Dear Editor,
I read an article on Tuesday’s Opinion page titled “The Austin Bomber was a White Christian. Ban Them All!”
This article exposes the mindset of most journalists, news commentators, talk show hosts and the huge majority of our nation’s people group.
Here is their mindset. A person who is white, brought up in middle America, waves an American flag, votes mostly Republican, carries a gun, clings to the Bible, goes to a church, maybe holds Bible study at their home, maybe homeschools their kids, has a basic moral standard, is polite to their neighbor, wants to make America great again, has been declared by this group of people to be Christian.
This idea of Christianity proves beyond any doubt whatsoever the total and complete ignorance of people to what a Christian really is.
I am so tired of the tag Christian. It is wrongly used and it is very irritating to those who know what a Christian really is.
A Christian is a Christ-In-You. Let me try to explain this so it is understandable to those who totally miss the truth.
A Christian is made by a miracle of God. They are new creations recreated by the Lord. He has taken an old sin-filled human, done a miracle of conversion on them and recreated them into a whole new person.
See, the natural person has within them a sin nature. We are born with this sin nature. We are condemned already, dead to God in our transgressions and sin, none are righteous, none are good, all have fallen short of God’s glory, the whole human race is without hope and everyone is eternally separated from God.
What you see in our world today are sin-filled creatures doing what comes natural to sinners. They are murderers at heart.
Once a sin natured person realizes their sinful self, they have an opportunity to come back to God, through the work of Jesus Christ to receive this reconstructive work.
This is not accomplished by anything the human does. It is accomplished by what God does in the human.
See the miracle of becoming a Christian is God’s work of placing a new Holy Spirit, holy nature, the Spirit of Christ into a human being. This is not natural. This is not accomplished by human effort or human works. This is only accomplished by God when He recreates the human into a new creature by giving the person something he didn’t have before.
The Bible calls the Christ-In-You an alien, a stranger, a foreigner in this realm of the world. They are not natural. They have been rebirthed into a new being by God. They are the children of God and they are different from the natural person who lives in this world trying to be something they are not.
I would like to ban the use of the world Christian for anyone who has not been miraculously transformed by God into a new creature having had God impart a new Holy Spirit into the old sin-filled person.
If you are not a Christ-In-You, you are not a Christian. I call on all journalists, commentators, talk show hosts and the American public to understand what a Christian is before tagging sin-natured humans with a super-natural title. This leads to a lot of confusion and ends up blaming the true Christ-In-You with acts of violence and impurity that they would never be a part of.
Stop it!

Pastor Thomas R. Swain
First Church of God
Great Bend