Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart: How to Know for Sure You Are Saved by J.D. Greear

Author:J.D. Greear [Greear, J.D.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Christian
Published: 2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Belief in the gospel is not demonstrated by “never falling” but by what you do when you fall.

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I love how the book of Proverbs says it, “A righteous man may fall seven times, and rise again” (24:16). The righteous man is not one who never falls, but one who always gets back up. If you are watching a man walk through the mall and he falls, you snigger and point it out to your friends. If he does it twice and looks like he is about to do it again, you get out your phone, record it, and send it to your friends who aren’t there. If he does it a fourth and fifth time, you post it on YouTube and it goes viral. If he falls a seventh time, you conclude there is something wrong with him and feel bad for posting it on YouTube. Yet God says righteous people fall seven times. Righteous people fall so much that it sometimes seems they can barely walk! But each time they get back up looking at Jesus.

Faith is not the absence of doubt; it is continuing to follow Jesus in the midst of doubt. Imagine a person who’s never seen civilization being suddenly asked to get on board a plane so they can travel with their infant to a remote hospital where they can obtain a needed medicine. Everything in them screams out in fear. Yet they drag themselves, kicking and screaming, onto the plane. Though their whole being resists it, their desire to save their infant overcomes their fears, and they get on board.

Repentance often works the same way: we put to death our desires, fears, and confusion because we know that Jesus is more important than them all. Like Peter said to Jesus, after a particularly difficult teaching in which many departed from Jesus and Jesus asked the disciples, “Do you also want to go away?” Peter says, “To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:67–68). Peter doesn’t say, “Of course not! What You’re saying makes perfect sense.” He says, essentially, “I don’t understand You on this either, Jesus, but there’s no way I’m following my doubts if they lead away from You. So I’ll follow You even with my doubts. You’re worth the risk.”

Likewise, we continue to follow Jesus as we struggle with sin. Repentance ushers us into a life of greater struggle, not out of one. While I’ve heard of some people who were immediately released from certain sinful desires, like alcoholism, anger, or same-sex attraction when they received Christ, as a pastor of fifteen years I can say that that is not the normal experience of new believers. Christians, like the apostle Paul, continue to struggle with sin, often unsuccessfully, for the rest of their lives. The struggle is proof of their new nature. They fall often, but when they do, they always get up looking His direction.

Repentance, therefore, is not the absence of struggle; it is the absence of settled defiance.

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