Born Again Christianity is Not a Sect.

prior to writing this article, I was confronted by an angry person who informed me that my being “born again”, meant that I was involved in some kind of sect. This person even went so far as to ask me which sect I was involved with. At the time I couldn’t help but wonder, “is there more than one? How many are there?” You see, I did not have the faintest idea what this person was referring to. I am not now, and I never have been, involved in a sect. I just looked up the word sect in a little electronic dictionary and the only definition it would give me, was “religious group”. Okay, that proves it right there, because I have never been a member of a religious group in my entire life.

Actually, I have always thought of sects as being full of crazies and weirdos, people who worship Unidentified Flying Objects, and shave their heads so they can tattoo the face of Mr. Spock on their Occipital lobes. I have never thought of any ordinary church denomination as being part of a sect, or even worse, a cult. The little dictionary defines a cult as two things: A religious system, and a faddish devotion. That must be the politically correct definition because it certainly does not cover all of what a cult means in the minds of the lay-persons. In my mind, a cult is where someone kills a chicken, pokes pins into a little doll that looks like you, and prays to the weeping willow tree in the back yard while sprinkling chicken blood on little fetish symbols, hoping to increase verility or fertility or something like that.

When I think of a cultist or a member of a sect, I certainly do not envision a Follower of Christ. But since that was what I was accused of, I want to take the time right now to explain a few things. First of all, being born again, has nothing whatsoever to do with cults or weird sects. When a person becomes born again, all it means is that the person in question has accepted Jesus as their personal savior. It means absolutely nothing else. What I am trying to say here is simple: If Jesus is your savior, you are automatically born again. That’s all the phrase actually means. There are no magic rites that must be followed, no special chants or specific deeds that must be accomplished. It does not require crawling down the Via Delorosa on your knees, or visiting a particular shrine, or saying a particular prayer so many times.

In fact, becoming born again is the simplest thing in the world to accomplish. There are no rules to follow except those that are written in the Holy Bible, and nobody is capable of following those perfectly their whole lives. There’s no special jewelry one must wear to be born again. In fact, the most popular symbol of born again Christianity is the cross, and not necessarily any particular design of cross either. Some Christians wear a crucifix, some wear real fancy crosses studded with real gem stones, while others of us go simpler with a plain, gold or silver cross. Still others wear a bunch of nails tied together in a cross shape to symbolize the nails that pierced the hands and feet of Christ on the cross. There really are no rules to follow in regard to the form or type of cross worn. Me, personally, I seldom wear any jewelry at all.

Christians often identify each other by certain symbols drawn on bumper stickers that are placed on cars. Usually this symbol will be the fish, and some Christians get pretty creative with that fish. I’ve seen them depicted about to eat Darwin, or with the cross of Christ superimposed over them. But I’ve never seen a bumper sticker showing a person down on his knees praying to that fish. Christians pray in the name of Christ, which is the most powerful name there is. Christians do not practice a form of organized religion. What they actually practice is simple faith. We have faith like a child to believe in the things that we cannot see, while non-Christians have to rely only on what they see in order to believe.

If I worshipped the moon, the family cat or the neighbor’s cow, that would be a cult or a sect, but worshipping God Himself? Who else are we supposed to worship? Of course Christians worship God. To us there is no other that can take His place. Just because we think of God as being a Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, that does not turn us into cultists. We know who and what we are, and so does God and all other opinions be hanged. Of course, harassment of Christians is nothing new, and the more outspoken you are, the more likely you are to recieve it, but sometimes I think we go just a hair too far in our weird ideas of what really makes a Christian.

As much as it pains me to say it, there are people out there calling themselves Christians, who do not, in fact, worship Christ, just as there are Jews out there who do not worship the God of Abraham and Isaac. In fact, if I may stray off the path of this article for a moment, there are Jews out there who actually worship Jesus. They are called Messianic Jews and they are hated far worse than we “born agains” are. But the “Christians” who do not really worship Christ are the ones causing the most trouble and harassment because they simply cannot understand what the rest of us are experiencing. We always hate that which we don’t understand. Trouble of it is, it’s pretty much a one-sided hatred.

The so called Christians who don’t know Christ are not Christians at all, but fakers. They lie and deceive just like their father the devil, and worst of all, they also deceive themselves, because they have no idea of what it really means to be a Christian. Why, the word Christian itself implies that you are a follower of Christ. If you are not a follower of Christ then why bother calling yourself one? Trust me when I tell you this: There is no secondary off-shoot of the Christian faith called the “born agains”. The born agains are the only real Christians there are. Remember, I told you at the beginning that born again is merely a term we use to describe people who worship Jesus as Lord and Savior. It implies nothing further than that.

Why make a mountain out of a molehill? Why place extra sins on the shoulders of people who already know they are sinners? They are sinners saved by Grace, but still sinners, nonetheless. Ask any non-believer if he or she is a sinner and chances are really good that they will deny it vehemently. Ask any born again Christian that same question and you’re liable to get an entire testimony of repented sins. People don’t like to be told they are sinners, and that is understandable because we all want to think of ourselves as “holier than thou”, but it never works, because we’re not. We are all equally sinful, and it doesn’t matter who we are, we are all sinners of the same caliber. The terrorists who destroyed all those innocent lives on 9/11 were no more guilty of sin than I am or you are. Adolph Hitler was no more guilty of sin than I am or you are.

We think of those people’s sins as being far worse than our own, because of the horrible things that they did during their lifetimes, but truth be told, God hates all sin, and none of us are righteous, no, not one. The Christian is not righteous, the Jew is not righteous, the Buddhist is not righteous, the Atheist is not righteous. We are all in the same sin boat together, and it’s a leaky one. Christians accept the fact that we are sinners and we seek only God’s forgiveness, nothing more. If you seek that forgiveness and repent of your sins, then Grace will be given to you and you will be saved from a sure destination of hell. But if you continue to go on thinking of yourself as sinless and perfect, you are condemned to hell whether you like it or not.

It is far easier to commit the sin than it is to repent of it and never do it again, which is why we backslide from time to time, but I think the worst thing each of us can do to ourselves is deny that we sin in the first place. Yes, Christians do sin, and yes we are aware of the fact, and yes, we do repent of those sins when God chastises us for them. We are not a cult, we are not a sect. We are born again Christians and we simply and irrevocably believe.