85. How to Believe and Be Saved
How to Believe and Be Saved
You may be saying, however: “I do believe! I know God cannot lie, and I have nothing in my heart against Him. Sincerely and honestly I believe all He says.” Are you sure? Have you actually taken God’s gift of eternal life (Romans 6:23) by having committed yourself in person to Him who alone is eternal life? And do you know that within you there is now an altogether different nature which is an actual “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17-18), because the “old things” of self, Satan and the world have passed away, and “all things have become new”?
Too many give mental assent to what is said about God and Christ, and then think they believe and are therefore saved. But faith in God is dependence on Him in Person, and so is not an attitude of the mind simply, but especially of the heart, “For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness” (that is, unto salvation. Romans 10:10).
Go back to what John says: “To as many as received him,… to them that believe on his name” (John 1:12). To believe on Him is therefore simply to receive Him, just as one would receive a visitor. Or again: “Behold I stand at the door and knock” (Revelation 3:20). And you open the door of your heart and let Him in, just as you would invite in a caller. Have you thus received Him? Have you let Him in? He says He will come in and sup, that is, fellowship, with you. Are you having daily fellowship with Him in Person?
You may ask how one may know when He has come in. Simply by accepting it as a settled fact that when you invited Him in, He came in, just as He said He would. You know it wholly because He said so, not by any feelings of any kind whatever. Our feelings are in our nervous systems, and the evidence of salvation is in what God says, not in our nervous systems. Faith is resting on the bare Word of God without further evidence. Feelings may come and go as they will, but that has nothing to do with the foundation of our faith, which is what God says, and nothing else. “Salvation is of the Lord” (Jonah 2:9). This is why it is “of faith, that it might be by grace” (Romans 4:16), which makes it an outright gift to us in person, without a cause in us.
Just such a definite, personal, first-hand contact with God is vital to the one who would be saved. Otherwise Satan can deceive him into depending on his sincerity, his willingness to be saved, his word to some friend that he does now accept Christ, his friend’s word to him that he is now saved, or any of the other substitutes for dependence on Christ in Person. If some one decides to depend on you to do a certain thing for him, you need his word for it to you in person. So does Christ need your word to Him, and then He can act. So do not stop short of personal contact with God in prayer, and never let any human being pronounce you to be saved. At least, never depend on any person’s word, for it is the Holy Spirit alone who bears witness with our spirit that we are a child of God, and He always does it through the Word alone, for that is the only thing that can be accepted without question.