A young man named Andre went to church one Sunday and sat in the last row. Things hadn’t been going well for him since his grandmother passed away a few weeks earlier. After the choir sang a song, the preacher started talking, and Andre listened. Before long something strange began to happen. It seemed like the preacher was talking directly to him. Then he heard the preacher say, “Jesus died so that Andre can be forgiven for all of his sins.” “Wait a minute” Andre thought. “Did he just say my name?” The preacher ended his sermon and asked if anyone wanted to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. When he felt a tear roll down his face, Andre brushed it off and tried to look away but the preacher kept talking to him. He said, “today is the day of salvation”. At that moment, the young man knew he had to do something. The preacher said, “stand to your feet and come down to the altar”. Andre stood up and began to walk to the front.
The next morning, Andre woke up and began to dress for work when his phone rang. When he picked it up he heard an unfamiliar voice. The man on the phone asked him the strangest question; “How does it feel to be a Christian”? Andre didn’t know what to say. After the man prayed for him and extracted a promise from him to come to Bible Study that Wednesday, he hung up and fell back onto the bed. “What am I supposed to do now?”, he thought. “Why did I go up to the front of the church? I do feel a little different, but why? What does it mean for me now that I am a CHRISTIAN?”
When we become a Christian, we begin a new journey. Like Andre in the story above, we may begin this journey with an incomplete understanding of what this all means. And, if we never stop and intentionally consider what we’re doing, we run the risk of wandering aimlessly through our Christian lives, hoping to reach an ambiguous destination called “Heaven”. Becoming a Christian means being given new life. This new life begins by believing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and accepting Him as our Lord and Savior. The rest is a journey of living our time here on earth under God’s guidance before joining Him in the afterlife. When we make the commitment to be a Christian, we are just beginning the journey to find and fulfill a purpose that God has in mind for us. That journey is what we map out in the new electronic book, The Journey: Intentional Christianity.
You can download a FREE copy of the electronic file (pdf format) on the “Downloads” page of The ELLWord.
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