Subject: WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?
Text: Acts 16:31: "And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house."
Sometime ago I was at a funeral home one Friday night, when a friend of mine motioned for me to come into a side room. "I have something to tell you that I think you will be interested in," he said.
Then he told me of how, at homecoming services at his church, an old gentleman called to him, and said, "Taylor, I want to talk to you."
He started to get a chair to pull up beside the old gentleman to talk with him when he said, "I don't mean here. I want you to come to my house."
"All right," my friend said, "when will it suit you?"
"Almost anytime," was the answer, so the next night my friend went over to his house to see him.
"I'll get right to the point," said the old gentleman. "I'm eighty-seven years old, and I've been going to church about all my life. I'm a member of the church, but I don't know whether I'm saved or not. I'm concerned about my relationship with the Lord."
"Well," my friend said, "has there ever been a time in your life when you made a clear-cut decision to accept Jesus as your personal Saviour and Lord and asked Him to come into your life."
"I don't know that there has been" was the answer.
"Well, the thing for you to do, then, is to accept Jesus as your personal Saviour and Lord and ask Him to come into your life," said my friend.
"I want you to help me," said the old gentleman.
So my friend opened up his Bible and showed the old gentleman out of the Word what one must do to be saved; and when he left the home a little while later, the old man was rejoicing in his salvation.
Sometime later when they met again, with peace in his heart the old gentleman said, "I'm walking in the strait and narrow way now."
We have two things of tremendous importance that stand out in this story.
One of them is the sad fact that a fine, respectable person of good moral character may attend church regularly across the span of almost a century and be a member of the church and yet not know how it is with his or her soul.
The other is that any person who names the name of Christ and professes to be a Christian ought to be able to sit down with another person and show him or her out of the Word of God how to be saved and how to come to have peace of heart and the assurance that it is well with his or her soul.
If we know the Scriptures, we need not go through life wondering whether or not we are saved. While salvation comes through faith in Christ, the Scriptures set forth some basic evidences which demonstrate the presence or the absence of saving faith. Those evidences are primarily love, obedience to the will of God, the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ, and the witness of God's Spirit that it is well with our soul.
Jesus said, "By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another." John, in his first epistle, says, "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren."
In John 15 Jesus tells us that the way we abide in His love and come to have His Spirit to abide in us is through keeping His commandments. In Matthew 7:21 He puts it perhaps a bit more clearly when He says, "Not everyone that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in Heaven."
In Romans 8 the Apostle Paul says plainly that if anyone have not the Spirit of Christ, he (or she) is none of His.
And John tells us that the person who believes on the Son of God has the witness in himself (or herself).
Thus we see that according to the Scriptures we need not be in doubt as to whether or not we truly believe on Jesus Christ. The faith which is unto salvation produces clearcut evidences of its presence in the lives of those who have it.
Vance Havner who, I suppose, has been one of the best-known and outstanding preachers of our generation, in his book, WHY NOT JUST BE CHRISTIANS?, says simply in effect that we live the way we really believe. Our lives indicate our faith more accurately sometimes than our words.
At any rate, we need not go through life wondering whether or not we are saved. In fact, near the end of his first epistle, John says, "These things have I written unto you that believe on the Name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life..."
But how about the second thing? What do you say to a person who wants to know what to do in order to be saved?
We have what we might call the perfect example of this in our Scripture lesson this morning.
Paul and Silas were in the jail at Philippi, in the inmost prison, with their feet fast in the stocks. At midnight they prayed and sang praises unto God. Suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prisons were shaken and the doors opened and the prisoners' bands were loosed.
Very much disturbed, the jailor was about to take his own life when the apostle Paul called out to him to do himself no harm for the prisoners were all there. None had fled.
The jailor called for a light and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas, and brought them out of the inner prison and said, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?"
They said, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house."
That, one sentence, when rightly understood, is all that a person needs to know and do in order to be saved.
