The Newborn Christian (and everyone else!) - Part Four - Taking Out The Trash

The End of Days is coming very soon. For those five to six billion people who are not Christians, that will be the hardest seven year-period in the history of mankind, and at the end of those seven years, death awaits, followed by eternal damnation. 

If you ARE a Christian, you need not have that fear, or any of those fears. You will be snatched away, possibly in your very sleep, before it even begins. But you have to be a true Christian, not just someone who says he is. And it won't be your opinion that matters - it'll be His. 

So, to refresh your memory, here are the seven things we've talked about so far in this series that are requirements for every Christian, newborn or not:


1) Confess as a sinner and accept the salvation and Lordship of Jesus Christ. 

2) Be baptized in water and the Holy Spirit

3) Accept communion with the body of Christ on a regular (seasonal) basis.

4) Attend church and bible study, and be a part of that church on a week-to-week basis.

5) Pray to God through Christ every day.

6) Read the Bible every day.

7) Share the Gospel every day with someone as often as possible. 

Yesterday we related these to what a newborn baby needs - the solution for a newborn and a new Christian when they hunger, need rest, or hurt are similar, except for a Christian their solutions are found through the final four requirements above, most especially the Bible reading and prayer.

But what about when, to use a euphemism, a newborn has "filled his diaper"? What is the Christian's equivalent?

What does excrement translate to for a Christian in a sin-stained world?  Committed sin. We create our own garbage. We come in contact with the world's sin, and we commit it ourselves. We find ourselves in a conversation with co-workers which turns to topics that (for example) demean women or other races, exude hatred, fail to show charity, or whatever else contradicts the Word of God. We see something which tempts us, whether it be our lust or our greed, and give in even slightly to the fleshly desire. We are startled by something brought on by the world and the instinctive man rises up momentarily, swearing and hating and cursing the others involved.

What do we do when this garbage piles up in our lives? WE REPENT.

Repentance is the eighth and arguably most important of the things every Christian must do. We must repent REGULARLY, and I would argue daily, to keep our garbage from piling up (and from being forgotten - even long-time devout Christians sin many times per day. You can't keep track of it all if you wait a week!). We must repent SPECIFICALLY, or at least as specifically as we can, in order to seek the appropriate forgiveness for our sins. 

Being forgiven of our sins is critical, but just as critical is to do our best to correct that behavior. We won't ever completely succeed, of course, but it's the attempt that matters. 

I use the following analogy in the book I'm writing right now, A Commission From God, which has as it primary message that we need to repent regularly. Take out the trash every day, and start each new day with a clean slate. Add repentance to your daily prayer ritual, and watch your communication with God blossom!

“Think about it this way, Charlie. Let’s say that you’re hosting a party in two weeks, and you invite me to attend, okay?”

“Okay. I might do that, I suppose,” he says, smiling.

“All right. But the day after you invite me, I go to someone else’s party and destroy their furniture. You’d be less comfortable about my coming to your party now, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d drop you like a hot stone, Andrew,” Charlie says, chuckling.

“Probably. But what if I apologized to you?”

“Hmmm.”

“Well, God’s extremely forgiving, Charlie, apparently more than you are, my friend!” I only worry if the host doesn’t chuckle or at least smile back at that point. “So He lets me keep my invite. But I do it again two days later at Becky’s party, and then I apologize, and then I do the same thing the next night at a different party, and so forth. After a while, no matter how forgiving you might be, you don’t believe my apologies, no matter how sincere I try to make them.”

“That’s what happens with God’s invitation to Heaven, Mr. Rose. God simply can’t tolerate sin. That’s the reason Christ had to die at Calvary – He carried our sins and took the punishment we deserved for us, so that God could accept us into Heaven at all. That doesn’t give us carte blanche to keep sinning, though. We’ve got to not just apologize but make an honest attempt to STOP the sin if He’s going to allow us into Heaven. It’s only through His grace that we get the invitation at all, so if we’re not even making an effort to at least cut back on those problem areas? God literally cannot tolerate our sinful nature.”

“Frankly, Charlie, it’s amazing to me that He allows us in at all, since we will NEVER be perfectly sinless, and we’ll ALL have some sins that we just can’t seem to get rid of no matter how hard we try.”