Articles

The Believer’s Character

By Gil Rugh

When we, as believers, placed our faith in what Christ did on the cross we became positionally perfect—we gained a right standing before God. Our ultimate perfection, however, will not be realized until we enter into His presence.

As we are working out our salvation here on earth, we are becoming in practice what we already are in position:

That you may prove yourselves [demonstrate, be becoming] to be blameless and innocent (Phil. 2:15).

Blameless refers to the judgment others make of us. If a person is blameless, no one can hold anything against him.

We must be careful to keep the emphasis where Scripture places it. “That you may prove yourselves to be blameless” (v. 15, emphasis added). Our flesh wants to judge if other people are blameless. However, each of us must evaluate our own lives.

Notice, also, that this verse says we are to be innocent, a word describing the inner character of a person. It literally means unmixed or unadulterated; thus it has come to mean pure or sincere. The word is used in Scripture of pure wine or pure metal, or that which is unmixed or unalloyed. Thus, my life is to be unadulterated, pure. It should not contain a mixture of things that have no place in the life of a believer. A follower of Christ shouldn’t dabble in both godly and worldly things. We should be purely seeking after Christ and nothing else.

This verse describes how God’s children are to live. We are born into God’s family through faith, by recognizing our sinfulness, by believing that His Son, Jesus Christ, died to pay the penalty for our sins.

God then begins working in our lives to bring about a transformation from the inside out, so we can live in a manner that is pleasing to Him.