The Beautiful Re-Prefix Of Christianity

While it’s true that Christianity is best spelt – D O N E, it is best described with words which use its beautiful prefix: re. These re-words are both a powerful set of descriptions and a set of glorious reminders about what Christ has done for us.

The Gospel has given the world a graphic and richer meaning to its uniquely used words: grace, love, eternal, mercy. But the Gospel is captured with re-prefixed words.

We should never take for granted just how beautiful the Gospel is. For those who have failed, it is the hope of a fresh start. For those who have lost their way, it is a light, a map, and a compass, to get them back on the strait and narrow path. For those who have been broken, hurt and damaged, by a world that treats people as things, it is the Owner’s Manual description of a person of infinite value to a God who loves them infinitely. For those who have lived their life without regard to God, His Word, His ways, or His will, it is the guarantee of His forgiveness and debt cancellation. For those who feel abandoned, alone, and rejected, it is the legal document informing them that the wealthiest Person in the Universe has personally sought them out and begun legal proceedings to adopt them and make them His heir! 

Each of these aspects of the Father’s love revealed through His Son, Jesus The Christ, might be told with re-prefixed words.

For a person to receive God’s offer of forgiveness from their sins and eternal life with Him in Paradise, they must have the Holy Spirit help them to realise their true condition of guilt and shame before God. They must have the Holy Spirit enable them to repent of their sins. They must return to the Lord. In doing what the Holy Spirit empowers them to do they are regenerated (born-again). They are simultaneously reconciled to God the Father by Christ. They are also redeemed by Christ and adopted by the Father. 

This is what makes Christianity unique from all other ‘religions’. It offers people the hope of not only a fresh start, but the power to change, and become a new person. I am not who I was a few years ago. I will not be who I am in a few years. The Gospel is changing me. It is enabling me to become who I long to be and who Christ is wanting me to be. Because, in it I am enabled to behold Christ. And as I do, I am changed, transformed. This is why God has ordained for the Gospel to be preached each Sunday to His people so that they can behold Christ and undergo its transforming grace. 

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
Second Corinthians 3:18

It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, or what’s been to you, you can be reconciled to the Father, redeemed by Christ, and regenerated by the Holy Spirit. By beholding Christ in the Sixty-Six Books of the Gospel you are given a new start, a new beginning, a chance to start over, but more than that: you begin to become a new person.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
Second Corinthians 5:17

You are never “a million miles” from God. You are always just one prayer away. 

Pastor Andrew

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THE THREE KEY Re WORDS OF THE GOSPEL TABLED

RECONCILED	For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. Romans 5:10	The Gospel reveals the truth about our standing before an infinitely holy God: enemies. In John 3:19 Jesus declared this truth by stating that without being reconciled to God, we all hate God and love the darkness (deeds of rebellion toward God). We need to be reconciled by a Mediator. and through him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross. Colossians 1:20 Jesus Christ has reconciled those who put their trust in Him by paying our debt to God on the Cross with His own blood!
REDEEMED	In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. Galatians 4:3-5	In the days of slave markets, when family members were sold off to pay a family debt, another family member could attend the slave auction and ‘redeem’ the auctioned family member by ‘purchasing’ them to cancel the debt. This is the imagery behind the Apostle Paul’s language in Galatians 4 when he describes us as being enslaved with Christ coming to redeem us and then adopting us God’s children.  Becoming a Christian doesn’t just save us from an eternity in Hell, it changes our status from orphan to adopted heir with Christ! (Rom. 8:17)
REGENERATED	He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, Titus 3:5	Biblically, “death” is not the end. Neither is it ceasing to exist. Rather, it means separation. James tells us that the body without the spirit is dead. When a soul is separated from God because of sin, it is dead. “We who were dead in trespasses and sins have now been made alive in Christ” writes Paul to the Ephesians in chapter 2. When a dead soul is brought to faith in Christ by being reconciled by Christ when they are redeemed by Christ, they are regenerated by the Holy Spirit. Jesus told Nicodemus that this was like being born again (John 3:3).