More Than a Moment: Belonging to Christ

“Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?”

I was asked that once, standing in a grocery store parking lot, wearing a clerical collar, as I was a Lutheran pastor at the time.

The woman who asked meant well. I could see the sincerity in her eyes, the earnest care of someone who genuinely wanted to know if I was going to be okay for eternity. God bless her. But her question caught me sideways.

She had assumed, apparently, that I was the sort of person who wore religion the way one wears a uniform—professional, external, perhaps even hollow at the center. She wanted to know if I had the real thing, the personal thing.

I stood there for a moment, collar and all, and I did not quite know how to answer.

Not because I doubted my faith. But because her question, sincere as it was, contained assumptions I could not fully explain while standing on asphalt with 90-degree summer sun blasting off of it (and wearing a black shirt).

I suspect that many Christians who have been asked this question, or who have asked it of others, have never paused to examine what lies beneath it. The phrase “personal Lord and Savior” is not found anywhere in Scripture. It emerged as a piece of American revivalist vocabulary, and while it captures something true, it also risks flattening the vast, ancient, and communal mystery of Christian life into a single transactional moment.

There is more to being a Christian than an instant of acceptance. And there is more to Christ than what is merely “personal.”

 

The Beginning Is Not the Whole

Consider the way Jesus called his first disciples. “As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ Immediately they left their nets and followed him” (Matthew 4:18-20).

Peter and Andrew responded. They dropped their nets. That was the beginning.

But nothing in that moment made Peter into the man he would become. Between that first step on the shore and the day he would be crucified upside down in Rome lay years of walking, stumbling, denying, weeping, being restored, preaching, suffering, and learning.

The moment of following was real. But it was not the completion of anything. It was the beginning of everything.

The Greek verb Jesus uses, ἀκολουθέω (akolouthéō), means “to follow” in the sense of accompanying, walking with, going the same road. It is a verb of duration. It is not a verb of decision. Jesus does not say, “Make a decision about me.” He says, “Come, walk with me. For the rest of your life.”

Saint Paul understood this. Writing to the Philippians, near the end of his life, having endured shipwreck, imprisonment, beatings, and every kind of trial, he wrote: “Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12).

Paul, of all people, could have rested on a single dramatic moment of conversion. He had one. He had been struck to the ground on the road to Damascus. He had heard the voice of Christ. If anyone had a “personal” experience of accepting Jesus, it was Paul.

And yet Paul, writing decades later, insists that he has not arrived. He is still pressing on. He is still being made Christ’s own.

This is how Christians have historically used the word conversion.

Not just a single event, but a lifelong journey. The Greek metanoia (translated as "repent") is not a moment but a movement.

It is the daily reorientation of the heart, mind, and will toward God. Every morning, a Christian is invited to convert again. Every evening, to repent and begin anew. The saints did not consider themselves finished. Teresa of Ávila, near the end of her life, spoke of herself as still a beginner in prayer. John of the Cross wrote of the soul’s journey as a dark night that stretches through years, not minutes.

To reduce the Christian life to an initial acceptance is like saying a marriage is complete on the wedding day.

The vows are real. The love is real. But everything is still ahead. The wedding is the doorway, not the house.

 

More than “Personal”

Then there is that word: personal.

I do not want to be unfair. There is something genuine in the impulse behind “personal Lord and Savior.” Christianity is not merely a set of doctrines to affirm intellectually. It is a relationship. Jesus is not an idea. He is a Person, and he calls each of us by name. “I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). That is astonishingly intimate. There is nothing wrong with saying that Jesus is your Savior.

That's what "personal" really means. It means pertaining to a person, a relationship. But in our culture, when someone says, "that's personal," we usually mean, "that's none of your business, it's private."

When “personal” begins to mean “private,” when it begins to mean “just Jesus and me,” then we need to reconsider the term.

Look at the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, and even when he counseled them, “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret” (Matthew 6:6), the prayer he then gave them was not “My Father.” It was “Our Father” (Matthew 6:9).

