When someone accepts Christ as their Lord and Savior something amazing happens in the spiritual realm that defies description. Church planter and pastor Neil Cole explains why, on the inside, something remarkable has occurred.
“When someone turns to Christ and they say ‘I’m going to pick up my cross and follow Christ,’ there’s a transaction that occurs in the spiritual world that we underestimate, where you are transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the Kingdom of Light, and suddenly everything inside of you is changed.”
“All the righteousness of Christ is transferred to your account, and all the debt of your life is transferred to Christ’s account, and you are set free.”
Often, from an earthly perspective, we don’t feel any different and that’s okay.
“The next day you probably don’t feel a change, you don’t realize all that you’ve been given. In fact, that’s what the Christian life is, that’s what maturing is, it’s the rest of your days realizing what you already have in Christ.”
“We learn who we already are in Christ, and that takes a lifetime to learn, but man it is incredible what Christ has already done for us.”
Once we have Christ in us, we can focus our attention on bringing Christ to other people as well. However, Neil says we often misunderstand how we can really bring Christ to those around us.
“We sometimes get this idea that you need this practice, this event, and you need this teaching, you need this song. The truth is, all of those things pale in comparison to what you’ve already been given in Christ.”
What does that mean for evangelism?
“As a Christians, instead of trying to put good stuff in people, what if we decided to start drawing the God stuff out of people, we would start to see that world change, because the work has already been done by Christ, not by our sermons, not by our practices, not by our programs, and events; it’s Christ that changes a life.”
Neil Cole is an experienced church planter and pastor. In addition to founding Awakening Chapels, which reaches postmodern people in urban settings, he is a founder of Church Multiplication Associates (CMA), which over the past thirteen years has grown to tens of thousands of churches in all fifty states and in fifty-plus nations.
Key Scripture: John 6:1-14
Featured Songs: Lift Your Weary Head – Crowder; We Bow Down – Steven Curtis Chapman and Chris Tomlin; Come, As You Are – Crowder
The anatomy of conversion
