7. What do I do next?

You’ve said the sinner’s prayer: you’ve confessed your sins; you’ve asked for God’s forgiveness; you’ve committed yourself to being His disciple.

He has forgiven you, as He promised that He would; He has given you new life – eternal life; you’ve been born again; you’re now a child of God – a new creation in Christ.

Hallelujah! Heaven is celebrating! (Luke 15:7,10)

But now what? What do you do next?

Before we get into that, I want you to think about this passage of scripture:

The portion that I want to focus on is verses 28, 29, and 30.

Whenever people discover that you’re a Christian, their reaction may not be what you would like it to be. There are people who are anti-Christian and anti-God, and they will challenge you with questions or objections such as:

“If your God’s so good, why is there so much evil in the world?”

“If your God’s so loving and caring, why is there so much suffering in the world?”

“What about the Palestinians?”

“What about all those paedophile priests?”

“Science has proven God doesn’t exist. Come on, show me a miracle!”

“If you were a real Christian you’d be doing ‘this’ or ‘that’. You’re nothing but a hypocrite, like the rest of them!”

Now, these are important and pertinent questions and objections, and I hope to deal with all of them and more elsewhere on this website, but it’s unlikely that you’d be able to give convincing answers to them the day after you gave your life to Christ.

You’ll also come across well-meaning but unwise believers who’ll be advising you that you need to be doing ‘this’, and doing it ‘this’ way, and not doing ‘that’, and not going ‘there’, and not having dealings with ‘them’.

All of this can put you under pressure and make you feel overwhelmed, inadequate, a failure, and that you might as well give up, because this Christianity business is too hard.

And that’s exactly what the devil wants you to do – to give up and go back to your old life.

So, look again at verses 28 to 30 of Matthew chapter 11.

What Jesus wants to do is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I have just described. Instead of laying a burden on your shoulders that you’re unable to bear, He wants you to find rest for your soul by learning from Him.

He knows that you don’t have all the answers, but He knows how to teach you so that in time you will have.

He knows that you can’t do all of the things that experienced Christians do without thinking, but He wants to teach you so that you will be able to.

We’ve all watched infants learning to walk. They don’t just get up on the morning of their first birthday and go out and run a marathon.

They get up, take half a step, then go down on their bum.

But they don’t stay down.

You learned to walk at your pace. I learned to walk at my pace.

I know a child who never took a step before she was two. Now she walks and runs as well as anyone.

Remember, Christianity is about being taught by God how to live a Godly lifestyle. It’s a process, and it’s not a formula. It’s a RELATIONSHIP.

Jesus does require you to take His yoke upon your shoulders, but this does not mean that He’s driving you with a stick and a carrot. In reality, you and He are yoked together like a team of horses. The two of you are pulling together.

The difference is that He’s pulling harder and He’s taking the lead and He’s taking the strain. All you have to do is follow His lead and do what He guides you to do.

That makes life a lot easier than trying to live up to a standard that somebody else has set and that’s beyond what you’re able to manage.

However, on the positive side, as you go along on this journey you will find that you receive wise counsel and strong encouragement from many saints who know God well and want you to be the best ‘you’ that you can be.

They have spent years under Jesus’s easy yoke and have been taught by God not only how to walk blamelessly before Him (Genesis 17:1; Luke 1:6) but also how to share in His Fatherly responsibilities by being loving shepherds of His precious flock (Acts 20:28; 1 Peter 5:2), of which you are now an important member.

So, having said all that, let’s have a look at some aspects of learning under Jesus’s yoke, some of the keys to having a successful and fruitful Christian life.

1. Prioritise Your Relationship With God

Christianity is not a RELIGION, it’s a RELATIONSHIP.

Relationships take time. They don’t develop by accident. They develop on purpose.

You make time for the people that are important in your life – your family members, your spouse, your children.

If you’ve ever been in love, you’ll have found yourself making lots of time to be with your special person, or even to just think about them.

Jesus is the most special person you’ll ever know. Knowing Him and knowing God the Father is the heart of your new life. Listen to what Jesus says in what is known as His ‘high priestly prayer’:

So, how do you get to know God?

The same way as you would get to know anyone else: spend time with Him; share your heart with Him, and let Him share His heart with you; get involved in what He’s doing, and let Him get involved in what you’re doing.

It’s good to have special times with God, but any time can be a special time simply by inviting Him to participate with you in whatever you’re doing, whether that be doing homework, doing housework, doing paid work, or going for a walk, going fishing, or going to a wedding.

Jesus loves a wedding! (John 2:1-11)

But time set aside for just you and God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is especially important.

Start the day with Jesus. When you wake up, commit yourself and your day into His hands. This takes only a few seconds, but it establishes a good foundation to build on.

Your day will begin in victory, not defeat; in joy, not despair; in faith, not anxiety.

Make time during your day to get alone with God. Morning time is best, because it means that you’re engaging with God first before all of the other things that put demands on your time and attention, and you can commit them to God before they happen.

