How to Lead People to Christ, Part 2: Our Invitation to Respond (John 6:35–40)

If I may judge from the number of questions that were raised yesterday and the flood of humanity that poured down here around the podium area after the presentation, I got you to thinking. And I’m delighted that I did. That’s one of the main purposes of a conference like this. And I happen to believe that the Grace movement needs to do some very careful thinking about some very important issues that are related to the basic message that we preach.

And if I send you away from here searching the Scriptures, I’ve done my job.

That leads me to a preamble to my presentation today. I have often thought that one of the reasons that God allowed the lordship controversy to arise was for the purpose of waking up the Grace people. Lordship theology really swept in while we were asleep at our post. Few of you can remember, as I can because I’m older by a considerable margin than many of you, but few of you can remember when the Southern Baptists and the Plymouth Brethren held up the true gospel in a majority of their churches. That situation is now gone and alien theology is to be found almost everywhere you look. Institutions that used to be pillars of Grace have become hot beds of Reformed and lordship theology.

But now that so many Grace people are wide awake we can begin to see at least part of what went wrong. We ourselves had been sloppy and fuzzy about the doctrine of salvation without realizing it. We ourselves had clouded the gospel message by careless terminology and by an unwillingness to think in a disciplined way about our basic commitments. Without realizing it we had added theological conditions and provided those and stipulations to our core message. We had so many of these in fact that even many Grace people struggled with assurance.

I hope you realize that that is true. Many people in Grace churches struggled with assurance because they were asking themselves the question, “Did I believe the right way? Did I believe the right things? Did I understand this when I believed? Did I understand that when I believed? Did I understand the other thing when I believed?” You’d be surprised how many people like that there have been.

We had sort of become a church of jailhouse lawyers. You know a jailhouse lawyer spends hours in the prison library pouring over the legal books to discover every conceivable technicality that might be appealed to to reverse his sentence. In the case of the church we have invoked technicality after technicality after technicality to invalidate conversion experiences.

So I may say to someone, “Joe Smith just believed in Jesus for eternal life.” But I might get any of the following responses: “Did he have a real conviction of sin? Did he know about the deity of Christ? Did he believe in the virgin birth? Did he understand the substitutionary atonement? Does he believe in Christ’s bodily resurrection?” And what if I said no to all of this and said he just believed that Jesus would give him eternal life? Was his faith misplaced? No indeed. He was believing the right person and he was believing the right person for the right thing.

But when we invoke technicalities and invalidate someone’s faith we open the door to lordship salvation which invokes a whole new set of technicalities. Now we have, “If you don’t believe and surrender when you believe, did you dedicate yourself? Did you submit yourself?” And on it goes.

In other words the differences we have with lordship salvation are sometimes only a matter of degree. The church’s fuzzy thinking about faith has created a theological monster. I would perhaps say a theological dragon whose primary operation has been to devour the assurance of salvation.

That leads me to the presentation of the day, how to lead people to Christ. Yesterday we talked about getting our core message to men clearly in mind. Our objective is to lead them to believe in Jesus Christ to provide their eternal salvation. The gospel message about His death, burial, and resurrection is the normal context for our presentation of this core objective. But at the end of the day anyone who trusts Jesus Christ for eternal life is born again. And that’s what I said yesterday.

And if I’d only said that much I probably wouldn’t have caused anywhere near the ripples that I caused. Because after telling you that I said there were no hidden provisos. There were no hidden clauses. There were no unexpressed stipulations. I got into the china shop like a raging bull and I broke a lot of glass. But what I have said to you is just exactly what I mean. We are trying to get people to believe in Jesus to provide their eternal salvation.

Now obviously, and this I hope emerged from the question session, there are two non-negotiables here. Number one, no salvation anywhere for anybody apart from the name of Jesus. Now by that we’re talking about the Jesus of the New Testament, not Jesus Espinosa who lives in the barrio in Los Angeles. And we’re certainly not talking about Mr. X in whom we have believed and oh we discover later that it’s Jesus. No. In this age you have to believe in Jesus, the Jesus of the New Testament. That’s one non-negotiable.

The other non-negotiable is that you must believe that He guarantees eternal salvation or that He gives everlasting life. Dr. Charles Ryrie used to say if you could lose everlasting life it has the wrong name. It’s not everlasting.

So the two non-negotiables are very simple. Number one, the Jesus of the New Testament must be the focus of a person’s faith. And the person is believing that the Jesus of the New Testament provides and guarantees his eternal destiny.

Today I want to talk about the process of seeking a responsive faith from those with whom we share our good news. Yesterday’s talk laid the groundwork for much of what we would like to say today.

Now today’s presentation is divided into some subsections. So subsection number one is believe that Jesus died on the cross.

In recent years I have become aware of a way of presenting the gospel invitation that kind of bothers me. I believe I have heard it from my earliest years and I admit it really didn’t bother me for a long time. Now it does.

I have heard people say this: “In order to be saved you must believe that Jesus died on the cross.” In the context of this discussion today I mean that this is their summary of the requirement of faith. This is not just one item.

Okay you say, “How does a person get saved?” They say, “Believe that Jesus died on the cross.”

Whenever I hear that nowadays I get extremely uncomfortable. For one thing is there anyone in a Christian church, unless it is a radically liberal church, who doesn’t believe that Jesus died on the cross? For that matter even some very liberal theologians would consider that a true statement although they might balk at the doctrine of resurrection.

You can see why I feel uncomfortable. Now I know that the statement I’m evaluating leaves a lot of things unspoken that are implied or at least usually implied by the speaker. Most of the time people who say you are saved by believing that Jesus died on the cross mean by that that He died for our sins. In fact that’s often added: “You must believe that Jesus died on the cross for your sins.”