What is a Christian?

Over the last three Sundays, we have been working through a question that appears simple: What is a Christian?

But before we can answer that question well, we have to go further back. Christianity does not begin with a list of religious behaviors and church traditions. It begins with God, with who He made us to be, and with an honest account of what has gone wrong.

Here are the three foundational questions we've addressed so far.

Who Is God?

We began by asking, “Where did your picture of God come from?” We all carry assumptions about God. These come from many different sources such as family, church, spiritual experiences, painful moments, culture, or simply our imagination. But Acts 17 confronts us with an important truth: God is not someone we get to invent. God made us, sustains us, and is near to us. And the best part is, He has made Himself known. That means knowing God requires humility, because I have to let God tell me who He is rather than asking Him to fit the picture I have already created. When our invention of God meets who God says He is, we have a problem.

When Scripture challenges my picture of God, which one gets to change?

That is an important starting point for Christian faith. We do not create God in our image. We learn to know Him on His terms. Here's the next question and sermon topic we tackled.

What Makes Humans Unique?

Once we ask who God is, the next question naturally follows: Who are we? Psalm 8 holds together two truths that we often separate. Human beings are small, but far from insignificant! Compared to the vastness of God's creation, we may appear as one small part, but that is not the case. Yes, we are limited, dependent, and temporary.

But the Bible is clear that God notices us, gives us worth, and entrusts us with responsibility. Genesis describes humanity as "made in the image of God"—created to represent Him in His world. That led us to this big idea:

Our worth and purpose come from God, not from what we achieve.

That matters because we spend enormous energy trying to prove that we matter. We measure ourselves by our work, our success, our families, our abilities, our appearance, our reputation, or other people's opinions. But those things were never designed to determine human worth. We do not achieve our worth. We receive it from the God who made us. And that truth changes not only how we see ourselves, but also how we see other people. If worth comes from God, then I do not get to decide who matters.

Every person I encounter is someone I am called to treat as a person who matters to God. Imagine if we lived like this. What would life look like? Yet we see the broken world and know that something doesn't add up.

What Went Wrong?

This is the elephant in the room: If God is good, and human beings were created with worth and purpose, why does the world look like this? How come we hurt one another? Why do we lie, hide, envy, exploit, control, and destroy?

We must go back to the Bible to make sense of this. Jeremiah 2 gave us a vivid picture.

God describes Himself as “the fountain of living waters,” but His people abandon the fountain and dig cisterns for themselves—broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

That gave us a deeper way of thinking about sin. Sin certainly includes breaking God's commands. But Scripture shows us that underneath our sinful behavior is something more relational:

Sin is more than breaking God's rules; it is trading God for what cannot give life.

We called it source-switching. It is our rejection of God as the source and our switching to created things to give us what only the Creator can give. Here's where this gets tricky: they are good things: work, relationships, money, comfort, family, achievement, approval, even religious activity. None of those are "bad" things, and they are all great gifts from the Lord!

The problem is that we ask a gift to become the Giver. A created thing cannot carry the weight of being our god. Eventually, as Jeremiah alluded to, every broken cistern leaks.

The story so far

Put these three weeks together and a larger biblical story begins to emerge.

God made us and has made Himself known.

God gave humanity worth and purpose.

Humanity walked away from the Source and began looking elsewhere for life.

And that story is not merely about “people out there.” It is much more personal than that. We are those people who carry distorted pictures of God and look to achievement or approval to tell us what we are worth. We all have broken cisterns—things we quietly expect to give us security, identity, meaning, or life. Anyone who has leaned heavily on a source that eventually crumbled knows the pain of realizing this firsthand.

So the question of Christianity cannot remain theoretical. It forces us to ask some deeply personal questions such as: Where am I allowing something other than Scripture to define God? What am I using to measure my worth? What am I asking to give me what only God can give? Don't miss this: those questions aren't meant to produce shame. They are invitations to honesty. The God who exposes our broken cisterns is also the God who invites us back to the Source. And that is where we find ourselves three weeks into this series: learning who God is, remembering who He made us to be, and telling the truth about how desperately we need Him.