The Bible defines a Christian as someone who has God’s life within them. It says that everyone can become spiritually alive, allowing us to know God personally in our daily lives. The Bible asserts that human beings were created for the purpose of sharing their lives with God, and the reason we have lost our sense of purpose is because we have lost the ability to know God in our lives. Now whatever we think of this extraordinary concept, it’s clear that it doesn’t describe our natural state: we aren’t born with that sort of life within us.
So the idea that people can become Christians by adhering to some sort of religious system doesn’t hold water. If Christianity was just a set of rules which told us how we should behave, or if Jesus Christ merely lived and died to provide us with an example of how to live, then Christianity would be just another religious system. But there is something much more profound going on here. We need to look more closely at Jesus’ life and death, and investigate what they mean for us today.
