#5 What's a Christian
 

By His Grace
 

Now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death.
(Colossians 1:22)
 

    Some of us believe we decided one day "to accept Jesus as our Savior.@ If by that we mean that one day we committed our lives to Christ, great! But we must not let that terminology move us away from a profound spiritual truth: Our salvation does not originate with us. Our salvation originates with God. It is God who has reconciled us to himself.
    If we fail to see this we will never understand the grace of God. It was the grace of God that determined that we should be reconciled, determined how we should be reconciled, and made the means of reconciliation available to us. It was divine initiative from start to finish.
    The only reason we can be reconciled to God, have our alienation taken away, our antagonism abolished, and our evil activities forgiven, is that God, in Christ, came into the world in the Incarnation, assumed our humanity, lived physically among us, and died a physical, horrible death on a cruel cross.
    It was necessary to remind the Colossians of this, because a heresy then current suggested that experience unrelated to the physical death of Christ could lead to fullness of life.
    Even today people will try to pry your attention away from Calvary to focus it on any number of self-improvement schemes. Even in the church there is a tremendous emphasis on personal fulfillment. You'll find scores of people trying to get their lives "integrated,@ "put together,@ or "reconciled.@
    Many of these programs so heavily emphasize individual fulfillment that they overlook the death of Christ. We need to remind ourselves that "there is salvation in no other; there is no other name under heaven given to men whereby we must be saved.@ We dare not move into any type of "reconciliation ministry@ that ignores the death of Christ. It becomes sub-Christian the moment it does.
    The only basis upon which sinful man can be reconciled to God is through the death of Christ. The wages of sin is death. We must pay it ourselves, or allow Christ to pay it for us. His death substitutes for ours. Only through his death on the cross is it possible for us to escape eternal death and everlasting separation from God.
    You'll never get right with God by doing an end-run around the cross. You'll never have sins forgiven on any other basis than the death of Christ.
    What happens when we start to focus on all things we have to do to be reconciled to God?
 

~Stuart Briscoe~