What Changes Are Supposed To Happen When You Become A Christian?
By: Aaron Cozort
Change is natural when a child is born. So it is true for a Christian. A Christian is not to be born in the watery birth of baptism and then continue in their old lifestyle of sin and wickedness. A Christian’s washing of regeneration in baptism and renewing by the Spirit of God should result in a drastically different individual than before they died to sin (cf. Titus 3:5).
So what things are supposed to change when you become a Christian? One of them is your mind is supposed to change because the person living inside of you is supposed to change. Ephesians, Chapter four, Verse 23 says, “And be renewed in the spirit of your mind. And that you put on the new man which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness.”
When a person is baptized into Christ, they die and they are resurrected again to a new life. They come up out of that water, a new person and they’re supposed to change. They’re supposed to think differently. Before baptism, a person might consider their lives to be without value. A person might think that this physical body is all that makes up their existence. After baptism (because it wasn’t to clean the physical body that they were baptized, but to cleanse the spiritual body) they should readily understand that they have a spirit (inner person) that is alive in addition to, and separate from, their body.
Before baptism, a person might consider their evil deeds to be of no great consequence. Especially if a person considered this physical existence to be all that there was to life, the consequences of committing wicked deeds or sins could never be any greater than death and the end of this physical life. Yet, the Scriptures make it clear that the end of this life is just the beginning of judgment. Hebrews 9:27 reads, “And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment…”
2 Thessalonians 1:5-9 reads, “…since it is a righteous thing with God to repay with tribulation those who trouble you, and to give you who are troubled rest with us when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on those who do not know God, and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power…“
When you were baptized, did you come out and begin living a new life? Or did you go back to the old one — think about that today.