A matter so simple we can miss it

Hope you had a great Easter! Like many churches, ours was overflowing. It is one of the highest attending services of the year.

We not only saw high attendance, but we saw a significant number of people decide to truly surrender their lives to Jesus, or in other words, to be saved.

America is a pluralistic nation, allowing for a variety of religious beliefs. Most people come under the heading of “Christian”, which represents everything from a high ‘liturgical’ (very scripted) service such as Catholic or Anglican to a more informal service such as Baptist or non-denominational (one of the largest groups now). The bigger difference today is between those denominations that rely on their church’s tradition and teaching for authority and those who rely on the scripture. The last category is also called “evangelical.”

I belong in this last group – evangelical. We believe the Bible is God’s Word, and is the ultimate and final authority by which man will be judged (see Matthew 24:35, John 12:48). After becoming a Christian in college, and my coming into a personal relationship with God, I soon realized, as many have, that if there IS a God, He would want to communicate with us in a way that is clear and consistent. Intuition, conscience, and tradition are too fickle and governed by cultural fads and basically our own tendency for self-deception to be a reliable eternal guide. It is either the scripture, or we’re just making it up as we go along.

In terms of guidance, there is no more important issue for which we need reliable guidance than our spiritual condition and eternal destiny. If we’re going to pay attention to scripture in any area, it needs to be on this – our salvation. There are a number of passages that speak to this, but my favorite is found in Romans 10:9-10.

⁹ because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰ For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

I like this passage because it states in no uncertain terms what it takes to be saved – believe and confess. Confession follows belief. Belief however, must be from the heart, which means we act upon that belief.  We call upon the Lord Jesus to be saved and come into our life, and we turn away from a life of conscious sin, which is the Biblical definition of repentance (see Luke 13:5). And then, we are willing to confess our faith to others as well.  This is the Biblical method of salvation.  

The narrow way

In our particular church, Easter Sunday fell during a series the pastor was doing on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, and that day the passage was Matthew 7-13-14,

¹³ “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. ¹⁴ Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

These words from Jesus tell us that the way to eternal life in heaven is not man’s default condition. We’re not automatically on our way to heaven, unless we’re just really bad people, as many people think. The ‘narrow way’ is not intuitive, or the majority would be following it. Christianity is our heritage, and its effects remain in our culture, including many of our current values, such as equality, the work ethic, and compassion. But a cultural embrace of some of the ethics of Christianity is not saving faith. You will experience a higher quality of life, to be sure, but it is not necessarily the same as connecting to Jesus as Savior. The whole premise of most of what I write about is that Judeo Christian values work better in every area of life and society. Hopefully the superiority of Christian ethics will not only improve our life, but lead us to God Himself. We cannot just become a better person. What is still required is a personal conscious decision to turn to Jesus as Lord and Savior.

Last night we had baptisms for those who had recently made decisions to follow Jesus. One woman emphatically stated, “I realized I was on the broad way, and needed to choose the narrow way.”

Blessed assurance

Many people are hoping their good deeds outweigh their bad when they stand before God. This contradicts the teaching of scripture, which emphatically states we cannot be saved by our good works (see Ephesians 2:8-9). That is self-salvation. Jesus suffered a gruesome death to become our sacrifice for sin and our Savior. We need a Savior because we cannot save ourselves.

A salvation of good works, which unfortunately many liberal churches teach, also takes away an incredibly important benefit of salvation – assurance. How will I know my good works outweigh my bad on that day? We need assurance now, not when we stand before God and it is too late. We can have both the assurance of scripture (Romans 10:9-10 above), and the assurance of the indwelling Holy Spirit (see Ephesians 1:13-14) when we truly turn to Jesus as Lord and Savior.

Do you have this assurance? Nothing is more important. If you do not, you can call upon Him now, in utter sincerity, and put your faith in Him to not only forgive you but lead you in this life and into the next.