Being a believer is essential for every person who identifies as a Christian, meaning we have to believe in God and follow His ways.
This seems obvious, but not everyone who states that they are a Christian is a person of faith. Some say they are Christian because they were ‘christened’ as an infant, or they grew up in a Christian family, or their spouse is a Christian. We would call them nominal Christians – Christians in name only.
However, without faith it is impossible to please God. We can’t live on someone else’s faith, although parents, to an extent, cover their children in infancy until they are of an age to identify as believers themselves.
Faith comes by hearing
We need to believe for our own life in Christ to come into being. So how does faith come, then? How can we discover how to believe if we have never heard before how to be a person of faith?
So then, faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.
Romans 10:17
Faith comes by hearing and by believing the gospel, which is the Word of Christ. The gospel is the good news that Jesus has paid the price of our sin through His death, burial and resurrection, whereby He was raised to life from death by the power of the Holy Spirit after having paid for our sins.
The wages, or recompense, for sin is death, which is essentially separation from God. Sin is death to the human spirit. God’s grace, through faith, can revive us.
Hearing the gospel is not enough, though. We need to genuinely believe the gospel, and act on it. The gospel is the power of God onto salvation for those who believe (Rom.1:16).
But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith which we preach): that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.”
Romans 10:8-11
Yes, so we believe with the heart and confess with our mouth what we believe. If, then, we believe the gospel message; that is, that Jesus died for us, was buried for us, and was raised for us so that our sin was paid for and we could be saved and made guilt free, and if we back this up by confessing it and receiving Jesus as our Lord and Saviour, we will be saved.
When we call upon the Lord to save us, believing that He has done all He needs to do to pay for our sin and give us new life, eternal life in Him, we will be saved.
The real thing
This must be a genuine, heart-felt confession, not just of our sins, but of Jesus as our Lord. Yes, we can confess our sins alongside this, but the truth is that our sins have been completely paid for at the cross of Christ, and we were made free right there at Calvary.
We can simply admit that we had sinned, that we are a sinner, and that we need to be saved.
We don’t have to dictate our entire list of sins throughout our lifetime. The slate has been made clean.
There may be some instances that come to our mind or heart that we see as bad examples of our former life that we want to shine the light on and talk to God about them, but that confession is secondary to confession of Jesus as Lord and acknowledgement of His sacrificial substitution on our behalf at the cross where He paid the price of those sins. He gave us a new heart and a new spirit attuned to His own.
Thereafter, we can walk free, guilt-free, completely without shame, made clean by the work of the cross and the Word of God. Our confession of Christ as Lord of our lives takes us over the line from darkness into light, from death to life, from eternal separation to eternal community with God and His saints.
From then on we are to walk by faith. The life of faith doesn’t end at our confession of Jesus as Lord. It begins there. Faith is essential to our ongoing journey with God. The just shall live by faith we are told (Rom.1:17).
Faith is what helps us overcome all obstacles to the Christian life, and there will be challenges along the way, but we are equipped and given the grace to overcome all difficulties through faith.
