A new year, a new beginning and the time that many people make those New Year resolutions - a commitment to change something, do something new or stop doing something they feel they ought not to be doing. Every year it's the same isn't it? A whole bunch of individuals, Christians included declaring that these are the steps they are going to take in the coming year. As we also know, very few of these actions last longer than a few months if we are lucky and can normally be seen to have dropped off the radar after more a few weeks (or even days).
However in amongst all the declarations and outpourings I suspect that one resolution you won't or haven't heard is this:
I'm going to stop asking Jesus into my heart.
Most Christians would never dream of suggesting such a thing and non-believers probably wouldn't care enough to make that kind of stand.
Asking Jesus into your heart by praying some version of the Sinner's Prayer, in which you acknowledge your sin and need of salvation and then accept Jesus as your Saviour, has become something of an evangelical ritual. It can mark the moment of salvation—"the hour I first believed," as the great hymn says. But like any ritual, we can wonder whether we've done it right—whether we were sincere enough and really meant it. At that point it becomes a kind of good work, something we do to get saved. And like every good work, it's not good enough to assure us of salvation.
In Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart, J D Greear speaks in very Lutheran terms when he says, "Saving faith looks outside of itself to what Christ has done, not back onto itself at what it has done." For the gospel is not about us and the decisions we make—not even our decision to choose Christ—but rather about Christ himself, his finished work on the cross and his sitting on the throne of heaven, where he himself is our all-sufficient righteousness before God. Greear is not saying it's wrong to ask Jesus into your heart. He's saying it's not the same thing as believing the gospel. And if we want to be assured of salvation, it's believing the gospel that actually counts.
Of course, we do make decisions (and resolutions), and they have their importance. Some people can narrate a specific moment of conversion, and such a moment may have included praying the Sinner's Prayer. But other people, Greear recognises, grew up in a Christian home and learned to believe the gospel at such a young age that they cannot remember any decisive "moment of salvation," and they are none the worse off for that. What matters is believing the gospel of Christ, not remembering when you first believed.
Read more and get the book HERE for just £6.50 until midday on Monday. Use code saj0114 at the checkout.
Dean is the Sales Manager at The Good Book Company. He engages with churches, organisations and individuals to provide them with useful resources for their varying ministries. Dean attends St John's Church in Woking, where he lives with his family.
