A friend of mine suggested that people want to know:

1. How to become a Christian
2. How to live as a Christian
3. How to stay a Christian

He and I want to work towards a course, a curriculum, that addresses these questions. Today, I want to share my thoughts on becoming a Christian and list some other questions and topics that question brings up:

Let’s begin with preaching to the lost. I used to call this “preaching the Gospel,” but “Gospel” is too big a word. You may have wondered why Matthew’s, Mark’s, Luke’s, and John’s “memoirs” (term borrowed from Justin Martyr) are called “Gospels.” “Gospel” can be used to mean the entire teaching of the Christian faith, as can “faith” (cf. Jude 1:3), and “truth.”

When you meet an unbeliever, you do not want to be obligated to present the Gospel as thoroughly as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did. Eventually, you do, but how do you begin so that you can lead up to the whole Gospel? Well, we have examples from the apostles in the Book of Acts, both with Jews and Gentiles.

I wrote a booklet [“The Apostles Gospel,” 2013)  discussing and outlining the preaching of the apostles in the Book of Acts. The result of my research is that the apostles were always building to one main point: Jesus rose from the dead, and his resurrection proves that he is Christ (Messiah) and Son of God (to the Jews), and Lord and Judge of the living and dead (to the Gentiles).

We all know that Jesus said that the apostles would be his “witnesses” after the Holy Spirit came upon them, but we rarely ask, “Witnesses of what?”

Each of the first 5 chapters of Acts tell us that the apostles were witnesses of the resurrection (Acts 1:22; 2:32; 3:15; 4:33; 5:31). This makes sense if the initial purpose of their preaching was to convince their hearers that Jesus rose from the dead, proving that he is Messiah, Son of God, Judge of the living and the dead, and Lord.

Paul tells us that we can be saved by confessing that Jesus is Lord and believing that God raised him from the dead (Rom. 10:9-10). Again, this lines up with the preaching of the apostles that we see in Acts. Paul also said at the beginning of his letter to the Romans that he was “set apart for the Gospel of God …” and that this Gospel concerned” [God’s] Son, who … was declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord …” The purpose of this Gospel was to “obedience of faith among all the nations for his name’s sake” (Rom. 1:1-5).

Today, at least among evangelicals, our initial preaching to the lost focuses on Jesus’ death on the cross, and we want our hearers to believe that Jesus died for theirs sins so that they can be forgiven. This is a stark contrast to Paul and the other apostles whose initial preaching concerned the resurrection, and who wanted their hearers to believe Jesus rose from the dead so that they would obey the Gospel.

Hopefully, this is a good time to point out that “preaching,” in the New Testament, always, refers to proclaiming Jesus’s resurrection to the lost. Speaking to the saved, the church, was called “teaching.” Thus, when Paul said he was a preacher and a teacher, he was saying that he was both an evangelist and a shepherd. All the apostles had to be both because they were both converting the lost and forming them into churches.

So, in answer to the question, “How does a person become a Christian?,” we must respond, “By confessing with his/her mouth that Jesus is Lord and believing in his/her heart that God raised him from the dead.” This, of course, means becoming obedient to that Lord and the precepts of the rest of the Gospel/faith that they will be taught after baptism.

This brings us to baptism, which is the first step of obedience once a person believes (cf. Gal. 3:27, and all the baptisms in Acts). The first step of faith is to be buried with Christ in baptism and raised again to a new life, the very life of Christ in us, so that we become servants of God rather than servants of sin. This is thoroughly and plainly explained in Romans 6. Unless you are taught in advance to misinterpret Paul’s letter to the Romans and question what Romans 6 says, you cannot misinterpret such plain teaching.

Questions and Topics Arising from This Essay

• The resurrection and the “Lordship Gospel”: Romans 10:9-10, John 20:31, and other passages. This must include the apostles as witnesses “of the resurrection.”
• Definition of terms: Gospel, faith, truth, preach, teach
• Water baptism and baptism in the Holy Spirit, though the baptism in the Holy Spirit belongs as much in the section on how to live as a Christian as much as it does in this section.
• Though I did not mention repentance in this initial article, repentance is included in the initial preaching of the apostles to the lost from the very first sermon to the last (Acts 2:38; 24:25). In fact, Paul describes repentance as the very heart of his preaching (Acts 26:20).
• The final judgment of the living and the dead as it would have been understood by the Jews and by the Romans and Greeks because Paul brought it up in his initial preaching to Gentiles (Acts 17:30; 24:25). If Paul wrote Hebrews, then he also referred to eternal judgment as an elementary principle of the faith in 6:1-3.
• The atonement, and a definition and explanation of “faith,” “grace,” and living by the Holy Spirit must be relegated to the “How do we live as Christians?” section because those things were not taught to Christians until they believed that Jesus was Messiah and Lord, were baptized, and were beginning their Christian life. A definition of “faith” is not needed to understand Romans 10:9-10 but is needed to understand Paul’s assertion that we walk by faith, not sight (2 Cor. 5:7) and his command to “continue in the faith grounded and settled” (Col. 1:23).

My Purpose for this Essay

The goal of this essay–this collection of thoughts, was to think through the topic of becoming a Christian, thus allowing me to collect some additional topics to address in the curriculum being developed.