What Is a Christian?

What is a Christian? How would you define a Christian? When you say that you are a Christian, what does that mean to you?

I think we will probably do a lot of defining during this course to make sure we’re on the same page. I think a lot of people have a lot of ideas about a lot of things! I want us to focus on what the Bible says and try to just believe that!

I guess that’s step one. This course assumes the Bible is true and that you accept the Bible is true. It will be our guide for how to follow Jesus and be His disciple, so we need to be able to trust it. If you want to learn more about how we know the Bible is true and all such related topics, Easy Peasy has an apologetics course. That’s where you’d find that.

What is a Christian? The believers in the Bible weren’t called Christians at first. In the book of Acts, they are first talked about as belonging to the Way. I like the name since Jesus is the Way! We could also state that as the believers were belonging to Christ.

We could say they were followers of Jesus. If you read the gospels, that’s what His disciples did, they literally followed Him around. What else did they do? The disciples listened to His teaching, learned from Him, and participated in His work at His direction. Jesus used the disciples to pass out the miraculously multiplied bread and fish. He could have miraculously just given it straight to everyone, or just filled their bellies! God chose to use the disciples in the work.

So, we could define a Christian as a disciple of Christ, one who follows Jesus, learns His ways, and participates in His work.