Should We Celebrate Spiritual Birthdays?

John MacArthur spoke on Grace to You recently regarding the proofs of salvation. In one sermon, he asked the congregation to raise their hands if they could remember the exact time and date when they gave control of their lives over to Christ.

John pointed out that this isn't a guarantee that a person is saved. It merely tells people that you committed yourself at a certain stage in your life to the lordship of Jesus and that you follow him.

But what of those folks who don't remember the transition from believing about God and believing, a.k.a. trusting, in Christ? Are these people not Christians because they can't pinpoint their exact time of conversion?

Look at what Christ himself had to say about the matter. During his Sermon on the Mount, he said in Matthew 7:16 (KJV) "Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" Jesus spoke of those who seemed like believers in the Father outwardly but were unchanged inwardly.

As Christ concluded in Matthew 7:20, (KJV) "Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." This means that their lifestyles will reveal which sort of persons they are. If people have a genuine desire to obey God and crave more knowledge about him from the Bible, that indicates their salvation is genuine. If, on the other hand, those people live the same way they did before, it's certain that their profession of faith wasn't from the heart.

So it is today that our lives reveal if we really were changed by our commitment to Christ or not.

Yesterday was the forty-sixth anniversary of my surrender to the Lord. I can see by what I wrote in my How I Was Razed memoir that I truly was changed. Even in the face of taunting from schoolmates regarding my love for Jesus, I still stayed true to him. Check out my wonderful testimony at Amazon.