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Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Congratulations!

You get it! You are reading this book because somewhere along the way, you welcomed Jesus into your life. You heard about Him and something clicked. You understood the gospel and you responded to God’s invitation.

You may have invited Jesus into your heart today, last week, two years or thirteen years ago. You may have surrendered to Jesus at church, after hearing a sermon or through an altar call. Maybe you prayed the salvation prayer or confessed Jesus as your Lord on your own, in a quiet way or in a moment of desperation. Everyone has a unique story. You may have turned to the Lord while reading the Bible or a Christian book. Perhaps, a family member, friend or coworker led you to the Lord. Maybe you heard the gospel at a concert, in the hospital or while in jail. You may have prayed to receive Jesus into your life after hearing the gospel online, on TV, through a CD, a DVD or a download. Regardless of the path that led you to the Lord, surrendering to God and confessing Jesus, as the Lord of your life is the most important, life-transforming, eternal decision you will ever make.

It’s my hope that through reading this book, God connects-the-dots for you on what it means to be a Christian. I pray your Christian life gets started (or restarted) on the right foot and you develop strong spiritual roots. As you read the 7 Basics, may you gain a better understanding of

God, Jesus, the Bible, church, heaven, hell and all kinds of eternal things. May you truly get a grip on these basics and develop a passion to help others get it.

PARTY TIME

Before we get into the 7 Basics, let’s celebrate!

In case you didn’t know, heaven is quite happy with your decision to believe in and receive Jesus. So thrilled, the angels threw a big party when you turned to the Lord. Listen to what Jesus said, “Or imagine a woman who has ten coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp and scour the house, looking in every nook and cranny until she finds it? And when she finds it you can be sure she’ll call her friends and neighbors: ‘Celebrate with me! I found my lost coin!’ Count on it—that’s the kind of party God’s angels throw every time one lost soul turns to God,” Luke 15:8-10, MSG.

If you haven’t yet taken time to celebrate and document when you came to know Jesus, do it now. Write down the details of the day you confessed Jesus as Lord.

Your Name:

Day/Date/Time:

Where:

Witnesses:

YOU GOT A DO-OVER

Now that Jesus is the Lord of your life, everything has changed! Your life was reset. More than that, your life was reinvented––literally recreated! Jesus gave you a second chance––a complete do-over! A real miracle occurred in your life when Jesus moved into you heart. You may not know the magnitude of this do-over yet, but in time, you’ll see it clearly.

If you think about it, yesterday, you may have been a low-down, rotten, no-good sinner; you may have been agnostic, atheist, anti-Christ or apathetic towards God. You may have been the biggest partier on campus, the most promiscuous girl in your workplace or the bad-to-the-bone guy in your circle of friends. Maybe your sins were a mile high and you thought you were unworthy of God’s love––but now you know, you weren’t too far away to receive Jesus and His mercy.

At the other extreme, you may have been the nicest person in your world and the most pure-as-the-driven-snow, goody-two-shoes ever known. You may have given money to charity, housed the homeless and marched for every cause you believed in. You might have been a religious, churchgoer that didn’t miss a single Sunday service. Maybe your good deeds and religious pedigree were a thousand acres deep and you figured you were doing a pretty good job trusting in your own good efforts––but now you know, you weren’t good enough to live without Jesus and His mercy.

The truth be told; we all need Jesus. He came from heaven to earth, to die on a cross to give us a complete do-over––the worst among us and the best among us.

THE BIGGEST PIVOT POINT

When you turned from your own ways to the Lord, He came running with His love and mercy. This was the biggest pivot point of your life. When you believed in Jesus and received Him into your life by faith, He pardoned and removed all of your sins, exchanged your attempts to be self-righteous with His perfect righteousness and welcomed you into His family as His very own child.

Listen to this, “He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west,” Psalm 103:12, NLT. He said He would not remember them any longer. He didn’t just forgive and remove your sins. He actually changed your status. God has acquitted you of every sin, pronounced you not guilty and made you righteous in His eyes. “This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe,” Romans 3:22, NIV. Your sins are gone. You’ve been made righteous. What a gift!

In God’s eyes, because of Jesus and His work on the cross, you have been reconciled to God. You can stand before God just as if you have never sinned.

What does this mean? According to God’s view, it means: you’re a true Christian. You’re a believer. You’ve been born again. You’re saved. You’ve been redeemed. You’re a follower of Jesus. You’re a friend of God. What do all of these things really mean? They mean you have become a new person and your eternal destination has been rerouted. Before you accepted or confessed Jesus as your Lord, you were separated from God because of your sin. You were lost and taking a one-way trip to an eternal separation from God in a terrible place called hell. Because of God’s love and mercy––when you received Jesus, He saved you and reset your eternal destination to heaven! God wrote your name in the Book of Life––His reservation book in Heaven.

Does this sound familiar? “It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You

filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah,” Ephesians 2:1-6, MSG.

Not only is your eternal destination secure, the rest of your life on earth has the potential to be very different because of Jesus and His gift of salvation. You are in for an exciting adventure as you get to know the Lord and walk with Him. So, what now?

