By Chad West & Chuck Slocum 

If being good and going to church and all that kind of stuff doesn’t get you into heaven, and only accepting Jesus sacrifice for you does, that changes things.  It means that being a Christian doesn’t mean that you’re a member of the choir or a deacon or a member of a certain denomination or anything like that.  It means that you follow Jesus.

Well, what does that mean?  One of the things that it means is that our lives are now about him—our jobs, our families, our friendships—everything.  It also means that we have a story; a story of how Jesus changed our lives.  Jesus said to one new follower, “Now go and tell the people what the Lord has done for you.”  With salvation comes a responsibility to tell people about this Jesus who changes lives.

Often, we get so bogged down in the religion and marketing of a church that we almost totally ignore why we exist.  When we do that, we’re kind of like a new car with no gas, attractive but useless.  Even worse, we become, as Jesus said, like freshly painted tombs—nice on the outside, but full of dead things within.  If our lives as followers of Jesus aren’t about Jesus then they’re about us, and that just doesn’t work.  Telling people “what the Lord has done for you,” your life-changing experience with Jesus, your story, can be the turning point in someone else’s life.  Our mission is telling people about Jesus with our lives and with words.  Anything and everything else falls short.