Bringing honor to him

If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God, and it is by openly declaring your faith that you are saved. As the Scriptures tell us, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be disgraced.” (Romans 10:9-11)

If you openly declare - that pretty much leaves out that we can be a Christian and nobody knows we are, doesn't it? Those who serve Christ, who have welcomed them into their lives, and given him control of their hearts will reveal evidence of that faith. Belief doesn't just end with a personal experience with Jesus. It continues into our everyday living - touching lives around us with that 'experience' and with the testimony of what Jesus has done in our lives.

For it is by believing in your heart (mind, will, and emotions all in agreement) that you are made right with God. Salvation is more than 'fire insurance' against hell. It is a life-altering experience that is both perfectly finished and being worked out at the same time. We are 'made right' with God at the very moment we say 'yes' to Jesus, but it can take a while for our choices to catch up with that faith experience, can it not? No matter how 'deep' our experience was with Jesus when we said 'yes', there will continue to be moments day-by-day when we must choose to live according to his will and not our own.

That is where the rubber meets the road, isn't it? In choosing his will over our own when all we want to do is go our own way at times. We want to procrastinate - he wants us to move. We want to rest - he wants us to rise to the challenge. We want life to be easy - he promises us he will be with us in hard times. Each step of the way, we are faced with 'willful choices' that require us to lean into his promise to not only make us right with God, but to keep us right with God. This is how we live above disgrace - we press into his promise to make us new.

Being made new doesn't mean we are 'rebirthed' as babies from the womb, but it does mean there will be a 'rebirth' of our choices. They will come from a different desire than before we said 'yes' to Jesus. There will be moments when the same choices that always caused us to trip up in the past will crop up again, but the desire to move into that choice will be different. There will be a strength that comes to resist it and to move away from it instead of into it. This is when others will begin to see the life-transformation that has occurred 'in Christ Jesus'. This is when our testimony becomes a thing that brings honor to him. Just sayin!