If you reject this gospel, Christ’s words, you reject the only way to eternal safety, that God made possible through His Son Jesus Christ! The apostle Paul wrote and said ‘I know whom I have believed and am convinced! Persuaded!’ whatever one believes may seem satisfactory to one, but to be sure and saved one has to believe in Christ, the apostle Paul was a strong pharisee, he believed something that He thought was absolutely God given, but he found how wrong he was! By the grace of God, he believed in Jesus Christ and so he says: ‘I know whom I have believed.’! With true faith comes a conviction; this brings me to my second point. A truly converted man becomes certain of some important changes as to his new relationship with God, who has become His heavenly Father!

Faith in Christ brings a positive conviction concerning life everlasting. Therefore, I now come to my next point in answer to the question I asked as to ‘Who is a Christian?’ thus, Secondly, Conversion leads a Christian to a strong conviction. A true Christian, born of God, is absolutely convinced about vital things that are part of his new life! This brings me to the point where I must state that the greatest manifestation of God to the world of men, is His Son Jesus Christ, whom He sent amongst us, to fulfil the promised deliverance from sin and Satan, as promised throughout the Old Testament! If one looks at the kind of people that the world breeds, one wonders why God should ever bother to stoop down to the level Jesus did! But Jesus came and He paid an awful price to save and deliver His chosen from the clatches of the devil. 

Before Jesus ever came, His Father put the whole campaign before Him, every detail of what it entailed was clearly known by Jesus, His rejection by His people, His suffering and death on the cross, his humiliation! Things that were prophesied by the prophets. Such as Isaiah, seven centuries before Jesus came amongst us, inspired by the Holy Spirit, he said the following: ‘Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before Him like a tender shoot and like a root out of a dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him. Nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrow and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised and we esteemed not!’ (Isaiah 53: 1-3) If you have a Bible read the whole chapter, maybe you have had a Bible in a drawer, or on a book shelf for years, and never opened it! Therefore, you do not know what His wonderful coming to earth and His presence during thirty-three years among men, has made possible, for men of all generations, it is a story beyond human comprehension! ‘Insondable’ as it is said in French, you cannot get to the bottom of it!

The Cross and His awful death on it was prophesied by King David centuries before the Romans used it for the execution of their worst criminals. Crucifixion was the most inhuman way to die, even for the worst of men! Led by the Holy Spirit David writes: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, and am not silent. Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are (enthroned on) the praises of Israel. In you, our father’s put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. They cried to you and were saved; in you they trusted and were saved! But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by men and despised by the people. All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads; He trusts in the Lord; let the Lord rescue Him. Let Him deliver Him, since He delights in Him.’ (Psalm 22: 1-8) His trial was the work of a crooked priesthood, who did not want to kill Him by stoning Him, which was their way of execution. But because they hated Him so much, for no reason, they wanted Jesus to die the death of a cross! So that He would die the cruellest way possible! Even Pilate the Roman governor who alone could condemn Him to die on a cross, and tried to release Him, but they forced his hands, and so Jesus died as He did, to atone for the sins of His people, paid the ransom for the release, of all that would believe in Him.