Born-Again Rascals

Born-Again Rascals?

One of the characters in Lanterns on the Levee, a popular novel that was once on the best-seller lists, asks a minister why so many good church members are rascals six days a week. The minister's reply is that it is because they have been born again! They are sure of salvation, so they can do anything they want to do.

Such doctrine, needless to say, is far from the Biblical truth. Paul answered that same charge, for it was being made as long ago as his time. "What then, shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid!" (Rom. 6:1), and he answers, "How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein?"

The thing that the world often fails to take into consideration is the level from which the Christian has been brought, the level on which he lives now, and the level on which he would be living were he not a Christian. Let us make a scale from one to one hundred and measure all men in their "goodness" against that scale. We discover that many who were born with a natural background of twenty, thirty, or forty, are saved and henceforth live on a scale beginning at fifty and moving up to the sixties, seventies, and eighties. A cultured, refined unbeliever born at the scale of seventy or eighty, may rise in good works to a mark of eighty or even ninety. He is the rare bird whom those of the world choose as their standard of what a non-Christian should be, and they ask if he is to go to hell while the Christians who live on the fifty-eighty level are to go to Heaven. They never compare the progress of the Christian who began at the twenty level with that of the non-Christian who remains at twenty, or has fallen
to ten. They do not talk about the great number of those who begin at sixty to eighty and have fallen to forty without Christ. Somehow they feel that sin in silk is not quite so horrible as sin in rags. They look upon a prostitute in rags as being far worse than the velvet-clothed mistress of the corporation executive.

The fact remains that those who are really born again are not the rascals. The life of God in the heart of one who has passed from death unto life will always bring that person up on the scale. Even the hypercritical world is forced to confess that they are far better than they would have been if Christ had not touched them, and the quiet-living Christians who work hard, pay their bills, and live for Christ seven days a week are not even seen by the critics who notice nothing beyond the superlative.

Nonetheless, the world's criticism should cause every born-again believer to look more closely at his personal life, in order that he may obey the word of the Lord, and "provide things honest in the sight of all men" (Rom. 12:17).

1. Even if a person is an “eighty”, what can they bring to God to merit salvation?
2. If our works and deeds are rooted in sin, what does give me merit unto salvation?
3. If Christ is fully man, how was he perfect and blameless?