Some years after the great ship, the TITANIC, hit an iceberg and went down in the Atlantic with great loss of life, a young man stood up in a religious service in Canada and said that he was a survivor of that shipwreck. He told of how, as he was drifting alone in the ocean on a piece of the wreckage, the waves brought an Englishman by the name of John Harper, also hanging on to a piece of wreckage, close to him. "Man," John Harper cried out, "are you saved?"
"No," the young man replied. "I am not."
"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved," John Harper cried back as the waves carried him away.
Later the waves brought them back closer together again, and John Harper cried out, "Are you saved now?".
"No, I cannot honestly say that I am," came the reply.
"Believe an the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved," John Harper cried out once more, and, drifting away, soon went down and was heard no more.
"There, alone in the night, with two miles of water beneath me," the young man said, "I believed."
Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father but by Me."
Whether one is drifting alone in the midst of the ocean or is in a comfortable church pew on a beautiful Sabbath Day, or at home, or at work, in a hospital or on a golf course or at a ball game, the way of salvation is the same.
Whether one is rich or poor, educated or uneducated, young or old, sick or well, skinny or fat, bald-headed or curly-headed, blond or brunette, black or white, red or brown, the way of salvation is the same.
Whether one is in North Carolina or South Carolina or Alabama or New York, the United States or South America, Europe or Asia, Africa or Australia or on an island or in the Artic regions, the way of salvation is the same.
Whether it was two thousand years ago or a hundred years ago or is today or will be tomorrow or in some other time of human history, the way of salvation is the same.
Whenever and wherever the question is asked by whomsoever, "What must I do to be saved?" the one basic Scriptural answer is set forth in the words, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be Saved..."
The word "believe" has to do with a conviction that results in action in harmony with the conviction.
Abraham believed God, and when God told him to leave Haran and go to a land which He would show him, he left Haran and started the long, long journey to Canaan in obedience to God's command.
He believed God, and when God told him to take his beloved son, Isaac, to Mount Moriah there to offer him as a sacrifice, he obeyed and would have completed the offering up of Isaac on an altar had not God stayed his hand and provided a ram in Isaac's place.
Noah believed God, and as a result of that belief built an ark and stored it with provisions that life on the earth might not be totally wiped out in the predicted flood.
Moses believed God, and as a result of that belief, left his comfortable life with Jethro, his father-in-law, who was the priest of Midian, and went down into Egypt to bring the Hebrew people out of bondage and lead them to the promised land.
What we really believe determines our actions.
To truly believe on the Lord Jesus Christ results in our trusting Him for our salvation. It rests in our becoming obedient to His known will. It has to do with our recognition of the fact that He is the incarnate Presence of the true and living God, the only-begotten Son of God, the One Who is now at the right hand of God, and at Whose Name every knee will eventually bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
True faith, John 3:16 faith, leads to an acceptance of Jesus as one's own personal Saviour. It leads to obedience to Jesus as one's Lord and Master. It leads to the commitment of one's life to Christ for the doing of His will, and an acknowledgement of the fact that we are no longer our own: we have been bought with a price, and therefore should live to the glory of God and the advancement of His kingdom.
The simple prayer of faith I prayed as a boy that resulted in the assurance that it was well with my soul was only a few words in length: "Lord, I believe in You as best I know how, and do believe that You died on the cross for me. I am trusting You for my salvation and am through worrying about it. Now show me Your will clearly, and I commit myself to be obedient unto it, You being my Helper."
The problem with getting saved comes sometimes, not because of an unwillingness to have Jesus as our Saviour so much as of an unwillingness to have Him as our Lord and let Him control our lives.
Human nature is a stubborn, self-centered thing that wants to have its own way, do as it pleases, and keep itself at the center of life.
Some-years ago Samuel Kamelason, a ministerial student from India, now one of the outstanding preachers in the world today, speaking at a Ministers' Conference at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, told of a man who was trying to make a living selling peanuts. He had a little broken-down cart that he used, and would buy a few peanuts, put them in his cart, and push his cart through the streets crying out, "Peanuts for sale. Peanuts for sale."
