Horatius Bonar (1808-1889)
“How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?”—Romans 6:2.
Before I can live a Christian life, I must be a Christian. Am I such? I ought to know this. Do I know it, and in knowing it, know whose I am and whom I serve? Or is my title to the name still questionable, still a matter of anxious debate and search?
If I am to live as a son of God, I must be a son, and I must know it. Otherwise my life will be an artificial imitation, a piece of barren mechanism, performing certain excellent movements, but destitute of vital heat and force. Here many fail. They try to live like sons in order to make themselves sons, forgetting God’s simple plan for attaining sonship at once: “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God” (Joh 1:12). The faith of many among us is, after all, but an attempt to believe; their repentance but an attempt to repent; and in so doing they only use words that they have learned from others…God’s description of a Christian man is clear and welldefined. It has about it so little of the vague and wide that one wonders how any mistake should have arisen on this point, and so many dubious, so many false claims put in.
A Christian is one who “has tasted that the Lord is gracious” (1Pe 2:3); who has been “begotten again unto a lively hope” (1Pe 1:3); who has been “quickened together with Christ” (Eph 2:5); made a partaker of Christ (Heb 3:14); a partaker of the divine nature (2Pe 1:4); who “has been delivered from this present evil world” (Gal 1:4).
Source:
Love Jesus 13 
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