Folks will often say, “Come to Jesus and He will take all your troubles away!”—I’ve found the opposite to be the case. Indeed, my life before Christ was relatively easy and carefree in most respects. And when I became a Christian, Christ did in fact take away that which formed the raw substance of my troubles: namely, the sin and impending judgement thereof that put me at infinite odds with Him. Looking back, it was only after I submitted to Christ that I found peace; and, somewhat unexpectedly, this was when the real battle truly began. As our Lord said, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

What does it mean to be a Christian? Among other things, a Christian is quite simply a follower of Jesus Christ—one who submits to Him as Lord and Savior, who joyfully puts themselves under the yoke of obedience to Him and His word.

Just as those who were subjects of Herod in the first century were called “Herodians,” those belonging to Christ were labeled as “Christians.” In Acts 11:26, we read how “in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians.” Whether the moniker of “Christian” began as a convenient label from outsiders or as a derogatory term—“mini-Christs”—meant to mock believers, one thing is certain: the name stuck.

To be a Christian is to be a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. This involves the recognition on your part that He is Lord and that you are not; that He is Savior and that you are woefully unable to save yourself from the wrath of God. Flowing from these twin recognitions is repentance; you turn from your sinful ways to Him, casting from yourself the very notion that you are able to be righteous before God on your own, trusting rather in the finished work of Jesus Christ on your behalf.

When we place our faith in the work of Christ—His sinless, obedient life before the Father, His atoning and substitutionary death on the cross for sins, and His glorious, bodily resurrection as vindication of God’s satisfaction in His Son’s sacrifice for sinners—we become justified before the sight of God. That is, we become righteous even as Christ Himself is righteous—“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). On the cross, Jesus bore our sins; when we respond to the Gospel in repentance and faith, Christ’s righteousness is put on us even as our sins—past, present, and future—were put on Him.

We are made right with God by His grace through the gift of faith; this is not of ourselves, lest we should find any reason for boasting. It is by faith, as the Spirit works in our hearts, that we enter into union with the Lord. As one theologian put it, “Faith is the hand of the soul by which we receive Christ and become one with Him.”

To be a Christian is to be one with Christ; to be united to Him through faith.

Once the Christian is justified by the work of Christ, then begins the work of their being made like Christ. This is called sanctification, the process by which we as believers are made holy even as Christ is holy. This is the very end unto which we were all saved: “For those whom [God] foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:29). All of the Christian life—that which resides within the very nucleus of what it means to be a Christian—is the God-glorifying, Spirit-filled, Christ-honoring work of our being made holy from one degree of glory to another after the image and pattern of Jesus Christ our Lord.

In Philippians 2:13, Paul says that believers must “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Paul is not saying that we are to save ourselves when he writes about working out our salvation—only God can do that. Rather, he is instructing believers to, quite literally, “work out” that which God has already completed in them through His Spirit. In a very real sense, sanctification is just that: our day-to-day working out of the reality which God has sovereignly worked in us. We are literally working out our salvation; outwardly etching into time and space with our good works that which God has sovereignly accomplished in us, in our very hearts.

Unlike justification, which God accomplishes on His own, sanctification is a work that we as believers partake in alongside Him—God is not going to live our Christian life for us. Though, at the same time, we are feckless in our attempts to be holy apart from Him. Indeed, we are co-laborers with God in sanctification, ever relying on the help of His Spirit as we seek to walk in obedience to His word.

Two of the chief ways in which we grow in Christlikeness is to spend much time in His word and much time in His presence through prayer. These two go hand in hand as we, in anticipating God’s manifold blessings from the word, first seek His help through prayer, then read, praying throughout and afterwards that His truth would trickle down to the deepest depths of our hearts and there bear fruit—that is, to “work out.”

We might, for example, read Paul’s words in Galatians 5:22-23 about the fruit of the Spirit—“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law”—and rightly conclude that we are desperately lacking in patience.

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