What Is It to Accept Christ?
To accept Christ is to accept his life, his love, his service, to accept his pardon and his forgiveness, to accept his cross and his power. It is to accept this simply, naturally, to accept it as a free gift, paying nothing for it. And then, because we honor him and love him, to follow him, and try to do his work in his way. Salvation by faith means that we work for him because he has saved us. If we try to buy peace and joy by working for them, we make a mistake. We are to take God's gift as we take the sunlight and the air, and we are to live in his grace just as we live in the sunlight and the air. Regeneration is new birth, new life. We can not re-create ourselves. The birth from above must come from above, not from us. We are to leave all questions of new birth to God, take his gift of life, and live naturally and simply because he has given that gift to us. Atonement is at-one-ment. It is reconciliation with God; it is being at one with him. It has cost God something to make this atonement possible. That cost is represented to us by the suffering and death of Christ. It remains simply for us to be at one with him, to make his will our will, by taking the gift which he freely bestows upon us, and by living the life which through the life of Jesus Christ he has interpreted to us. Salvation, then, does not come by work; it is not given to us as wages because we have paid for it by service. It comes by the faith which accepts it, the faith which is shown in the obedience of love, by doing the work which Christ bids us to do, and living the life which he enables us to live, accepting the commission which he proffers to us in the words, "As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you."—Outlook.