The Difference in Christ and the Difference it Makes Part II

The Sanctifying:

The truth is a powerful thing. It can save a person wrongfully accused or condemn someone to die. It can levy justice and inspire awesome acts of love and faithfulness. It brings light to lies and sets free the captives imprisoned within their own minds.

To be sanctified is the process of being made holy. After accepting Christ, that night all alone in my quiet dorm room, I immediately felt the burden lifting from my shoulders. I still had a lot of wreckage to deal with, and still do, but ever since then there has been a presence and a knowing that has dogged me, sometimes hunted me, always working away within me even when I don't cooperate. I had become weighted down by my struggles to find life in things, relationships, reputation, causes and creeds. That is the sin of idolatry, the chief sin, for from it came all the other sins in my life and any one else's. I had locked myself into a certain way of living from which there was, perhaps literally, no return.

It is tiring to carry with us all the hurts, the failures, the dark moments. Equally heavy can be the victories, because sometimes the loneliest moments are those when we accomplish what we feel is the ultimate and find it lets us down. For me it was like breathing fresh air again. My first reaction was to read more of the Bible, to learn more about who God was. My second reaction was to read about the Bible itself, to see if what I believed to be true was actually true or if I merely wished it to be. Having fallen into atheism years before I had read plenty of things to make Christianity seem ridiculous to believe. I never knew there were thinking people who defended the faith, nor had I ever read them.

So I did. You see, the atheist views on religion are not neutral nor are they free of bias. They assert the denial of that which Christianity rests upon. How can the atheist perspective then be free of bias? SImilarly, one can't dismiss the Christian perspective out of hand simply because it is religious, without betraying an enormous prejudice for religion. And prejudices have nothing to do with the truth.

So, familiar with the atheists perspective, I undertook to understand that of Christian thinkers and scholars. I learned about the Bible's history, about how it had been penned over centuries by many different authors. Yet within the Bible's pages I saw the internal consistency, how it was the exact same God throughout the ages. I had my doubts at points and I worked through them. Nor did I ever feel bad about having doubts - doubt is a halfway house between sin and salvation, as I have heard. There is no growth without doubt. The sin is in how we respond - either we raise the questions and assume they are unanswerable, or we raise the questions and seek for answers. I can say I have never had a question prove to be impossible to answer, nor do they require me relying on straw men or rationalizations.

I found that Christ gave me great insight into myself and others, for in His light I was coming to know myself for the first time. I came to see some of my fundamental weaknesses and problems, and in some areas I saw the need for therapy. I realized that I could not always trust my thoughts or reactions, nor my motives. I realized that the burden I had felt lifted was the weight of God's judgment upon me which I had reaped, unable to do anything else. For without Him I could do nothing but sin. Most of all, I learned that Christ was not rules, regulations, confessions or creeds.

I learned that Jesus Christ, from that moment I prayed alone in my room, has come to live in me through the power of His Holy Spirit. I have learned that I can't evict Him, that He is faithful to complete the work He has begun that night several years ago whether I am working with Him as much as I should or not. I have learned that either I am a slave to my own desires, hurts and longings, or that I am a slave to Christ and am freed from all those things.

From studying the history I have learned that the best explanation for the Biblical narrative and what I have seen in my life is that it all actually happened. The Bible is not just a bunch of stories with moral teachings. Moral stories do not radically change lives, and philosophies do not free from the burdens of sin. If Christ had not died to suffer God's judgment I would still be under it, and if He had not risen from the dead then there would have been no lifting of my weight.

I've learned that God does not wave a magic wand and fix all of my problems. But God does provide the strength to see my problems for what they are, the strength to endure them, and the power to take me through them. God does not deal in sidestepping or avoiding issues, He leads you through the worst parts of it in love, to remind you that He is God, and you are His. This, truly this, is the power of Christ in those He has rescued. Not in miracles, although they are powerful. Not in convicting words, although they are needed. The power of Christ is this: the truth of transformed life. The truth my brother began to see in that photograph I mentioned in my last post, the truth that between then and now I have been changed dramatically. Not a mere change in behavior by adherence to rules, but a change in kind, a deep and fundamental change concerning who and what I am.

But more than that, He has given me love, joy and peace. The love of His son to know that I am precious in His sight, and was bought at a price. Joy to understand that circumstances come and go but Christ carries me through happiness and sorrow, and that the joy in Him enables me to worship and love Him even in the midst of pain and tears. Peace to calm my anger, to know that if God is for me that what does it matter who is against me, and that all things work for the good of those who love Him. Those who know me have seen the difference. Being Born Again is a uniquely Christian thing. I have never encountered anyone from any other philosophy or faith that can claim the same radical transformation that is found in Christ Jesus.


I've learned that there are many things I must unlearn, such as how I think about some people, places and things. Like a house built on a poor foundation, anything above the break must be torn down, the break fixed, and built upon anew with good, strong materials. This has required the sacrifice of some ideas I held sacred, some images I held to be important, some attitudes I held to be necessary. Yet the more I turn them over to Christ to bear on the cross as only He can, the more I find that they were never really what I wanted in the first place.


I've learned that temptations remain ever present, and to remember that a good sign of Christianity gone wrong is to identify people as enemies. The Christian's battle is never against people, the battle is a spiritual one against sin to establish the kingdom of God in the hearts of all those who believe in Him until He returns. It is not to blow up abortion clinics, to legislate relationships, or to elect republicans. It is to preach the life transforming power of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. This is what the religious right does not understand - that only God, not laws, can change people.


I have a long, long way to go. I cannot answer every question, nor right every wrong, nor perfectly conduct myself so as not to insult people or sin before God. But I am His, and He is mine, and though God does not love all that I do He does love me. That love is the strength to deal with and work through who I am and what I have become.


He does not have a message. He is the message, and that message is life. There is no life apart from the truth, and there is only one truth. Not your truth or my truth, only His truth. The problem isn't that there is only one way. If He gave us a hundred ways we would want a hundred and one - we would want our way.

Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent (John 17:3).