belong

I can’t remember the first time I heard it, but I know I’ve heard it a lot since. 

“I’m a Christ-follower.”

I understand what people are doing when they say that. It’s an attempt to avoid the cultural baggage of the term “Christian,” a term that has come to mean all sort of things to people outside of the church which fall far short of the vision of the Kingdom of God we find in Christ. That being said, I’ve never been able to embrace “Christ-follower” as an alternative. It seems to me that it fails to communicate the reality that when a person puts his or her faith in Jesus as Lord, something radically different happens to their very being which changes them. Their identity, which does come from following Christ, is changed at the core of who they are. It’s as if in that moment, they are born all over again into someone new.

I see that hand!

This belief, that as Christians, we are born-again is woven deep into the history of the Church of God. Having grown out of the revival and camp-meeting background of the 19th century, the Church of God has been a people who have held up the importance of that moment of rebirth. We call people to remember the day when their life changed forever and they were reborn in the Spirit of God! Sure, some are more dramatic than others, but it’s a part of who we are to believe that there is a day in our past to which we can point as our “second-birthday.”

This belief is drawn primarily from Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in John 3, in which he tells Nicodemus three times that a person must be “born-again” in order to see and enter the Kingdom of God. Nicodemus has to wrestle with this reality. He’s an observant Pharisee. He follows the Law. He lives a righteous life, and yet that’s not enough? How can he enter into the womb again, and be reborn?

Jesus, however, has a different birth in mind. One that comes from the Spirit. And as we in the Church of God, continue to seek the will of God in our lives, in our churches, and in our future, we too must hear Jesus’ words and remember that it is the work of the Spirit which brings us to new life in Christ. A new life that is markedly different from the world around us. A new life that does put off the things of the old life, and strives to run the race to its completion by the power of God.

The Born-Again Linchpin

To speak of the new life as opposed to the old life, or to speak of being born at all, is to speak of an element of our faith that holds together much of what it means to believe as a part of the Church of God. First, to speak of being born-again is to have in mind the anticipation of some future goal. For the one who is born again, it is not simply that there is a date or time at which he or she received the proverbial “get out of jail free card,” in order to escape the future judgment. Rather it is a transformative moment from which we can expect growth and maturity to develop through the work of the very Holy Spirit through whom new life was brought about. For the Church of God, the believer who is “born-again” is born as such so that a new life can be lived, a holy life, a life of the future kingdom breaking into the world now.

Consequently the fact that we are born into the kingdom reminds us that just as in our physical birth we are born into families, the person who is born-again is also born into the family of God. We’re not born unto ourselves, only with some new spirituality to guide are way. Rather we are born into a holy community. Therefore, just as we might embrace a new younger sibling in our family, excited to see our brother or sister grow into a mature adult, we embrace our younger Christian siblings, and are embraced by our older brothers and sisters who can help us along the path. We would do well to remember our heritage of referring to our brothers and sisters in Christ when we gather together to remember that in Christ we are all family.

In this way we see how the Christian experience of being born-again rests at the center of Church of God theology. It is from this experience that we can begin a life of holiness, as the Spirit brings us forth into new life. Simultaneously, it is the fact that we are born into a family, full of brothers and sisters in the church, that calls us to remember our unity with one another, to love one another and encourage one another on to maturity and holiness in the faith. Let us, therefore, be a people who go on together in our new family, and by our lives and our love perhaps people will begin to see that to follow Christ is to experience something so radically different, so fundamentally transformative, that it must have required being born anew by the very Spirit of God.