This may not be feasible because of your commitments or your schedule, so some other time of day may suit you better. There is no hard and fast rule. What’s right for you is what’s right for you.

Ask the Lord to help you with this and enable you to make the opportunity that you need. He’ll be very happy to answer that prayer.

So, what do you do in your special times with God, in these ‘quiet times’ or ‘personal devotions’, as they’re sometimes called?

When Jesus’s disciples asked Him to teach them how to pray, He responded by giving us what’s known as ‘the Lord’s Prayer’ (Matthew 6:5-15; Luke 11:1-13). Here it is in the traditional 17th century version that I learned as a child and is used in many churches today:

This is a model prayer. I don’t suppose that Jesus meant us to repeat it verbatim, although we often do, but to use it as a template so that our communion with God contains certain important themes, such as:

• Recognising God as our Father, who loves us as His children, and who has parental authority over us
• Recognising God’s holiness, and cultivating a desire to promote His holiness
• Praying first for what God wants – putting His will before our own
• Presenting our needs to Him, confident that He wants to meet them, and will do so
• Keeping short accounts with God by repenting as we need to, but also forgiving as we need to, for how can we expect God to forgive us if we are not willing to forgive someone else?
• Praying for His protection, acknowledging that we have enemies that are too strong for us on our own, but that none is too strong for Him
• Acknowledging His greatness, His power, His authority, His eternity – His omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence

A relationship is a two-way street, and God wants to talk to us as well as listen to us talking to Him.

How can you be taught by God unless you listen to what He has to say?

The primary way that God speaks to us is through His written word – the Bible.

Someone has said that the Bible is God’s divine instruction manual. How does He want us to live? The Bible tells us how. What is life all about? The Bible tells us what. And, very importantly, as the old children’s hymn puts it: “Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so”.

If you haven’t already done so, please read the article on the Bible in this website.

There are many ways to read the Bible. I read it like a book, starting at Genesis chapter 1 and working through it to the end at Revelation chapter 22. Then I go back to the beginning and start over again. This is what works for me.

My wife uses a daily devotional, which has a meditation for each day based on a short passage of scripture. She not only reads the quoted passage, but reads the full chapter from which it’s taken. This is what works for her.

You’ll find out what works for you, but whatever reading plan you end up with, please remember that it’s QUALITY that matters and not QUANTITY. As one man said to me, “I’d rather read two verses and have God speak to me through them than read two chapters and get nothing from them”.

But it is important to read the WHOLE Bible, not just the parts that are easy reading. Every word is in there for a reason, and if we are to understand God we need to pay attention to EVERYTHING that He says, even the parts that seem to be dry, boring, and irrelevant to modern life.

2. Nail Your Colours To The Mast

By convention, when a ship sets sail it displays on its mast the flag (or ‘the colours’) of its country or its organisation so that everyone knows who it belongs to.

When the captain’s trying to cover up for something, he may sail under a ‘flag of convenience’ or a ‘false flag’.

God wants you to be up-front and honest about your commitment to Him. As we said in the previous article, He wants you not only to believe in your heart, but also to confess with your mouth (Romans 10:9-10).

It’s tempting to raise a ‘flag of convenience’ or even a ‘false flag’ when flying your true Christian colours would bring the risk of being ridiculed, left out, discriminated against, or worse.

When I became a Christian in the 1970s, commitment to Christ was still understood and respected by most people.

Things are different in the 2020s, where many people have no idea what ‘being a Christian’ means, and others equate ‘being a Christian’ with ‘being a bigot’.

Making your first profession of faith in Jesus can be challenging, even daunting, but the sooner you do it, the easier it will be.

Pick someone whom you know to be a Christian already, or someone whom you can trust to be sympathetic, even though they might not understand where you’re coming from.

Starting with the school bully may be too much for you (it would have been for me), but if you’re up for it, go for it. Jesus loves boldness.

But whoever you tell, tell somebody. Break the ice before your faith freezes. You’ll find that once you’ve done it, the strength and courage of God, along with His joy and peace, will fill your heart.

The people you live with need to know right away. If the prospect of telling them scares you, then pray to the Lord for that boldness that Jesus loves.

Tell the other people in your life as soon as you can. Don’t try to be a ‘secret disciple’.

If you sail under a ‘flag of convenience’ for the next three months and are then invited to get involved in something that you know would not be pleasing to God, what are you going to do? If you say, “I can’t do that; I’m a Christian” and they ask you how long this has been going on, they might be justified in blaming you for having been a hypocrite for the past three months.

Read the apostle Peter’s experience in Matthew 26:69-75; Mark 14:66-72; Luke 22:55-62.

3. Get Involved In Church

Note that I didn’t say, “Go to church”. There are plenty of people who turn up at a church service on Sunday mornings, go through the religious motions, and don’t give God a thought for the rest of the week. That’s not discipleship.

Your Christian life is a coin with two sides. One side is your PERSONAL relationship with God; the other side is your CORPORATE relationship with God.

