How “Getting Saved” can lead you to miss Jesus
Yesterday, I preached from Acts 8.9-25 about the life of Simon Magus, who professed Christ, was baptized, joined the church, and then turned out to be a false-convert and a heretic. While we shouldn’t assume that anyone who isn’t involved in the life of a church belongs to Jesus, Simon proves to us that not everyone who talks about Jesus and belongs to a church knows him either. And this should make us stop and think. We need to ask where our hope and our trust are. This is especially important here in the South, the Bible belt, because everyone goes to church here. And there’s a lot of bad teaching about salvation in the churches many people go to.
The typical approach to salvation here in the South is that you must “ask Jesus into your heart,” or “give your heart/life to Jesus,” or “enter into a personal relationship with Jesus,” or “make Jesus your personal Lord and Savior” (pronounced pursnullordnsavyur). There are a few problems with this mindset. The first is that none of these phrases are to be found in the Bible. Scripture casts salvation in terms of repentance and faith. We trust in Christ and his work on behalf of sinners. Jesus makes us right before God (justification). At their best, these expressions are trying to get at this. But often they degenerate into something harmful.
For example, Pastor Stephen was “saved” and got baptized around seven times during his childhood. He asked Jesus into his heart a lot. And at no point was his faith put in Christ. I’ve personally said the “sinner’s prayer” countless times. And it never worked. And the problem is that by expressing the matter in these terms, we turn the focus onto ourselves and on what we’re doing, rather than on Christ and what he has done. Our confidence is shifted to our act of prayer, or confession, or acceptance, or walking the aisle, or whatever other accoutrements may attend the “conversion experience.” And when that happens, there’s a very real possibility that we are trusting in ourselves and our own works rather than Jesus.
Often times, people are pointed back to their conversion experience for assurance of salvation. But again, this is a misguided idea. Our assurance can’t come from something we’ve done. Maybe I “believed” in Jesus back then, but what about now? Only faith in the present tense is the instrument of receiving Christ and his benefits. And what if I “did it wrong?” What if I didn’t repent or believe enough or the right way? Instead, biblical assurance of salvation comes from the Holy Spirit leading us to recognize the promises of God to all who believe, and that we ourselves are included in these promises. Biblical assurance pushes us back to the cross and resurrection of Jesus and away from ourselves.
I’m not saying that all people who “ask Jesus into their hearts,” or “get saved,” or say the sinner’s prayer haven’t been truly converted. But I am saying that many are not because they are trusting themselves rather than Christ. And I am saying that when we explain salvation this way, we confuse people about the nature of hope, and risk leading them to miss out on salvation even as they are “getting saved.”
Posted by: Gene Schlesinger
Good post Gene. There has been much confusion caused by all of these salvation “formulas”. I guess they stem from preachers wanting to get visible responses to invitations and altar calls. People are wired to want to see results from their preaching. Some of the techniques that I have seen to get responses are truly embarrassing. I think if I hear a “all eyes closed, all heads bowed, raise your hand” altar call again I am going to scream and run out the door.
Yes, there’s an odd tendency to replace God’s action with our own.
I like that, the sacrament of the altar call.
Actually, if you look, you’ll see I deleted that part of the comment. I felt it was a bit too expressive of a sneering condescension. And I don’t want this post to be an “ammunition against fundamentalists and broad evangelicals” post. I want it to help us clarify the way we think and speak about conversion and salvation. And hopefully shift the hope of some people who’ve gotten saved but never trusted Christ away from themselves and onto him.
For those wondering, though, I noted that many times churches replace God’s action in the sacrament of communion with man made sacraments highlighting human action (e.g., altar calls, rededications). There, I said that without talking down at anyone. That’s how it should have been to begin with.
I concur with this message wholeheartedly. I think that the problem we see commonly in churches today has a key theological flaw, primarily in presuming salvation to be a decision and not a supernatural miracle by which God grants.
I think there are other issues that help make a congregation more suitable for false conversion. That is when the gospel is assumed to be known. Assuming that the gospel is known is a symptom of having a low view of the power of the gospel and a high view on man. If I assume that “everyone is saved” in the church while not preaching in a way that brings the cross of Christ and glory of God in the gospel to the forefront, it can yield a church full of people who know lots of practical things but are not being transformed by the gospel, or clear to what the gospel actually is. We also must watch out for terms that go undefined or cliche’. If salvation is, in my mind, a decision, and believing, in my mind, is just agreeing that Jesus came, repentance, in my mind, is feeling sorry, and “ask Him in my heart”, in my mind, is being tingly with God, then we have a mess on our hands. Other than a misguided theological presumption about salvation, assuming the gospel and leaving terms undefined (or wrongly defined) are two of the biggest enemies of gospel preaching in the modern day church.
[...] across the blog earlier today of a church in Winston-Salem. The title of the post was “How ‘Getting Saved’ Can Lead You to Miss Jesus.“ Yesterday, I preached from Acts 8.9-25 about the life of Simon Magus, who professed [...]