Do you really have to confess Jesus as your Savior to be saved?
Here is an excerpt from the below link:
So we’ve talked about repent, Lordship, receive Christ, believe and work, and last time we talked about baptism. And now we’re entering into another area where people try to argue that in order to be saved a person must confess Christ before man. And if they don’t confess Christ before man, in addition to believing in Jesus, then they’re probably not a true Christian. Has anybody heard that kind of thing from people. And what you’ll discover is a lot of evangelistic tracts will say you’re not saved by works, but then at the end of the tract they’ll give you a bunch of works to do. And one of them is this idea that you have to confess Christ before man, which is not a bad thing to do at all, it’s just not a condition for justification.
And when you tell people that the verse they all go to is Romans 10:9-10. [9 “that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; [10] for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.”]
You all have heard that before, right. So that what you have in a lot of evangelistic presentations is the ABC method. The A stands for you get the person to admit they’re a sinner. B stands for you get them to believe in Jesus. And then “C” stands for the fact that they’ve got to make some kind of public confession. And so what people do is they go to these para-church evangelistic ministries and they get programmed with a method, A.B.C. And they’re never really taught to think about it biblically, and the method may work and so they spend the rest of their lives following this method, rather than getting back to the Scripture and seeing what does the Scripture actually say about this.
So if you believe in the ABC method, see, I’m a “B” person, I don’t believe in the “A” or “C.” The Spirit convicts people of their sin of unbelief. And then as the Spirit of God places them under conviction we have the opportunity to share the gospel with them. I’m not getting them to admit anything, I’m sharing the gospel with them and inviting them to trust in Christ or believe and that should seal the deal. But you see, with a lot of ministries that doesn’t seal the deal, you’ve got have some kind of visible sign, walk forward, raise your hand, fill out a card, confess Christ publicly and they present it in such a way that they make you feel that if you don’t do that third thing (the “C”) you’re really not a Christian at all. And a lot of their literature kind of reads this way as well. It’s very confusing. So it turns into nothing more than a gospel of works; it’s what I call the Texas two-step, not one step to Jesus (which is believe, which is what the Bible teaches) but there’s some additional step.
Now even before we look at this biblically just think about impractical this is if you believe this. For example, what if someone is mute and can’t talk, how in the world are they supposed to confess Jesus Christ? What if somebody, and there are many cases of this, like in a hotel room and they reach into the drawer to find a revolver and they find a Bible there, and they open up to John 3:16 and they get saved. But it’s like 3:00 o’clock in the morning, there’s no one really to confess to. I mean, I guess you could order room service or something like that. But you can see practically how this really doesn’t work. And this is sort of an American doctrine because in America we have the freedom, in most cases, to come out and publicly state that we belong to Christ and suffer very little retaliation as a result of it. Some people do from their own family but by and large it’s not in America that people are being crucified by ISIS and groups like that.
Here is an excerpt from the below link:
So we’ve talked about repent, Lordship, receive Christ, believe and work, and last time we talked about baptism. And now we’re entering into another area where people try to argue that in order to be saved a person must confess Christ before man. And if they don’t confess Christ before man, in addition to believing in Jesus, then they’re probably not a true Christian. Has anybody heard that kind of thing from people. And what you’ll discover is a lot of evangelistic tracts will say you’re not saved by works, but then at the end of the tract they’ll give you a bunch of works to do. And one of them is this idea that you have to confess Christ before man, which is not a bad thing to do at all, it’s just not a condition for justification.
And when you tell people that the verse they all go to is Romans 10:9-10. [9 “that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; [10] for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.”]
You all have heard that before, right. So that what you have in a lot of evangelistic presentations is the ABC method. The A stands for you get the person to admit they’re a sinner. B stands for you get them to believe in Jesus. And then “C” stands for the fact that they’ve got to make some kind of public confession. And so what people do is they go to these para-church evangelistic ministries and they get programmed with a method, A.B.C. And they’re never really taught to think about it biblically, and the method may work and so they spend the rest of their lives following this method, rather than getting back to the Scripture and seeing what does the Scripture actually say about this.
So if you believe in the ABC method, see, I’m a “B” person, I don’t believe in the “A” or “C.” The Spirit convicts people of their sin of unbelief. And then as the Spirit of God places them under conviction we have the opportunity to share the gospel with them. I’m not getting them to admit anything, I’m sharing the gospel with them and inviting them to trust in Christ or believe and that should seal the deal. But you see, with a lot of ministries that doesn’t seal the deal, you’ve got have some kind of visible sign, walk forward, raise your hand, fill out a card, confess Christ publicly and they present it in such a way that they make you feel that if you don’t do that third thing (the “C”) you’re really not a Christian at all. And a lot of their literature kind of reads this way as well. It’s very confusing. So it turns into nothing more than a gospel of works; it’s what I call the Texas two-step, not one step to Jesus (which is believe, which is what the Bible teaches) but there’s some additional step.
Now even before we look at this biblically just think about impractical this is if you believe this. For example, what if someone is mute and can’t talk, how in the world are they supposed to confess Jesus Christ? What if somebody, and there are many cases of this, like in a hotel room and they reach into the drawer to find a revolver and they find a Bible there, and they open up to John 3:16 and they get saved. But it’s like 3:00 o’clock in the morning, there’s no one really to confess to. I mean, I guess you could order room service or something like that. But you can see practically how this really doesn’t work. And this is sort of an American doctrine because in America we have the freedom, in most cases, to come out and publicly state that we belong to Christ and suffer very little retaliation as a result of it. Some people do from their own family but by and large it’s not in America that people are being crucified by ISIS and groups like that.
