What It Means To Be A Christian...

        To be a Christian means a positive alliance with Christ. There are times of disturbance in the world when a nation may, with honor, be neutral. But a neutral Christian one can never be. "He that is not with me? is against me," said Jesus, Matt. 12:30

       But to be "with Christ" does not necessarily mean that one must be identified with any particular group of people who gather in His name and give themselves to His service. A man was found casting out devils in the name of Christ and the disciples forbade him "because he followeth not with us." It was not the character of the results which they questioned — evidently this man was succeeding in the Christlike service of leading others out from under the powers of evil that possessed them — but it was the fact that he was working independently of those who had openly announced themselves as "with" the Master. His real motive was essentially Christian, tho he was not identified with the avowed followers of Christ. The disciples reported him to the Master; and Jesus said, "Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name that can lightly speak evil of me. For he that is not against us is. for us." Mark 9: 39-40. There are loyalties and services which count for Christ because they run down into the heart of loyalty and service and place their identification there "in deed and truth" without stopping to consider the claims of the outward identification which is expressed in terms of "word and tongue." "Any person who is deliberately negative toward Christ, so that what he does is consciously in the interests of Christ's enemies, is -against Him. But anyone who has even a partial faith and whose actions are not hostile to the cause of Christ may be counted as for him," says Dr. Ozora S. Davis. Doubtless "more are with Christ than we know;" but whether we know or not, to be a Christian means a positive allegiance with Christ that God shall know and that He shall delight to honor.
       To be a Christian means that one has caught, in some vital sense, the spirit of Christ. "If any man have not the spirit of Christ he is none of His," says Paul, Rom. 8:9, implying that he who is possessed, to some vital degree, of the spirit of Christ, is His.
       Many fine questions arise as man with all his limitations attempts to put into the language of the human mind his conception of what it means to be a Christian. It can only be expressed in terms of the Spirit. He is a Christian who is one inwardly, in the spirit and not in the letter. And it is only "in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ" that it shall be fully revealed to whom the name belongs. There is suggestion and inspiration for the thoughtful, however, in such a statement as the following by Dr. Charles R. Brown: "A Christian faith, grounded in reason, vitalized by spiritual experience and made practical by being related at every point to ordinary duty, is the choicest, dearest possession any one can have for the life that now is, and it furnishes the only satisfying preparation for the life which is to come." Burr.