J. D. Greear asks: Should We Stop Asking Jesus Into Our Hearts?
By the time I reached the age of 18 I had probably “asked Jesus into my heart” 5,000 times. I started somewhere around age 4 when I approached my parents one Saturday morning asking how someone could know that they were going to heaven. They carefully led me down the “Romans Road to Salvation,” and I gave Jesus his first invitation into my heart. . . .
[But h]ad I really been sorry for my sins? And could I really have known what I was doing at age 4?
So I asked Jesus to come into my heart again, this time with a resolve to be much more intentional about my faith. I requested re-baptism, and gave a very moving testimony in front of our congregation about getting serious with God.
Not long after that, however, I found myself asking again: Had I really been sorry enough for my sin this time around? I’d see some people weep rivers of tears when they got saved, but I hadn’t done that. Did that mean I was not really sorry? And there were a few sins I seemed to fall back into over and over again, no matter how many resolutions I made to do better. Was I really sorry for those sins? Was that prayer a moment of total surrender? Would I have died for Jesus at that moment if he’d asked?
So I prayed the sinner’s prayer again. And again. And again. Each time trying to get it right, each time really trying to mean it. I would have a moment when I felt like I got it right and experienced a temporary euphoria. But it would fade quickly and I’d question it all again. And so I’d pray again.
Although my experience was quite different from Greear’s, I did go through something of a crisis of assurance of salvation in high school. It was not a major crisis, but it was enough to cause me to wonder whether I had gone through the right procedures to “get saved.” At some point it finally dawned on me that I needed to trust the promises of God in Christ and not the efficacy of my own decision-making abilities. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why I love so much the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism:
Q. What is your only comfort
in life and in death?A. That I am not my own,
but belong—
body and soul,
in life and in death—
to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,
and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.
He also watches over me in such a way
that not a hair can fall from my head
without the will of my Father in heaven:
in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.Because I belong to him,
Christ, by his Holy Spirit,
assures me of eternal life
and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready
from now on to live for him.
July 15th, 2012 | 4:06 pm | #1
Somewhere along the line evangelical culture has forgotten that as we grow in our faith, we grow in our sense of sin and in our grasp of God’s grace.
Because we forget that, we come to believe that every time we experience our own sinfulness more deeply and embrace God’s grace more deeply than we previously had, we’re “saved” in a way that we weren’t “saved” before and so presumably weren’t “saved” at all until now.
Pass that kind of thinking down through several generations and you get an entire culture filled with kids and then adults mirroring J.D. Greear’s experience. Things like the Heidelberg are great antidotes to that kind of thinking, but sadly even most churches that embrace the Heidelberg tend to relegate it to “formal catechism” and the rubber-meets-the-road spirituality that is preached and modeled is more revivalistic and feeds the “I’m REALLY getting saved THIS time” syndrome.
Confessing that it is Jesus who “makes me” wholeheartedly willing and ready to live for Him precludes the idea that we have to be ready (“really ready, for real”) first, before we get His help. We just have to listen to ourselves when we confess it.
July 16th, 2012 | 1:26 am | #2
I can relate to this experience. I think the cause of it originates in a narrowed vision of what salvation is. For an Evangelical, it’s an event; I prayed the prayer sincerely and now I’m going to Heaven no matter what I do. And yet, if I honestly reckon up my life I know how much needs to be changed. But, if I set out to reclaim my life from the spiritual wasteland I’ve made it, I then run up against the accusation – you’re trying to work your way to Heaven. It’s a trap which keeps people in a state of anxiety. The cure is to realize that the Christian life is a way, not just an event. The escape for me started with George MacDonald’s sermons. “Tell me it is faith He requires:do I not know it? And is not faith the highest act of which the human mind is capable? But faith in what? Faith in what He is, in what He says – a faith which can have no existence except in obedience – a faith which is obedience.” Or this: ” Tell me something that you have done, are doing, or are trying to do because He told you. If you do nothing He says, it is no wonder that you cannot trust Him, and are therefore driven to seek refuge in the atonement, as if something He had done and not He Himself in His doing were the atonement.” And finally, ” He knows that you can try, and that in your trying and failing He will be able to help you, until at length you shall do the will of God even as He does it Himself,” The Christian life really lived, even though imperfectly, is what brings comfort.
July 17th, 2012 | 11:25 am | #3
Olaf, the way I often think of it is that people worry too much about “becoming” a Christian and not enough about “being” one. It is still all by faith, but for crying out loud stop worrying so much about whether you crossed the the starting line right, and just get out there and run the race! If your faith is genuine, you’ll do it!
July 18th, 2012 | 4:42 pm | #4
I helps to distinguish between the Law and the Gospel. The Law is what we should do and whatever it may be that one is trying to do to be what one should be. The Gospel is what God has done, and. Still does for me. The Law always condemns me. It is only in the Gospel that I find salvation, certainty, and peace.
Look not to your feelings or your actions (everything with “your” is going to fall short). Look to Christ, in His Word, in His Baptism of you, in His body and blood in the Lord’s Supper “given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.”
July 20th, 2012 | 5:06 am | #5
If you want people to believe that you are a christian you better act like one.
July 21st, 2012 | 3:14 am | #6
Biblical assurance depends on the manifestation of fruit, not on our professions. Good article.
Josh Mann
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