarried; four, should the preacher preach to inform the mind and to transform the heart or should he preach to do whatever it takes to move people to make a decision for Jesus; five, should the church focus on discipleship through groups and programs or should the church focus on the public gathering for worship where the Word of God is preached and taught in such a way that the Holy Spirit develops disciples in His own way; six, should our primary focus in missions be right here where we are and those in our surrounding area or should our primary focus be unreached peoples who have never heard the Gospel? I hope by now that you get the picture. What I want you to see, however, is the real problem that we face in our day.

Here it is: we live particularly in America in a context in which we think in “either . . . or” terms. We have all but lost the capacity to think in “both . . . and” terms. The results are increasingly tragic for the church and particularly for the pastors called to lead the church. I want to show you this reality with one of the biggest issues that churches face in our day. But before I do that, let’s be clear that I am not talking about finding some kind of “mushy middle” here. Some issues are so clear that there is no “both . . . and.” For example, I cannot be a committed follower of Jesus and believe that God is anything less or other than totally and thoroughly omniscient. And to take a practical and now very highly political matter, I cannot say that I am a Christian committed to Jesus as Lord and take a pro-abortion stance. Issues like these two and many others are just too clear biblically for there to be any “both . . . and.” But let me turn to the one that is destroying many churches now and contributing the most significant exit of pastors from churches in a very long time.

We can frame the issue in two questions: first; “Is God absolutely and totally sovereign over all things in the sense that He alone decrees all that will come to pass so that He does not change His mind and accomplishes in time all that He has decreed.” Second, “are we as humans fully responsible to God knowing that we are making free choices that are not coerced, and particularly in connection to our relationship with God?” The first question is connected with those called “Calvinists” or much more correctly, “Reformed.” The second question is connected with those called “Arminian” or in Baptist life “Traditionalists.”

The resolution created by the two questions is simple; the problem is much harder since we in our culture contrary to previous ages have turned the answer to the questions into “either . . . or” rather than “both . . . and.” In fact, it has gotten so nasty in some corners that to address these questions as “both . . . and” is to be heard and seen as a coward. The entire situation is complicated by caricatures of both positions that do not represent either position biblically or historically. And the issue is made more messy still when people in our churches use the terms but do not know they mean and worse, have never read a book or commentary by John Calvin or Jacob Arminius or any writer from either persuasion. It creates a gnarly mess that should not ever happen.

The main road between these ditches looks something like this: God sovereignly saves all those known to Him as His from before the foundations of the world who hearing the Gospel are brought by the Holy Spirit under such conviction of sin that they are compelled to come to Jesus and to surrender all that they are to Him. Any person who comes to Jesus, He will not refuse because they cannot come unless He calls them to come.

Satan has created this mess. Want to be concerned about something that matters? Let me give you two things: one, there are those who believe sincerely that they are born with a good heart, mind and soul who are loved by God and will be with God forever, as will all the people they know. Such people in the past would have been called “Pelagian.” We call them “universalists” today. Two, nobody comes to Jesus nor is any person known by Jesus from before the foundation of the world as His that will be saved by Jesus apart from the Gospel. So, while you are gossiping in order to hurt people on one or the other ditch, lobbing rocks at one another, why not join hands on the main road and run with the good news that our God sovereignly saves all who having heard the Gospel come under heart and soul wrenching conviction of sin that compels them to come to Jesus will be saved. He saves sovereignly. All who are saved by Him are responsible to Him to come to Him in faith.

Thomas Schreiner in his magnificent commentary on Romans argues that Paul speaks of the righteousness of God that comes to us in and through Jesus Christ in a very foundational way in chapters 1-4; he then speaks of this righteousness of God in a very functional way in chapters 5-8. Schreiner may cringe at my verbiage in describing the connection, foundational and functional righteousness, but that for me is a simple way of seeing and saying what he is addressing in his commentary. He is making this point: The real and radical Spiritual Transformation that God produces when a human being turns in repentance and faith to Jesus Christ as Lord is then expressed for the rest of this believers life in a growing and changing moral transformation. What God does for us, He then does in us and through us. He declares by His grace that we are His children and He delivers His Spirit to us to begin to work out in us and through us who we really are. Put simply, to be right with God though rooted in God’s declaration is never to be separated from the ongoing and life-changing work of real moral transformation in our lives.

