Express your Faith
Accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour
The journey towards maturing in your faith in Christ has to begin somewhere. This process can’t actually truly begin until you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour. Accepting Jesus as Lord and Saviour is a response to God revealing what He has done for you through Jesus Christ. It means that you believe in your heart that Jesus Christ died on the cross and on the third day rose again. You believe that His death is a substitute for your spiritual death (hell – eternal separation from God) and with Him rising from the dead, this proves that His sacrifice on the Cross is sufficient to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. In other words, it proves that Jesus is the Son of God.
Because you believe that, it means a response that says, “Lord, my life is not what it should be. Please come in and run my entire life. I hand it all over to you so I can be used for Your glory and to fulfil the purposes you have designed for my life. I do this because you have forgiven me of my sin and I know I can’t do anything out of my own strength to make myself approved to enter into Your presence. I want to know you! I want to serve You as the true and living God! I now ask that You will guide me as I embark on that journey.”
That’s the reality of accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. It’s not adding Jesus into your life – it’s allowing Him to take over. Are you willing to do that if you haven’t already? I encourage you to seek someone in leadership, the person who may have invited you to church, or anyone wearing a badge, and tell them that you would like to ask Jesus into your heart. Or simply, do it in the privacy of your own home but if you do, please don’t stop there. Please tell the church as we can then help you and equip you in victoriously living out God’s design for your life.
Repent
If you read above on what it means to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour, you will notice that the response you make to Jesus forgiving you of your sin is something that you make at the start and it will also be a decision you have to make on a daily basis. This decision is called repentance and you’ll see multiple times in the gospels that Jesus implored the people to repent. To repent means to no longer live the way you want to live but to go in the opposite direction and that is to live out God’s ways instead. Because it’s both an initial decision and an on-going decision, we say that there are two kinds of repentance.
The first one involves our salvation where our decision to hand over our lives to God is evidence that we believe in our hearts that Jesus’ death and resurrection is all that is needed for Him to forgive us of our sins. This repentance is not counted as a work – just an expected response. In other words, I don’t repent in order to be forgiven of my sins; I repent because I’ve been forgiven of my sins.
The second one involves our sanctification where our on-going decision to hand over our lives to God enables us to pursue and actively live out God’s design for our lives. We’ve been created in the image of God and our ultimate goal is to conform into the image of Christ. It’s easier said than done because we have Satan, our enemy, trying to stop that from happening and he uses our other enemies, the flesh and the world, to tempt us into doing things our own way. Unfortunately, some believers get trapped by the devil’s lies and their journey towards maturing in their faith gets interrupted. This is why an ongoing repentance is so important to practise in one’s walk with Christ.
Get BAPTISED
Getting baptised is a command that we’re told to obey after we have accepted Jesus as Lord. We call this believer’s baptism and recognise it’s practised by full immersion in water if possible. It symbolises the believer’s sinful life being buried as he/she is dipped under the water, and the believer’s new life being resurrected as he/she comes out of the water. If a new believer was baptised/christened as a baby in another church, we expect them to follow the instruction given to us in the Bible of believer’s baptism.
If you have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and have never been baptised after that experience, I encourage you to contact Pastor Tim and ask when the next Baptism Sunday is scheduled so you can be part of it.
Dedicate your child
As a church family, we want to support parents, grandparents and caregivers as they seek to raise their children to know and love Jesus. We recognise the enormous influence that family has on a child and it is our desire to be able to support families as they navigate the challenging and yet, rewarding path of parenting.
Dedicating your child is an opportunity for you to thank God for the wonderful blessing of your children. They are also a time for you to publicly declare your desire and prayer that your child will grow up in the knowledge and love of Jesus. It also reinforces your hope that your child will choose to accept Him as their Lord and Saviour in the years ahead.
Prayer & Fasting
Prayer is such an integral part of the Christian faith as it is being one with God. We are told to continually pray to God and that can come in many different shapes and forms. As a church, we encourage everyone to utilise the prayer guides that are given out at the start of every month and commit to continually pray for each other, not just in the service during our time of corporate prayer but even more so in our own personal and private times with God. You may even be prompted by the Spirit to fast for a particular length of time and in a particular kind of way. If you would like to know more about fasting or you would like ways to help you make your prayer life stronger, then please contact Pastor Tim via email or in person.
Read, Study & Meditate on the Bible
Reading, studying and meditating on God’s word is so important for maturing your faith in Christ. This is an exercise that needs to be done daily; for some, morning and night. Our encouragement to you is to continually study God’s word both privately and with other believers. If you would like to know more about how to study the Bible and what it actually means to meditate on the Scriptures, then please contact Pastor Tim.
Worship Christ corporately and faithfully
The book of Hebrews instructs us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves. This is because God created us to be relational – to be in community with each other. This is a vital commitment to have; though sadly, so many Christians don’t do it. At FCBC, we thoroughly believe that it is harder to actively live out God’s design for your life if you are separated from the local church. Click on this link to read ten reasons why that is so. Would you commit to attending Sunday services faithfully each week? If you have just decided to make that commitment, please tell someone. We’d love to hear how God has been working in and through you!