To claim that the Holy Spirit lives in me would be incredible arrogance unless the Bible authorizes me to say so. Thankfully it does, and all born-again believers can make this claim without arrogance. But what does this mean? What difference should the Spirit living in me make? What responsibility is mine because of this high privilege? How do I need to respond to the Holy Spirit within me? Those are the questions we’ll try to answer in this closing message on what it means to be alive in Christ.
Everyone likes something new, so born-again Christians should be the happiest people in the world. Why? Because they became new people when they were born-again. This isn’t wishful thinking but Biblical truth. Believers can truthfully confess “I Am a New Person in Christ.” In this message we’ll see the truth declared and backed up in a number of other passages. We’ll explore what exactly is new and what living as the new person we are in Christ involves. Ready for the new? This message is for you.
Self-centeredness seems to be celebrated in American life. It is disguised as taking care of oneself, looking out for number one, and the ‘you deserve it’ advertising we hear all the time. To be alive in Christ means the focus of our life changes from self to Christ. In the verses we’ll cover today, Paul will tell us about a fact that transforms us and how that fact is to change us. We’ll also discuss why God went to the trouble he did to make this change in focus in our life and conclude with a call to make this transformation real in our lives.
Some Christians seem to believe that they are always supposed to struggle, always supposed to just barely be making it (if they are making it at all). We’ve already seen that we can have a positive attitude in all of life’s situations. This week the Apostle Paul (who suffered and struggled more than most of us ever will) explains that despite all that happened to him and all that could happen to us, he was, and we can be, more than conquerors in every situation through Christ. What does that mean? Can it change how we feel and how we respond to life’s challenges? That’s what we’ll discover in this message.
What does it mean to be a Christian? Some think it just means having a new set of rules and new moral standards. This is far from the truth. As we’ll see in this message, the fundamental truth of the Christian life is that believers are alive in Christ. But what does this mean? How does it impact how we live the Christian life. We’ll explore those questions before we come to the application. This message we presented with extensive diagrams on PowerPoint slides. You can access those in this message file.