It has struck me for some time that two of the issues raised continually by the prophets concerning Israel and Judah that reveal the disconnect between their declaration that they are the people of God and the visible evidence among them that they are not who they say they are is seen in how they see marriage and how they use the Sabbath. You may want to quibble, or do more than quibble with me about the Sabbath, but what the Bible means by marriage is clear. Marriage is the joining of one man to one woman for life in order to live productive lives that reflect the rule of God in their lives as particularly seen in the presence of children, and pouring into these children the truth of God. Marriage for a believer is a mission. And it begins with the clear and uncompromising commitment of believer to be sure that he or she marries a believer.

Some would argue that the teaching in the Bible about the Sabbath has ended, just as some would teach as well that the teaching in the Bible about tithing has ended. Some see “sabbath” as a time that we designate for ourselves and our families for worship and for rest. It can be any time and for as long a time as we determine. I don’t see it that way because I do not think that the Bible teaches it that way. The Sabbath for the Believer is called in the New Testament, “The Lord’s Day” or “The first day of the week.” It is designated by those terms because this is the day that Jesus was raised from the dead. It is the day that since the early days after the resurrection the church has gathered to celebrate His resurrection. It was for most of the Christian era a day when all but necessary work ceased and the day was given by the people of God to worship and to rest. No more. Good and godly people violate the biblical principles that govern the Lord’s Day almost every Lord’s Day. Good and godly families have seasons of the year when they are gone for some traveling sports team almost every weekend. Many families show up on Sunday for the time of worship in the morning but nothing else on the Lord’s Day and assume that God is pleased.

Read the Bible. Listen to what it says. To be right with God is to live with the help of His Spirit righteously before God. To be truly born again is expressed equally as truly in a real and increasingly changed lifestyle. And that lifestyle is seen in how we see and treat marriage and how we see and treat the Lord’s Day. And both are on display in our lives for us to know and for others to see. Do not see these two truths as God throwing the rulebook at us. It is God putting His compassion for us on display. He is making it really simple for us. This reality about marriage and the Lord’s Day is God making sure that what we need to know and to have for assessing our lives is not in some thick manual on the top shelf that we cannot reach; it is right there in front of us for all who have eyes to see.

I will have the privilege to gather this week for the first time this year with a group of men who are committed to growing in the grace and knowledge of God, learning what it means as saved sinners to live under the Lordship of Jesus. We will among other things we do together examine the first book that we are reading for this year, What is Saving Faith, by John Piper. It is one of the most important books that I have read in a long time. It is addressing an issue about which so many in our churches are clearly confused. This book has helped to solidify in my soul what I have believed for a long time the Bible teaches about saving faith.

If you were to know me, really know me; you might be a little (or maybe a lot) skeptical of trusting me and my observations about what Scripture teaches. I began my life as a Christian being what would have been called at the time a “legalistic fundamentalist” with an intense evangelistic fervor. I was an active and aggressive witness for Jesus. I simply wanted people to accept Him for who He is so that they could be assured of heaven. Any discipleship that I would do with a person, which in those days was not much; was to help them know how to behave as a Christian: don’t smoke, don’t drink, be in church as much as possible, tell other people about Jesus etc. I was fervent. I was faithful to what I was learning to be as a Christian but I was far, far from flawless. So were those that I saw “pray the prayer” or “walk the aisle.” Many of them, in fact, walked the aisle out the back door after a few months never to return. I began to wonder about the meaning and reality of salvation. My front burner question was, “what is saving faith?”

I had in just over two years after being saved begun ministry as a preacher in a church, first as a “fill in” and then as the real thing. Ordained at age 19, I went from “al” to “Rev. Wright.” I had such high and holy views of the church and her people. It did not take long for those high and holy views to collapse. I saw and heard things from leaders in the church that caused my soul to grieve and my heart to hurt. And the struggle over what salvation really means became more and more intense. What I was seeing and experiencing quite simply was a deadly crash between what I saw in the church and what I was learning from Scripture. I was beginning to question whether or not I had really misunderstood what Scripture taught about salvation because I was seeing so little of what I saw in Scripture among the people in the church.

So, I loosened up. My evangelistic approach did not change but by expectations did. I wanted to see people “saved” so that they could go to heaven but I actually expected little change in their lives because to this point I had seen so little in the lives of others. Can I be honest? Life as a pastor was so much easier this way. I was just one of the boys hanging out with other boys whose only difference from any other boys is that we had all made a profession of faith and went to church most Sundays. But all during this time, I was digging deeper and deeper into the Bible. And one day I began to see in the Bible what I had never seen before.

