RECEIVING JESUS CHRIST INTO YOUR LIFE
 
                                                                By A. W. Tozer

 
Accepting Jesus Christ, receiving Jesus Christ into your life means that you have made an attachment to the person of Christ that is revolutionary in that it reverses the life and transforms it completely.

It is an attachment to the person of Christ. It is complete in that it leaves no part of the life unaffected. It exempts no area of the life of the total man; his total being.

This kind of an attachment to the person of Christ means that Christ is not just one of several interests. ! It means that He is the one exclusive attachment, as the sun is the exclusive attachment of the earth. As the earth revolves around the sun, and the sun is its center and the core of its being, so Jesus Christ is the Son of righteousness, and to become a Christian by the grace of God means to come into His orbit and begin to revolve around Him exclusively.  In the sense of spiritual life and desire and devotion, it means to revolve around Him completely, exclusively-not partly around Him.

This does not mean that we do not have other relationshipswe all do, because we all live in a complex world.  You give your heart to Jesus. He becomes the center of your transformed life.  But you may be a man with a family.  You are a citizen of the country. You have a job and an employer. In the very nature of things, you have other relationships. But by faith and through grace, you! have now formed an exclusive relationship with your Savior, Jesus Christ. All of your other relationships are now conditioned and determined by your one relationship to Jesus Christ, the Lord.

Jesus laid down the terms of Christian discipleship and there have been people who have criticized and said, "Those words of Jesus sound harsh and cruel."  His words were plain and He was saying to every one of us: "If you have other relationships in life which are more important and more exclusive than your spiritual relationship to the eternal Savior, then you are not my disciple."

To accept Christ, then, is to attach ourselves to His holy person; to live or die, forever. He must be first and last and all. All of our other relationships are conditioned and determined and colored by our one exclusive relation to Him.

To accept Christ without reservation is to accept His friends as your friends from that moment on. If you find yourself in ! an area where Christ has no friends, you will be friendless except for the one Friend who sticketh closer than a brother.

It means that you will not compromise your life. You will neither compromise your talk nor your habits of life. We have to confess that we find there are people who are such cowards that when they are with a crowd that denies the Son of God and disgraces the holy name of Jesus, they allow themselves to be carried away in that
direction.  Are they Christians?  You will have to answer that.

A Christian is one who has accepted Jesus' friends as his friends and Jesus' enemies as his enemies by an exclusive attachment to the per­son of Christ.

I made up my mind a long time ago. Those who declare themselves enemies of Jesus Christ must look upon me as their enemy-and I ask no quarter from them. And if they are the friends of Jesus Christ they are my friends and I do not care what color they are or what denomination they belong to.

To accept the Lord means to accept His ways as our ways. We have taken H! is Word and His teachings as the guide in our lives. To accept Christ means that I accept His rejection as my rejection. When I accept Him I knowingly and willingly accept His cross as my cross. I accept His life as my life-back from the dead I come and
up into a different kind of life. It means that I accept His future as my future.

I am talking about the necessity of an exclusive attachment to His person-that is what it means to accept Christ. If the preachers would tell people what it actually means to ac­cept Christ and receive Him and obey Him and live for Him; we would have fewer converts, but those who would come and commit would not backslide and
founder.  They would stick.

Actually, preachers and ministers of the gospel of Christ should remember that they are going to stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and they will have to tell a holy Savior why they betrayed His people in this way.

Now, please do not go! out and tell people that Mr. Tozer says you should never use those words, "accept Christ." I have tried to make it plain that we should always invite those who are not Christians to come to Jesus, to believe what God says about the Savior, to receive Him by faith into their lives and to obey Him; and to accept Christ as
their Savior if they know what it meansan exclusive attachment to the per­son of Christ.

Are you aware that many of the great preachers and the great evangelists who have touched the world, including such men as Ed­wards and Finney in the past, have declared that the church is being betrayed by those who insist on Christianity being made too easy. Oh, what a host of people have been betrayed into thinking that they were converted when all that they did was to join a religious group.

I would say frankly that moral sanity re­quires that we settle this important matter first of all, settling our personal and sa! ving relation­ship with God. The way some of us live, we ought not to be surprised when some concerned friend or brother asks, "Are we Christians, indeed?"

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Yours in Christ,
Paul N. F.