What is a Christian?

In this tiny booklet, “What is a Biblical Christian” by Albert Martin, from Chapel Library, Al Martin that Christianity is not simply a religion of knowledge. Answering the question “What is a Biblical Christian” is important in order to preserve the church from false professors of faith.

He gave four strands of the Biblical answer to this question. A Christian is a person “who faced realistically the problem of his own personal sin” (bad record and bad heart), who “has seriously considered the ONE DIVINE REMEDY for sin” (in the person and substitutionary work of Christ on the cross), who “has wholeheartedly complied with the terms for obtaining God’s provision for sin” (believing repentance and penitent faith), and who “manifests in his life that his claims to repentance and faith are real” (Spirit-wrought evidence).

Here are some of the quotations from the booklet that are worth pondering in answering the question, “What is a Biblical Christian?”

One of the many things that distinguishes the Christian faith from the other religions of the world is that Christianity is essentially and fundamentally a sinner’s religion.

...we see that it is not oversimplification to say that everything that the Bible teaches about the doctrine of sin can be reduced to these two fundamental categories: the problem of a bad record and the problem of a bad heart.

The Bible teaches that the problem of our sin arises not only from what we have done, but from what we are. When Adam sinned, he not only became guilty before God, he also became defiled and polluted in his nature.

The disposition of every human heart by nature can be pictured as a clenched fist raised against the living God. This is the inward problem of a bad heart—a heart that loves sin, a heart that is the fountain of sin, a heart that is enmity against God.

A biblical Christian is a person who has in all seriousness taken to heart his own personal problem of sin. 

A unique feature of the Christian faith is that it is not a religious self-help scheme, where you patch yourself up with the aid of God. Just as surely as it is a unique tenet3 of the Christian faith that Christ is the only Savior for sinners, so it is also a unique tenet of the Christian faith that all of our true help comes down from above and meets us where we are. 

If your personal problem of sin is ever to be remedied in a biblical way, it will be remedied only as you have personal dealings with the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Such is the unique strand of the Christian faith: the sinner in all his need, united to the Savior in all the fullness of His grace...

the cross is the monumental display of how God can be just and still pardon guilty sinners. At the cross, God, having imputed the sins of His people to Christ, pronounces judgment upon His Son as the representative of His people. There on the cross God pours out the vials of His wrath unmixed with mercy until His Son cries out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Psa 22:1; Mat 27:46).

You will never know the forgiving mercy of God while you are still wedded to your sins.

True faith makes you willing to be counted as a fool and crazy—willing to be considered outdated—because you believe that there are eternal, unchangeable moral and ethical standards.

To God be the glory!