I began to see what saving faith really is. It is God by His Holy Spirit opening my mind to see the majesty and glory and beauty and wonder and magnificence (I could go on and on here) of who God is in Jesus and of what God has done in Jesus to save sinners. It is seeing all of that through the Scriptures by the power of the Holy Spirit in the awareness of just how sinful I really am. It is being captured by the greatness of who God is in Jesus that leads to a compulsion (faith) to know Him, to love Him, to worship Him, to be a part of His body the church, to grow in Him and to point others to Him (I could go on and on here). It is to come by God’s grace to the place that the vision of Jesus is so overwhelming that I desire Him—Him, not His benefits and blessings, but Him; and I desire Him more and more. This faith is real. This faith is rare in our day. Satan has snatched it away and given us a substitute that will send us to hell while we think we are going to heaven. This faith like a seed in soil grows in us and keeps on growing in us producing real fruit for the glory of God. This faith comes from God to us by His Spirit and when we see it and receive it, we want everybody to see it and receive it. This is the faith that saves us and shapes us. This is the faith that leads not only to deeper and deeper devotion but also to deeper and deeper delight. This is grace-infused, gratitude-invoking, love-inducing, Holy Spirit anointed, joy growing, holiness seeking, and happiness finding faith. Get the book. Read what He says. It is so Bible saturated that in the end, in so many ways to say “no” to what he writes is to say “no” to what God has written in His Word about Saving Faith.

Paul writes, “finally, be strong in the Lord and the strength of His might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the SCHEMES of the devil,” Ephesians 6:11. The word that the ESV translates “schemes” is the Greek word that sounds out as “methodeeaws.” You would think of the English word “methods” when you hear it. Satan has his methods. They are real. They are slippery and seductive. They are limited. But they are very successful. Jesus teaches us that the Devil or Satan exists to “steal, kill and to destroy,” John 10:10. Satan does not have good designs in our lives or good desires for our lives. What he wants is for us to get to the place where we think that we possess something that we do not possess because he has stolen it, to have enough of the things of this world that we appear to have life when we are in fact dead, and to see us enjoy enough success with its benefits to think that we are “blessed” when in fact we are bankrupt. Jesus sets before us in John 10 the goal with which Satan operates. Paul puts before us that he has his limited methods with which he operates. Go to the accounts of the temptation of Jesus recorded in the Gospels and you will see clearly the goal and the deceptive and destructive methods with which he operates. But there is one most strategic weapon of his that has stolen many hearts, destroyed many souls, and will devastate thousands upon thousands on the final day of judgment. It is this weapon that in our day and in our world needs to be exposed for the spiritual nuclear warhead that it is.

This spiritually destructive weapon consists of several components that he mixes together, gets us to affirm, accept and act on which will in time lead to our devastating judgment before God. First, he must get us to focus our attention on ourselves. We must see ourselves as the reason that God is. He is God to give us what we need to get to where He is when we die but to bless us to pursue our own dreams and desires until we die. So, we exalt ourselves as good people with good desires doing good things that please God. Second, we have to reduce salvation to an event that happens once in our lives. It happens as an experience that we have in which we decide in the moment to get saved. We go through whatever rituals are required to get saved. We are told that we have been secured for heaven when we die. Step two is finished. Step three seals the deal: life is about us and what we desire, we have done what we were told we needed to do to get saved and third, we celebrate as the only real attribute of God His great love for us that provides what we need to live the good life while requiring very little from us. We love words like: grace, love, and forgiveness which are all very critically necessary words for the Christian life; but they become the only words in our vocabulary. And the phrase that pictures our lives is, “I am only human; do you expect me to be perfect?” And we speak these words or similar words as an excuse for our patterns of sinful living while not experiencing any real sense of the greatness of the glory of God that should cause us to fear Him and to fall before Him in repentance of sin and in great thankfulness for His mercy. The third step is the neuter God of His central attribute of holiness while exalting any and all attributes that enable us to keep on living in ways that make us, and how we want to live our lives the focus of God’s attention and affection. What we lose in the process is any sense of what it really means to fear God.

