In reference to your former way of life, you are to rid yourselves of the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you are to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth. – Ephesians 4:22-32 

There is one very important way to know whether faith is real or if faith is fake. If our faith is real then surely we’ll be changed. We believe that in Christ we are a new creation, the old has gone and the new has come, so this new creation must be different and DO things differently. 
Sarah’s way of life, her thoughts, deeds, attitudes and behaviour must show evidence of the fact that she is not the same as she was before coming to faith in Christ. The Sarah after Christ has to be different from the Sarah before Christ. Before faith and after faith. If there had been no change at all, you could legitimately wonder if I really had become a Christian, if my faith was or is real.
Before I became a Christian I was the black sheep of the family. I was a rebel. I did all the things my father had dreaded I would do if I went to Art College, and then some. I lived in a way that was offensive to God. When I finally left London after 7 years and went back to my mother’s house, I knew I didn’t deserve to get away with all that I had done.
My disabled Grandmother had been living with my mother for a few years by then, and she was not happy when I moved back. She did not approve of me at all. To be honest, I don’t blame her. 
One day she discovered that there was a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate missing from the stash she kept in a drawer in her bedroom. There could only be one culprit, her grand-daughter !!! She was right, it was me. Rather foolishly, I had thought that as she had so many bars of chocolate she wouldn’t notice one less…
She wheeled her wheel-chair out of her room and yelled for me. As I crept down the stairs my knees were knocking together. At the top of her voice, she accused me of stealing her chocolate. All the while I was conscious of the fact that my mother had visitors. I am sure their conversation would have stopped mid-sentence. They could not have failed to hear every shameful detail of what was going on, just the other side of the not very solid door. 
I couldn’t deny it, I’d done it. Except that, if she had found out just a couple of weeks earlier I probably would have tried to deny it. But, and it was a very big but, in the meantime I’d become a Christian, a freshly minted, brand new, born again Christian. So, my response was to stammeringly admit the deed, and to say how sorry I was (it sounded so feeble in the face of her anger), and to say that it wouldn’t happen again because of my new found faith.
She was not impressed. As the wife of an Anglican priest for many years, she knew her Bible. Psalm 5:4-6 makes it very clear what God thinks too.
For you are not a God who is pleased with wickedness; with you, evil people are not welcome. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence. You hate all who do wrong;  you destroy those who tell lies. 
As she finished her tirade, she furiously wheeled herself out into the garden, I followed her. “Gran, please listen, I know I was a thief, I know I told lies, I know I was like that, but I really do believe that God has changed me. You’ll just have to see if I’m different from now on.” Her response demonstrated that she was far from convinced: she snorted: “Humph! God is not mocked!”.
A couple of years later I moved into a little studio apartment in a nearby village, as I pursued my studies to retrain as a Chiropodist. To my great surprise, my grandmother bought me a complete dinner service as a gift to get me started. Plates, bowls, cups, even serving dishes. 
This was her unspoken acknowledgement that God had done a work in my life. There was no way she would have invested any money in the old Sarah, no way at all. She could see that my faith was real and my new lifestyle demonstrated the reality of that faith. 
My hope and prayer is that you can say the same thing. That you have been changed, not only at the time you were saved but that, by God’s grace, you (and I) continue to be changed, as we continue to grow in Christ. This process requires humility, before God and before others, because we all need to admit that we’re still so far from being truly Christlike, how much we STILL need to change. Only as we do so will each one of us be able to say with confidence Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 3:18
And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
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