Hello and welcome. Let me ask you a question. Are you saved? Before you answer, please think about this. Think about this because the Bible encourages each person: “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith.”
Why does the Bible encourage us to do this? Is salvation not a simple matter? Is it not to simply hear the Gospel, recognize that you are a sinner, admit this, say the sinner’s prayer, and then confess Christ? Is it not as easy as one-two-three to just accept Him and believe on the Lord?
Well, this is the easy methodology that the churches and congregations present today, many of them; I will not say all. But, actually, this is not the methodology of the Bible.
Many think that they are saved because they took a step of faith. They reached out and think that they brought the Lord Jesus to them through some work that they did. They would not call this a work, but it is. They pray. They say the sinner’s prayer. They come down the aisle or just accept Christ and then they think that it was a choice of their will.
This is where the idea of “free will” comes from. Theologians encourage people, “Well, you have a ‘free will’ and you can exercise it any way that you want. You can reject Christ or you can accept Christ.”
But this is not true when it comes to salvation. We cannot accept the Lord Jesus into our hearts and become saved because God tells us, matter-of-factly—and this is about as definitive as anything could be in the Bible—that we are not born by “the will of man, but of God.” You can read this in John 1:12-13. We are born from above, as we read in John 3. We are born by the action of God. It is He who must save us “and not we ourselves.”
Maybe this does not make any sense to you because then what is the “Gospel call?” God says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved;” but the Bible also tells us that none can believe to the degree that the Word of God demands, which is total belief “with all thy heart and with all thy soul.” “There is none that seeketh after God,” the Bible tells us in Romans 3:10-12, because we cannot seek God sufficiently according to the Word of God.
All of these commands are designed to show us that we fall short. We “come short of the glory of God.” We just cannot get ourselves into Heaven. If we think that we do the least bit of work, then we have corrupted the Gospel of grace. We have perverted the Gospel of grace and we have developed “another gospel” wherein there is no salvation.
There is no question about this. If you think that you have done something, anything involved with salvation—that you took some kind of action—then you do not have the salvation of the Bible and you are in a dangerous position because you still do not have the salvation that the Bible shows us.
So what kind of salvation is that? What can we do then?
Well, God has given us a great privilege. He is merciful beyond anything that we can comprehend. He is gracious to thousands. He is kind and good and a wonderful Saviour. The Bible, again and again, tries to show us the great love of God towards sinners and towards His elect people and God encourages us to go to Him, not demandingly, not arrogantly and trying to force Him to save us; no, but humbly and lowly, mindful of our situation, which is that we are rebels and transgressors of the Law of God, guilty of breaking the Law.
We are guilty and deserving of the penalty of the Law, which is an eternal death, an “everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord,” an end to existence. This is what we deserve. None of us deserves God’s grace or mercy. He gives this to the undeserving.
We are like a guilty criminal who is awaiting the death penalty. He has already been tried. He is already subject to the death penalty. It is just a matter of when. He is on death row. Yet God permits us to contact Him in order to beseech Him for pardon, that we might be spared and delivered and saved.
What a merciful God that He allows the worst offenders to enter a plea for pardon! And God gives us many examples of this. One place in the Bible where we see a right approach to the Lord in the matter of salvation is in Psalm 123. It says in Psalm 123:1-4:
Unto thee lift I up mine eyes, O thou that dwellest in the heavens. Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters, and as the eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress; so our eyes wait upon JEHOVAH our God, until that he have mercy upon us. Have mercy upon us, O JEHOVAH, have mercy upon us: for we are exceedingly filled with contempt. Our soul is exceedingly filled with the scorning of those that are at ease, and with the contempt of the proud.
You see, here there is a cry for mercy and there is then waiting. This is what God permits us to do. This is the Gospel of the Bible.
Yes, read the Scriptures. Read the Word of God as much as you can. And while you are reading or after you read, stop and pray, “O Lord, O Father, have mercy on me! Have mercy! I am guilty and yet I have heard that You are merciful and that Your mercy is everlasting. Even though I know that You will have mercy upon whom You will have mercy, I beseech You. O Lord, there is no reason, there is not good reason at all, no reason whatsoever why You should save me. I am as guilty as everyone and more so, and yet only because You are merciful, only because You have provided a way of salvation through the Lord Jesus, do I beseech You. I look only to You. I look nowhere else. There is no other gospel. I will not bring salvation to myself because that is deceitful. I will perish if I do so. So Lord I do wait, but time is getting short. O Father, have mercy! Could it be that You will save me?”
Then we wait. We wait. Today and tomorrow, if we find ourselves still troubled and still not sure—we still wonder because we see our sin—then we cry again and we beseech the Lord again and we wait. We wait upon the Lord, for it is in His hands.
Could there be any better place for the whole matter to rest than in the hands of such a gracious and merciful God?