I am reading daily now as a part of my quiet time each morning very slowly, carefully, prayerfully and meticulously through the Greek text of Romans. I am following that time by reading the appropriate section from the brilliant commentary by Tom Schreiner, perhaps the leading New Testament scholar in America today. I had worked my way through Romans 1:18-32 the other morning, my soul again deeply grieved over how much this passage reflects the dark depravity of our times. I finished it. I prayed for my own soul. I felt again the sting of my own sin. I then read Schreiner’s comments where he is getting at the reason for the kind of living that is described in Romans 1:18-32. Here is his conclusion, “the purpose of life is to fear and reverence God so that He is esteemed as holy and majestic and mighty. Sin at its heart decenters God; it degods God; it rejects His rule over our lives . . . the root and basis of all sin is the failure to fear and reverence God.” Do you want to know what Satan wants for your life? There it is. He wants you to decenter God in your life. He wants you to come up with your own understanding of what it means to have a right relationship with Jesus. He wants you to profess a relationship with Jesus based on what you did ritually to accept Jesus while your life for the most part is marked by however you desire and decide to live. Here is a question for you and me: Do thoughts about the greatness of God and His goodness to you in Jesus come to you more than a few times every day? Are you compelled to worship Him with His people and to spend time with Him daily? Does your sin destroy your soul; does it create aches that make physical pain feel like nothing at all? Or do you simply go about your day finding your assurance in some event in the past when you did what you needed to do to get saved and then be assured by others that you were saved forever. I have a good friend and brother that has a phrase that I love, OTWT; “only time will tell.” I would only add that time and ongoing experience tells. The right fear of God does not diminish in the soul of the believer over time, it grows. I know that I am a sinner who sins. I did not deserve the grace of God to day i received Jesus as Lord; And I am overwhelmed right now that a God so great could be so gracious to a sinner like me. “Thank you” is not enough. The real “thank you” is to bow before Him even now in worship and then go to witness and to work for His glory.

We had boarded our church bus to make the trip to Atlanta. We would board a plane iin Atlanta to fly nine plus hours to Amsterdam. We would wait in that most beautiful airport (my favorite among international transitional terminals) for what seemed like forever. We would then board another plane for another nine hour flight to Nairobi, Kenya. We would arrive after dark, be taken to a nice, by Kenyan standards, Nairobi hotel. Our team would board multiple vans the next morning for an exciting and sometimes nerve-wracking trip to our destination. We arrived tired, ready to get some food and settle in for the night. But we were met by the church gathered eager to meet us and to begin to get to know us. I will never forget what happened next. It was one of those moments that God used to continue a revolution that was going on in my soul about what it really means biblically to be saved. I was at that time in my walk with Jesus at a place where God was turning my world upside down and showing me delightful and very disturbing truths in His Word. This experience I am about to describe began to confirm what I was being shown in Scripture. But that day it shook me in a very profound way and continued the reshaping that God was doing in my life. Here is what happened.

We sat in a big circle in what was then the sanctuary for the church. The pastor opened with prayer and then we sang, I mean we really sang, some wonderful praise to God. Our accompaniment was a bongo drum and tambourine. The pastor then read some Scripture and told us that he wanted all of us to introduce ourselves. Our team went first in the typical American way: my name is, I am married or not, I have children or not, I work at etc. Then came the Kenyans. Their introductions all followed the same format with one major exception; they went like this: praise the Lord, My name is, I am saved, I worship at the Choimane Baptist Church where Pastor James is my pastor, I am on the Praise Team etc. I have given my life to Jesus as my Lord. Each person said the same thing until we got to the fourth person, and then a few later the same thing happened, and then several more times. It went like this: My name is, I am not saved, Please pray for me that God will open my eyes to see so that I can be saved . . . This shook me. Honest. Open. Public confession of not being saved, but gathered with the others and embraced by the others right inside the church building. I could not wait until this time was done and I could ask the pastor what this was all about: are these people confused? Are they crazy? Are these people who are emotionally disturbed and mentally distressed?

This is what the Pastor told me when I asked. We have a very high view of God. He is Holy and He is Just. We fear God. We stand and tremble in His presence. We know that God alone knows our hearts. So, we would not dare to stand in the church and declare that we are saved when we are showing something different when we are not in the church. We fear God too much. He could kill us for lying about who we are. No, Pastor Al; we take “being saved” very seriously so our people are not going to say that they are when they know that they are not.

