Fight the Good Fight of Faith, English Edition

Lesson : The Enlistment We Make • 

God’s enemies. In what ways have you found this to be true since the time you first accepted Christ Jesus as your Savior and Lord?

In the last session ( The Epic We Find Ourselves In ), we learned that the Story of God’s salvation in Christ, articulated in the Bible, answers the big questions about life. But as amazing as this Epic is, this grand Story must not just be heard simply for amusement, as when you go to a movie, view it, and then forget about it. When we hear God’s story of rescue and restora tion in Christ, then we must make a decision to cooperate with God. We must receive his testimony about his Story, accept it as the truth, let it become our very own story, and then begin to participate in this good fight of faith. We must change sides , voluntarily enlisting in the Lord’s army. Through no merit of our own, and completely by the mercy of God through Christ’s substitutionary (“in our place”) death, he extends to all humans the invitation to enlist. The invitation to be saved is a call to war – to go from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, to move from a life lived for yourself alone to becoming an ambassador of Jesus Christ as Lord, following him in the midst of a crooked and mixed-up world. If you confess your rebellion and sin, turn away from it in repentance* , and ask for God’s forgiveness through Jesus’ death on the cross, God cleanses you and puts you in right relationship with him. You are placed into the Body of Christ, God’s family, the Church. Upon salvation, God the Holy Spirit makes his home in us, and he then empowers us day by day to honor God, to serve Christ, and to do his work. The Holy Spirit is the down payment of the full gift of God that will come to us when Jesus returns; the Spirit serves as a guarantee of our future inheritance in Christ. Repenting from sin and clinging to Christ by faith is changing allegiance from the kingdom of Satan to the Kingdom of God. When you do so, you literally are connected with all who have believed God by faith and are rescued from the wrath to come. Water baptism* , commanded by Jesus for all believers, is an outward sign of this inward work of grace done in us by . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . *baptism – Baptism is a ritual for believers that involves the application of water on the body in order to represent you being brought into the Body of Christ. It may involve immersion (dunking) in water, water poured on the head, or other means of application. Baptism comes from a word “baptidzo” which means “to be placed into.” So baptism is important because it is a public demonstration of a spiritual reality; it shows that you have now been placed into Christ. Every believer should be baptized because Jesus asked all of us to do so as a public demonstration of our allegiance to him.

Content

*repentance – To repent means to change your mind, to turn around and go the other way, to go back the way God desires. When you repent, you agree with God that you were on the wrong track and change your behavior to be in line with God’s will.