If you want a really
quick guideline to tell if a particular “Christian”-sounding church really
follows the Bible, here’s a question to ask of their belief system:
“Do
you believe God grants us complete grace, or do we have to do
something to earn our way to heaven once we’ve joined?”
In many,
many places in the Bible, and not just in the New Testament, it’s
made very clear that God grants the
believer grace, that “if you confess with
your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him
from the dead, you will be saved.
For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one
confesses and is saved.” (Romans 10:9-10).
A true confession of faith (and that can be a sticky thing to evaluate
from the outside – God knows, of course, but we lowly humans have no
absolute way of checking out another person’s faith) is
all that’s needed for the believer to take his place in God’s Book of Life.
In contrast,
most Christian-looking, Christian-sounding
sects that don’t truly follow the Bible (and therefore put its members at a frightening risk of damnation) demand
something beyond this to PROVE one is “good enough” to go to heaven when
they die: works during their membership, or penance (verbal or monetary) in
conjunction with the church in question. The worst ones, the infamous ones, demand such service
directly to the “sect” (“cult”) leader, or perhaps his inner circle.
Here’s a related principle – how related you’ll see in a bit:
If
you’re a member of a truly Christian church, one that simply wants your
salvation, they know that it doesn’t matter
whether you’re a member of their church or another with Biblical
principles at its core – depending on its tolerance, they may not even worry if
you’re still in the exact same denomination as long as you’re still a
true Believer, your soul still saved. By contrast, it’s much more often
the case that people trying to leave
the false sects (and again, increasingly the farther you get from true
Christianity!) are going to be subjected to hurdles, harassment, sometimes
threats and shunning beyond all reason.
Why is this? It
turns out there’s a very simple reason.
When you are
actually saved, when you become an actual
Child of God, the Holy Spirit indwells within your soul.
At that point, you don’t need to
be performing beneficial works as a way of proving how ‘heavenly’ you
are – you’re a Child of God, and you’re going to want to perform good
works because God designed it that way! Read Ephesians 2:8-10
carefully – not only does it repeat the earlier statement about how we are
saved by faith and not works in exactly so many words, but it explains why
those works are there for us to perform:
“For by grace you have been saved through
faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of
works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in
Christ Jesus for good works, which God
prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
Those works were prepared beforehand for you, given to you by a God who wants
to use you, as He wants to use all of His Children, to make His
World a better place.
When you join a non-Biblical
church, you don’t get saved, so you
don’t get the Holy Spirit within you.
What’s your motivation to do those good works? That
church has to come up with a reason!
“It’s because you’re a good person,
like ALL of us who are members of (fill-in-the-blanks)
are! So we need to show God that we’re good people!” Or perhaps, “when we do
something wrong, we need to pay for our sins by doing (X, Y, or Z) as penance to show God that
we’re sorry.”
Really? You don’t think God wouldn’t know you
were “good” or “sinful”? Did you MISS one of the seven thousand places
where the Bible says something like “GOD KNOWS EVERYTHING THAT’S GOING ON,
EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME”?
Or is it that you think that somehow
you’re going to EARN your way to heaven by being “good enough”? Again, did you
miss the two or three hundred places where the Bible tells us our sinful nature
came from the very beginning, and literally the ONLY way that you can get past
that is through “the way,
the truth, and the light” –
Jesus Christ, the only Son of God? If
you really were a “Christian” church, of course, you’d KNOW that already.
Oh, wait! I
forgot! There is something about giving a sacrifice
to pay for our sins in the Old Testament! THAT must be why you think that you need to do a penance of some
kind to “pay for your sins”, right?
Unless you actually spent a few minutes
in the NEW Testament, where you would have learned that Jesus’ sacrifice on the
Cross DID AWAY WITH ALL OF THOSE SACRIFICES. Those were pre-cursors of the true sacrifice given by the Son of God, fully
God and fully Man, the ONLY person who could pay a worthy enough sacrifice for
our sins to be sufficient for God to grant us grace.
What does a true
Believer do to pay for his sins?
He renews his prayers to his Lord Jesus Christ and
repents of those sins, and God grants him Grace. End
of story.
What does a true
Believer do to earn God’s grace and be kept from Hell/slash/go to Heaven when
he dies? (There’s
another clue about the church you’re considering – those should be
the only two choices when you die: Heaven
and Hell. They’re the only Biblical choices. Nowhere in Scripture is
there any reference to any kind of third
option – there’s no ‘limbo’, no ‘purgatory’, no annihilation, no
reincarnation. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something, as they say.)
Nothing. There is literally nothing that he can DO
to earn God’s forgiveness and grace. Nothing. God grants it free of charge for
acknowledging the Lordship of the Holy Trinity, and living with the Holy Spirit
inside of you.
Seriously – what are you going to
do to pay for that gift? Help the poor? Big deal. God could’ve done that in a heartbeat. Bring others to
Christ? That’s our JOB. No rewards
for that.
There is NOTHING that we infinitesimal
creatures could EVER do to repay the Creator of the Universe for Eternal Life
in Heaven (and the flipside of that
coin, salvation from the Hell we deserve to be in as payment for our sins).
†
What should a
church which actually teaches the Bible tell you about salvation?
That it’s a one-step process.
That “if you confess
with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that
God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Period. End of story. It only takes a moment – the most important
moment of your life.
That any church that tells you otherwise
is to be run away from before they get their claws into you.
Because rather than getting saved,
you’re likely to get trapped instead.
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