Here is what got me that day. Do you see it in what the pastor said: we have a very high view of God. He is Holy and He is Just. We fear God. We stand and tremble in His presence. Do we? One of the identifying marks of cultural Christianity is that cultural Christians exalt the love and grace of God TO THE PRACTICAL EXCLUSION of His holiness and justice. I have heard for years as a pastor statements like this one, “I know that God is holy, but the Bible says that He is is love and that He loves us. I don’t really live as I should and I know it, but I know that God loves me.” There is in statements like the above enough truth to get people to believe it, but it is laced with a lot of half-truth. Where are those people so awed by the holiness of God that we fear Him and tremble in His presence, so much so that we would not ever dare to profess to be saved when almost everything about our lives would indicate that we are not?

Every believer who is a biblically defined believer is absolutely dependent on the love of God in Jesus shown to us daily in lavish doses of grace and mercy. We have no hope without it. But those doses of grace and mercy drive us daily to worship and adore Him, to witness to His greatness to others, and to seek to live in obedience to His Word as we seek to walk in His way no matter what the cost is to us. Our daily declaration is simple: we do not care what others say, we will give ourselves to Jesus as Lord today; we are not after the world’s acclaim, we will live and we will die to lift high Jesus’ Name.

Welcome to a Wright View! Make sure you spell “wright,” right. What I will be posting here in this place is my view. My prayer is that it will be far more than just my view though. My opinion on anything is worthless. What matters only and eternally is what God says. And God is not silent. God has spoken. He has spoken fully, faithfully, and finally in His Word; the center of all that He has said grounded in and giving glory to the Lord Jesus Christ. My goal in this blog is to seek prayerfully and diligently to be as faithful as possible to what God has said in HIs Word. This means that I must seek to be clear about the “words” that are the constitutive elements in the Word of God. Each and every word matters. Will I make mistakes? You betcha! Not just in grammar and syntax, but in not having a clear understanding of the Word. I am still growing. God is still sanctifying. I rest in His love for me and grace toward me in the life, death, resurrection and current reign of Jesus over all things. I await eagerly His time for me to come home or His time to come get His people and judge the world. But I will work until He comes to get me through death or through HIs descent to the earth. And a part of that work will be using words in this space to get at the meaning of “words” in the only “Word” that really matters, the Word of God.

My main concern for most of the ministry in the church as a pastor of a local church has been focused on one issue. It is the issue that most troubles my soul. It is the issue that wakes me up at night and drives me to prayer. It is the issue that causes me to weep with great sorrow over the spiritual condition of so much of the church in America and for me particularly, the part of the world in which I have lived and worked for almost all of my time in pastoral ministry. It is the concern over the deep divide between “cultural/nominal Christianity” and “genuinely Biblical Christianity.” The former is by far the most popular, the most powerful, and the most pervasive. The latter is real, but rare. Most of our churches are populated by people who profess and practice the former. Those in the latter group love Jesus and His church but are deeply grieved over what is too often called Christianity among those who profess to be Christians. But those in this group are often more than hesitant to stand up and speak out for fear of being called Puritans, Pietists, or Pharisees. This is the issue that I will be addressing. Pray for me that I will speak to it with biblical faithfulness, theological integrity, and compassionately driven evangelistic enthusiasm.

Let me end this first post with a very brief definition of both the cultural Christian and also the biblical Christian. A cultural Christian is someone who follows the rituals and traditions of his or her church for what it means to become a Christian. Such people choose the time and the place to choose to become a Christian. The choice is made, the rituals that follow are fulfilled and from that moment on this person considers himself or herself a Christian. It is a forever done deal. Sometimes small changes in life are made. Sometimes for a short season big changes in life are made. But all the basics of the Christian life are negotiable: belonging and being active in a local church, reading and studying the Bible, giving through the church for the advance of the Gospel, sharing the Gospel of Jesus with family and friends, a daily time for prayer to God and hearing from God as we read His Word etc.

A biblical Christian is someone who can identify a time in his or her life (it does not have to be a precise day and time for everyone) when they know that something changed in them. And it changed them. They know that the change was real and that it was radical. They know that something happened that they cannot explain. It is a mystery that is marvelous. They know that they received Jesus as Lord and surrendered their lives to Him. Still sinners, yes; but new desires begin to be born in them: to be an active part of a local church. to read and study the Bible, to pray to God, to give financially as God commands, to share the Gospel of Jesus that saved them with family and friends, to love Jesus and His church more and more and to live for His glory.

There are not different kinds of Christians. There is only one biblically defined kind of Christian. Anything other is fraud. It is false. It will send people to hell forever even while such people live daily and unto death actually believing and saying that they are Christians. Do you see and sense why my heart breaks and my soul weeps over this issue?