When Peter first preached the Gospel, his listeners cried out, “what must we do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30). We all know, as they did then, that we cannot save ourselves; there is nothing we can do to merit or provide salvation for ourselves or anyone else. Salvation is a gift of God. However, Peter’s audience realised that they needed to make some sort of response to the Gospel, but they didn’t know what that response should be.

In a previous post I told the story (a true story by the way) of the evangelist who asked the waiter to ‘receive Jesus’. Was the waiter’s prayer an adequate and effective response, and to what was he responding? Wayne Grudem writes in his book ‘Systematic Theology’ that ‘anyone who comes to Christ for salvation must have at least a basic understanding of who Christ is and how he meets our needs for salvation’. He goes on to say that the explanation of salvation must include at least the fact that all people have sinned (Romans 3:23), that the penalty for our sin is death (Romans 6:23), and that Jesus Christ died to pay the penalty for our sins (Romans 5:8). If these basic facts are not presented in some comprehensible form then to what exactly is the person expected to respond? Without wishing to be crass, would the following ‘gospel’ invitation’ suffice… “Tim do you know Jesus? No, Well Jesus this is Tim, and Tim say ‘pleased to meet you Jesus’. Good, now you are saved.” Yet many of the alter call/sinner’s prayer methods we see and hear so often are really little more than that.

One of the evangelists who recently preached in my church said that we shouldn’t expect people to come blubbering to the front to repent when all that is needed is to simply call upon the name of the Lord. Yet, surely, if repentance is required it needs to be real and to be real it must be heart-felt?! Imagine committing serial adultery over several years and then saying to your spouse “I call on you to take me back!….  what…. why won’t you?” As a very minimum your spouse would need to be convinced that you were heart-broken over how you had hurt her/him, deeply repentant, and determined that it would not happen again.

After real repentance must come a genuine and informed acknowledgement that we cannot make it right with God. We can’t pay him off and we can’t work off our debt for the rest of our lives.  Jesus has paid for our sinful rebellion and we must understand, acknowledge and accept the wonder and validity of this. Yet, even that is insufficient, because even if we repent and accept what Jesus has done on our behalf we are still the same old fatally flawed human being we were moments before our repentance and acceptance. God needs to do something radical – he needs to give us a new spiritual existence – we need to ask him to give us this new life; we need to be born again. Jesus taught Nicodemus about this (John 3) and Paul explained it comprehensively (Ephesians 4:21-24 and many other places). We receive the new birth by faith and then confess what God has done for and in us by telling others especially through the physical ‘telling’ of water baptism. These then are the things we need to do in order to receive the free salvation God offers us in Christ Jesus. Anything less is an inadequate response to an inadequate Gospel.

A thought to leave with you – what about those folk who have grown up in a Christian home and church environment and who have never consciously made a response to the Gospel – are they ‘saved’?