“…if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” Ro10.9
Faith in Christ is more than an intellectual assent to Christian doctrine but certainly not less. What we truly believe with the mind tends to trickle down into the whole person, our will and emotions will certainly follow. Once we accept as fact the resurrection, the more we look forward to the realities it has accomplished. We express our faith in public confession, not ashamed but confident that Christ is truly the Lord of life. We transfer our trust from personal works to His finished work so that He might present us right with God. Each person individually comes to His cross, accepts the forgiveness He offers, experiences a personal death in surrender to His will, and is raised to newness of life under His Lordship. If one really accepts as historical fact the physical resurrection of Christ how could is not affect the whole of his life.
The result is living here in anticipation of a personal experience to be realized in our own resurrection. The whole may be compared to a friendship nurtured on-line via email with a very real person whom we have yet to meet in the flesh. Death arranges that face to face meeting. What we have only experienced via this means is real but nothing compared to the substance of that real world meeting when we encounter Christ face to face. The acronym used to convey this on-line is ITRW-“in the real world.” Christian faith expresses that eternal hope when death ushers us to that meeting ITRW. 4/18/07 ts