The church is not a big stone building with a tower and a bell, and it’s not a religious organisation. We use the word ‘church’ to refer to these things, the way we use the word ‘Westminster’ to refer to the UK parliament or ‘Number 10’ to refer to the Prime Minister’s staff.

The church is the Body of Christ:

When God created man in the beginning, one of the first things He said was, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). We were not designed to be lone wolves or Lone Rangers. We were designed to be members of families, members of communities.

The church is the family of God, the community of faith, the community of the redeemed, the body of Christ.

There is a universal church, comprising all the saints who are alive on the earth at any one time. There are also local congregations of various sizes: some small, some large, some vast, and some tiny.

If you have any friends or family members who are Christians, the obvious thing is to get involved in the congregation that they belong to.

Otherwise, where you live will make it either easy or difficult to find a good church. In Northern Ireland, you’ll still find a church on every street corner (almost), but elsewhere in the UK this is no longer the case. In some places you’re more likely to find a mosque or a Hindu temple than a Christian church.

By the way, all religions are not the same. If you turn up at the mosque or the temple and tell them you’ve committed your life to Christ, they will not be impressed.

Similarly, not all apparently Christian churches are genuinely Christian.

For instance, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (commonly known as the Mormons) or the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses are what you might call ‘pseudo-Christian’ in that they use a lot of Christian terminology and have Jesus at the centre of their theology, but their version of Jesus is what the apostle Paul refers to as ‘another Jesus’, not the real Son of God (2 Corinthians 11:4).

The Roman Catholic church is Christian at its core, but has a number of layers of non-Christian doctrine and practice, such as the adulation of Mary, ‘the Mother of God’. Mary was, of course, the mother of the baby Jesus, and deserves to be respected and honoured for the critical part she played in enabling God to bring salvation to the world, but she is not in any way the mother of God. Jesus is the eternal Son of God, and Mary was the mortal handmaid of the Lord (Luke 1:38 KJV).

Some key things to look for in a good church are:

• The understanding that salvation is by grace alone, through faith in Jesus Christ and what He accomplished for us on the cross
• The importance of forgiveness and cleansing from sin through the blood of Christ
• Commitment to the preaching, teaching, and study of the Bible as the true word of God
• The centrality of prayer in both private and corporate life
• Worship as a way of life
• Love for God, love for each other, and love for those around us

By the way, if you’re looking for the perfect church, I’m sorry to have to tell you that you won’t find it. This is because the church is made up of people – redeemed sinners like you and me, on a journey of salvation, but still far from perfect.

If you can’t find a good church in your area, then pray and ask God to guide you. He wants you in fellowship with other believers. He places the solitary in families (Psalm 68:6).

4. Get Baptised

Baptism is to the Christian life what a wedding is to a marriage. It’s your public commitment to a lifelong relationship of love and devotion.

Baptism is more than a religious ceremony. It’s the God-appointed opportunity for you to start a life of obedience with a simple act of obedience that is possible for anybody no matter how old, no matter how young, no matter how strong, no matter how frail.

Being baptised is the outward demonstration of an inward repentance (1 Peter 3:21).

Every Christian church practises baptism in some form.

The word ‘baptise’ comes from a Greek word meaning to dip or to immerse, so baptism should involve being dipped under the water.

Some churches prefer to sprinkle you with water instead. In fact, many churches tend to ‘baptise’ (by sprinkling) babies, who are too young to know anything about what’s happening, never mind having any sins to repent of.

If possible, find a church that will dip you. If there aren’t any in your area, then get sprinkled. After all, it’s what’s going on in your heart that God is primarily concerned about rather than the outward symbolism.

The best way to gain an understanding of baptism and what its symbolism means is to read Romans chapter 6.

I remember being in a lunch-time Bible study at work many years ago. It was led by a man who belonged to an evangelical denomination which places great emphasis on the need for baptism, and he was preaching on Romans 6 and the importance of baptism. I only remember one thing that he said, but it has stuck with me through all of these years. He said, “I won’t be doctrinaire, but I will be dogmatic. GET IT DONE!”

Let the Adventure Begin

Walking with God is the greatest adventure that you’ll ever undertake.

You might find yourself travelling the world, taking the Gospel to all kinds of remote places and unreached people-groups.

You also might find yourself staying at home, caring for your family, and pursuing a career.

But, behind the scenes, you’ll be getting to know the most wonderful and amazing Person who ever lived, and at the same time getting to understand the world around you, why it works the way it does, and who you are in the midst of it all.

In your new life of devotion to God and obedience to Christ, there are many things that He’ll want you to do for Him in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. Some of them will be a pleasure, and some of them will be a challenge; some you’ll be glad to do, and some you’ll resist, or even resent.

But whatever God requires of you from now on, the four things that I have itemised here will be included.

If you want to get your life of discipleship off to a good start, then start with these.

I’ll close by reminding you of what Jesus said about the life of discipleship that He’s called you into: