Today’s reading: Exodus 22; 2 Corinthians 13
Paul says to his Corinthian readers, “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? - unless indeed you fail to meet the test!”
I think there is something to note here for the modern Evangelical reader. Paul doesn’t tell them to examine themselves to see if they prayed a specific prayer at some point in their lives, or if they raised their hand at a service, or if they went up to an altar call, or anything like that. His question is, “Do you, right now, believe?”
I have sat around with a group of faithful brothers and sisters in the Lord before, and people were sharing how they came to faith in Christ. As one guy shared his story, there was no point at which he prayed a “sinner’s prayer” or anything like it. He described how he came to understand the gospel (which he articulated as part of his story), and he described the joy of being part of God’s family, and how he had been walking with God for years since then. When he was done telling his story, one of the others there was clearly bothered by the lack of a specific point-in-time conversion event and kept pressing him for when he made a specific decision and/or prayed for forgiveness, but he never had (at least not in the way our friend was looking for). He said he looks back and there was a time he didn’t believe, a time of study, prayer, and discovery, and then, at some point in all that, he had come to place his trust in Jesus, but he didn’t know when.
What really struck me about that whole thing was that here was a guy who loves the Lord, has devoted a significant portion of his life to following Him, has a clear understanding of salvation by faith alone in Christ, is actively teaching others the same message of grace, and is bearing fruit in his own life, but that was not enough. There needed to be a prayer prayed, or some switch flipped along the way. But where is that in Scripture? Where is it said that our faith is only valid if we have prayed a “sinner’s prayer” (a prayer that none of the writers of Scripture even bothered to include)? Or, maybe more importantly, where is it said that our faith today is valid if we said the right prayer “back then”?
None of that is in Scripture. Instead, what we have is statements like this, “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith.”
This is faith throughout the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments. Where does your faith lie? With whom have you aligned yourself?
For Israel, this was aligning themselves with Yahweh over against the gods allotted to the nations. Yahweh declared that He was redeeming Israel from those other gods and they were to follow no one but Him alone. Being an Israelite didn’t save them. Being circumcised didn’t save them. Sacrificing at the temple didn’t save them. But aligning themselves with Yahweh, placing their faith and trust in Him, assigning their believing loyalty to Yahweh over against Baal, Asherah, Molech, Dagon, and all the rest of the gods of the nations around them, that was what God called for.
And in the New Testament, it is a continuation of that same faith. Not, “Did you pray a prayer when you were 5? Or even 19?” But, “Are you in the faith?”
It is by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that we can be brought into the people of God. It is through faith in the sufficiency of His sacrifice that we can be restored to right relationship to our Creator and look forward to a glorious eternity with Him in Heaven. And it is by that same faith that we walk with Him.
It is not by praying a prayer that we are saved. It is not by answering an altar call or raising our hand during worship that we are adopted by God as His children. It is not by having had an emotional experience of God at a summer camp that we are assured of our eternity in Heaven.
So my question to you is the same as Paul’s question to the Corinthians: Are you, today, in the faith? Are you, day by day, walking with God by faith in Jesus as the way the truth and the life, and the only way by which we can come to the Father? Or does your “faith” rest on a past conversion experience that says nothing about your life or belief today?
We, as a church (globally, not a specific church), need to be less concerned with counting conversion prayers and more concerned with leading people to lives of ongoing and growing faith in our Lord and savior.
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