He didn't have enough money to buy enough peanuts at one time to make enough profit to get better equipment or to rent a little stand in a good location where he could build up his business and make a decent living. He lived sort of a hand-to-mouth existence - selling a few peanuts, taking the money and buying a few more to sell, and just barely making enough to keep body and soul together.
One day he got tired of it all and decided to chuck the whole thing. He pushed his little cart into some bushes, and took what little money he had and went into a resturant, planning to spend it all on at least one good meal.
The waiter came by and he ordered one of the finest meals on the menu. As he sat waiting, another man came in and sat down beside him.
"Are you in business?" the other man asked him.
"Yes," he said, "I have a little business."
"What position do you have in the company?" the man asked.
"Well, I'm the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary and the Treasurer," the little peanut vender replied.
"How are things going?" questioned the man.
"Not so good," said the peanut vender.
"My name is John D. Rockefeller," said the man. "I have plenty of money and everything that is needed to run a successful business. How about us going into partnership? I will supply the money and everything you need, and you furnish your time and ability and whatever you can."
The little peanut vender thought about it for awhile. Then he said, "No, I don't believe I'll do it."
"Why?" Mr. Rockefeller asked. "You are not doing so well as it is; and together the business could become a success!"
"Well, I'll tell you," said the little vender. "The way it is now, I am the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary and the Treasurer of the company; but if we went into partnership, you would want some office in the company, too, and you would want to have some say-so about how things are run. I think I'd rather keep it just the way it is."
Having said that, the little peanut vender got up, walked out and went to pull his little cart out of the bushes once againt to try to scrounge out a living with his little bit of merchandise.
Brother Kamelason of course didn't vouch for the actual events of the story. He simply used it as an illustration of how it so often is with us. We may not be making much of a success of our lives, but when the Lord comes along with all the great resources of His grace and His mercy and His blessings and offers to go into partnershop with us and insure our making a success of life, we turn Him down. We are so proud and so self-centered and so independent that we had rather run our own lives and make a failure of them so long as we can be the whole cheese than to let anyone else - even the Lord Jesus Himself! - get some of the lime-light, some of the credit, some of the profit and have some of the say-so as to what goes on.
"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." The New Testament knows nothing of a saving faith which accepts Jesus as Saviour and yet refuses to accept Him as the Lord and Master of one's life.
True saving faith is trust: a trust in Jesus that results in an acceptance of Him as one's personal Saviour; and a trust in Jesus that results in obedience to His known will.
Faith involves trust and leads to commitment.
At Lake Junaluska in the Missions Conference in 1981, Bishop Lawi Imathiu of Kenya was one of the principal speakers.
In one of his messages, he told of how he dated the woman who is now his wife for just about two years. They were wonderful friends, but he had been afraid to ask her to be his wife because he was afraid she would say, "No."
Finally, he asked her to marry him.
She said, "Wait. I will ask my parents."
The next day he asked her what the answer was.
A day or so later he asked her again what the answer was. She said, "Yes!"
"That one word," he said, "made all the difference in the world in their relationship." Because of that one word they now have five children, and what he has is hers, and what she has is his.
So it is with us and the church and the Lord Jesus. We can be together a great deal. We can enjoy each other's company. We can have some pretty wonderful times together.
But until we say "Yes" in commitment to Jesus, He is still outside our hearts' doors knocking and He is still waiting to come in.
Much as a marriage cannot take place without commitment, so we cannot sing, "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!" without commitment.
And, just as a marriage ceremony doesn't take very long once two people are willing to stand at an altar and make the commitment, so it doesn't take very long for a person to become a Christian once he or she becomes willing to truly commit his or her life unto Christ in faith.
"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." Rightly understood, that is all we need to know in order to be saved, and that is all we have to do in order to become a Christian and enter that straight and narrow pathway that brings us safely home to our Father's house at last. Let, us pray...