Congratulations, if you have completed the first five steps of salvation! Including; hearing the word and having faith, believing that Jesus is God's son, repenting of your sins, confessing that Jesus is God's son, and being baptized for the forgiveness of sins. But your Christian walk has not ended yet! You have just begun! The last step of remaining faithful until death is the hardest step of all, because now you are a Christian and must act like it.
In II Peter 2:20-22, Peter tells of the importance of remaining faithful. He wrote, "For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment handed on to them. It has happened to them according to the true proverb, "A dog returns to its own vomit," and "A sow, after washing, returns to wallowing in the mire."
Becoming a Christian is the most important decision of our lives. We must realize that it requires a turning away from our old lives and filling our new lives with Christ-like goals, attitudes, and activities. We must be careful not to fall back into our old ways, back into sin, and away from Christ and eternal life. After all, when the day of judgement comes we all want to be as Paul when he said, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing." II Timothy 4:7,8 |