Every phrase is plural. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Even when we pray alone, in the secret of our own room, we pray as members of a body. We pray with and for others. We cannot say “our” without them.

Paul’s language for the Church is not accidental. “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12:27). The Greek word for “members,” μέλη (mélē), isn't about belonging to a club, or having your name on a roster. It refers to limbs and organs of a body.

A hand is not a healthy hand if it is severed from the arm. An eye is not a healthy eye if it is plucked from the head. Paul is not offering a poetic metaphor. He is telling us the ontology of Christian existence. To be in Christ is to be in his body, and his body is both plural and singular, one body many members, living, breathing, and gathering together.

The early Church spread so quickly largely because of this truth. When Tertullian described the Christians of his day, pagans marveled: “See how they love one another.” The witness was not, “See how each of them has made a private decision for Jesus.” The witness was communal. It was a life shared.

And this is why the Christian faith cannot survive as a purely individual project. A Christian without a community, without the sacraments, without the Scriptures received in the midst of God’s people, without others who correct and encourage and pray, is a limb detached from a body. For a while, perhaps, it may retain some warmth. But it cannot live long alone.

 

The Deep Root of Belonging

There is a beautiful moment in John’s Gospel where Jesus prays for his disciples on the night before he dies. He prays: “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:20-21).

The unity of Christians is not about sitting around a fire and singing kumbaya. It is missional. It is how the world will come to know that the Father sent the Son. When we fragment into a thousand private spiritualities, when we treat faith as if it were a matter of personal preference, we obscure the very witness Jesus prayed we would bear.

The unity is grounded in something even deeper. “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you.” The communion of the Church is a participation in the communion of the Trinity itself. God is not a solitary monad. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, an eternal community of self-giving love. When we are drawn into Christ, we are drawn into that life. And that life is, by its very nature, shared.

So the question is not, “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?” The deeper question is: “Are you being drawn, daily, more fully into the life of the Triune God, in company with all the saints, through the long, patient work of God in you of becoming like Christ?”

That question does not fit on a bumper sticker. It might not be a quick and easy slogan to use when approaching someone in a parking lot. But it is the deeper truth.

 

Living the Long Road

What does this mean for the way we actually live? Because this is actually good news for us.

First, be patient with yourself. If you have followed Christ for many years, you may still find yourself struggling with the same faults, the same fears, the same hesitations. This does not mean your faith is false. It means you are still on the road. The Christian life is not a finish line crossed once and celebrated forever. It is a walk. Keep walking.

Second, examine where you may have privatized your faith. Do you pray only for yourself and those close to you? Try widening the circle. Pray for the person you find difficult. Pray for the Church across the world. I light a candle in my morning prayers, write on an index card several people I'd like to pray for (including all of my readers, all of you), and light a candle (or my oil lamp), representing that this is a prayer I'd like to offer up continually throughout my day. Today I have written on it a few people who have been creating friction with my family recently. I won't say they are my enemies, but if we are to pray for our enemies, certainly we should pray for those whose agendas run contrary to yours. Pray even for those you will never meet, those suffering persecution across the world, those who are in prison, those who are poor and hungry.

Third, invest in the body of Christ. If you have drifted from a worshiping community, return. If you are in one, deepen your presence there. Serve. Show up. Bring a meal to someone. Sit with someone who grieves. The body of Christ is not an abstraction. It is the people in the pews next to you, the neighbor across the fence, the stranger at the shelter.

Fourth, practice small, daily conversions. Each morning, offer the day to God. Each evening, examine where you have fallen short and where God has been faithful. Do not wait for a dramatic moment to renew your commitment. Renew it now. And tomorrow. And the day after.

Fifth, remember that the goal is not to have merely accepted Jesus. The goal is to become like him. “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

From one degree of glory to another. That is the shape of the Christian life. Not a single acceptance alone so you can get on with your life, but a continual transformation. Not a private possession, but a shared inheritance. Not a moment, but a lifetime.

And the good news, the very best news, is that the One who began this good work in you will bring it to completion (see Philippians 1:6). You are not walking alone. You never were.

 

God Bless,

Judah