Four Crucial Goals for the Christian Life

I once read in Dr. Charles Stanley’s In Touch magazine his listing of four essentials for finding New Life in Christ.  It is well-worth sharing:

1.     Claim your salvation and live into it:  God’s unconditional love and un-deserved redemption, simply stated, gives you the spiritual and emotional freedom to grow, change and to be transformed by the power of God in your life. 

2.  Be Intentional about your spiritual growth and your relationship with God: Growing in the image of Christ involves intentionality.  In your New Life (Born Again life, to use Jesus’ words) relationship with God through Christ, the Holy Spirit has taken up residence in you.  With His power and presence, you can seek God’s face daily and grow in your knowledge and love of the Lord. 

3.   Immerse yourself in a caring, loving, sharing Christian fellowship: True Christian fellowship is a foretaste of the Communion of Saints gathered in Heaven from throughout time and for always.  It is in relationship with others that you learn to unconditionally love the way Christ unconditionally loves you.  You are called by Christ to move ever more deeply into being involved in other people’s lives.   It is in the Church that you can be a blessing to others, and in the process yourself can be blessed by others.

4.    Allow God’s Holy Spirit to lead you from self-absorption to self-giving: At its heart the Christian journey is a movement from self-absorption to self-giving.  To be like Christ is to sacrifice, even suffer, for others.  Jesus says in John 15:13, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  This sounds like something reserved for the Saints (with a capital S), but to think so would be unbiblical.