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How Do You Know if You are a Christian?
by Amanda Chapman

A Christian is someone who has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. In effect, this person has salvation through Jesus Christ. Salvation means being saved from the punishment of death for sin and being saved from this world. Someone who is saved has accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, and has accepted His death on the cross as a payment for his/her sins. This acceptance is not a one-time acceptance and transformation, but a continual acceptance of His sacrifice on the cross and His teachings. This transformation continues daily if you pursue a relationship with Christ.

C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity,

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self - all your wishes and precautions - to Christ…the real problem of the Christian life…comes…the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day…We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us... We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

God wants to create something good in you. You can tell you are really saved if you have a personal relationship with Christ, and work to hand yourself over to God so that He is reflected in you.

What does it mean to accept Jesus?

In order to accept Jesus, you must accept Him as the sacrifice to God that God requires of you, realize that He died for your sins, and make a commitment to follow Him. You cannot produce good works without God. If you are Christian, you will let God work in you to produce the things that are good.

You know you have accepted Jesus if you constantly work to changed your thoughts and actions to follow God, in the sense that you now let Him lead you. No one is perfect, and that is why Christ dies for us. But as Christians, we acknowledge our sins yet yearn to let Christ make us right. This salvation freely offered by accepting Christ is freedom from sins, and freedom to let God lead.

What is Christianity?

Christianity is the way of being Christian. By definition, Christians are little Christs--which is following Christ and working to let Him work in you. Christianity isn’t belonging to one specific church or denomination, but it is living as one Church with all other Christians--resembling the likeness of Christ in teachings and actions.

What are fundamental Christian beliefs?

The Bible is a fundamental foundation to our faith, as it is historically tested and cannot be disproved. The Bible teaches that:

God is a real being who created us to live in a relationship with Him
We are sinful, and our sin separates us from God
Because of this sin that separates us, we are condemned to hell
We cannot save ourselves from hell
God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, who was both true humanity and true deity and lived sinlessly but was sacrificed for us so that we never have to make the legalistic sacrifices again
We only need to accept Jesus and our sins are forgiven