THE LEARNING CURVE

Whenever you start anything new, there is a learning curve. Whether you’re an athlete or a new employee, there is a learning curve to master. If you’re visiting a foreign country, trying to understand a new computer program or figuring out how to use an app on your phone, there’s going to be a time period of learning. There are new words to memorize; new people to meet; new things to discover and new processes and systems to understand.

The same thing is true in your new relationship with the Lord. From the time you are born again until you become a fully functional mature believer, there is a learning curve. Getting to know God is just like getting to know a new Person! This takes time. There’s a whole new glossary of Bible words to learn. There are many new spiritual things to discover. Fortunately, you have the best teacher in all of Creation––God Himself, Who will take you by the hand and help you to learn.

PUT DOWN ROOTS

Think about this spiritual learning curve like you would think about caring for a very precious plant. You are that plant! Through being attentive, patient and focused on the right things you can grow a healthy, fruitful plant with deep roots. In the same way, as you give your attention to the 7 Basics, focusing on the content and Scriptures in each chapter, you will grow into a very beautiful, healthy, fruitful Christian with strong roots firmly planted in God.

Remember, getting rooted in the Lord takes time. You will have questions about God and you may feel like you should know more than you do; be patient. You won’t have all the answers overnight. It will take time for you to grow in your knowledge of God, but as you get started, you will sense your spiritual roots growing and getting stronger in the Lord.

Always keep this in mind; if you want a big life with God, you will need deep roots! It takes a lot of time––up to several decades––to grow a large, stately oak tree with a strong root system as its foundation. It takes less than a month to grow a full-sized mushroom; however, a mushroom’s root system is very shallow. In order to have a root system like a majestic oak tree, rather than the shallow roots of a mushroom fungus, you will need to carve out time to get to know the Lord.

A friend of mine, and her husband, own a large greenhouse operation and she told me some very interesting things about the art of growing plants. She said that they can “force grow” a plant by using certain techniques, but they have to be very careful otherwise the plant will grow too quickly and have a few fatal flaws.

First, if the growth is forced too quickly, the plant will never produce fruit. Isn’t that sad, a plant that is supposed to produce fruit will never develop any! Second, if they accelerate the growth too much, the root system will not have a chance to develop properly. If this plant were to be transplanted to a natural outdoor environment, it would likely not survive because it did not have time to develop hearty roots that could withstand winds, storms and a harsh environment.

What a great analogy for the growth and development of your life as a Christian. God won’t “force grow” your life. He wants you to produce fruit and He wants you to have hearty roots so that you can survive and thrive in the harsh elements of this world. Give yourself an advantage and take time to allow for healthy, balanced spiritual growth.

Psalm 1 is a great description of what God has in store for you as you get rooted in the basics. “Oh, the joys of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or stand around with sinners, or join in with mockers. But they delight in the law of the LORD, meditating on it day and night. They are like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit each season. Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all they do,” Psalm 1:1-3, NLT.

GET STARTED

To get started, I encourage you to do these things: Pray. Invest. Do.

Pray and Ask God For Help: As a new or young believer, you are not expected to know everything about God and you are not expected to do the Christian life perfectly in the first ten minutes. Ask the Lord to help you and He will!

Invest 15 Minutes a Day: As you begin your life with Jesus, invest 15 minutes into your relationship with the Lord. Here’s an easy way to get started doing this: Each day, read a portion of this 7 Basics book and then look up every verse in the Scriptures to Read section mentioned at the end of each chapter. (We’ll talk about what versions of the Bible you should have when we get to Basic #2––so for now, use whatever Bible you have.) If you will invest fifteen minutes daily, I believe you will sense the Lord speaking to you and your relationship with Him will become very real to you. Don’t be in a hurry. Take your time as you read, reflect, ponder and meditate on the things God is speaking to your heart.

Do What You Learn: Most people learn best by doing. The Bible tells us it’s the doers of the Word who are blessed, not just the hearers. So, as you get into God’s Word, ask the Lord to show you how to put the things you are learning into practice. Then do it!

THE 7 BASICS

Are you ready to go? You’ve probably heard of the Seven Wonders of the World, a seven-layer salad, Seven Jeans and the top seven drinks at Starbucks, but now it’s time to get acquainted with the 7 Basics! Turn up your expectation and prepare to be enlightened, encouraged, challenged, inspired and stretched as you get into these seven very important basics:

BASIC #1: Get To Know God

BASIC #2: Get Into The Bible

BASIC #3: Get Real In Prayer

BASIC #4: Get Into A Good Church

BASIC #5: Get Excited And Tell Somebody

BASIC #6: Get Your Head On Straight

BASIC #7: Get Ready For The Adventure

This is my prayer for you as you get started in the 7 Basics; “I pray that from His glorious, unlimited resources He will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make His home in your hearts as you trust in Him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think,” Ephesians 3:16-20, NLT.

SCRIPTURES TO READ

___ Psalm 1

___ John 3:1-17

___ Luke 15:8-10