How is a person saved?

Question 07013.

How can a person be saved? It is the oldest question in the book, quite literally, since the Philippian jailer asked it in almost those words at midnight with an earthquake still settling around him. Paul’s answer to him was one sentence long, and I have never been able to improve on it: believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved. Not join, not try, not promise. Believe.

That simplicity offends us. We would rather be given a course to complete or a standard to reach, because then some part of the credit would be ours. But nobody can be saved on those terms, and the whole New Testament is written to say so.

Start With Why Anyone Needs to Be Saved

You cannot want a rescue until you know you are in trouble, and this is where most conversations about faith actually stall. Modern people do not generally think of themselves as guilty. Flawed, yes. Stressed, certainly. Guilty before a holy God, hardly ever. And yet Romans 3:10-12 says that none is righteous, no, not one, and that no one seeks for God, which is an uncomfortable verdict on the whole species and not only on its obvious villains.

Sin in Scripture is not primarily a list of offences. It is a direction of travel, a settled independence from God that shows itself in a thousand small ways long before it shows itself in a large one. The respectable and the disreputable are on the same road at different speeds.

So the first movement in anyone’s story is usually not intellectual but moral. Something happens, or someone says something, and you find yourself thinking: that is true of me. Until that lands, nothing else will.

What God Has Already Done So That You Can Be Saved

Here is the good news, and notice the tense of it. The work by which sinners can be saved is finished. Jesus lived the life we could not live, died the death we deserved to die, and rose again on the third day. 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 gives that as the apostolic summary of the gospel, delivered as of first importance.

The cross was substitution. He took the penalty; we take the pardon. 1 Peter 3:18 says that Jesus suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, and those last five words are the whole point of the exercise.

This is why nobody has to wonder whether there is enough grace for them. The question was never whether the payment was sufficient. The question is only whether it will be received.

The Response: Repent and Believe

The apostolic call is consistently to repent and believe. These are not two separate transactions but two sides of one turning. Repentance is turning from; faith is turning to. You cannot face east without turning your back on west.

Repentance does not mean cleaning yourself up before you come. That would be like washing before a bath. The Greek metanoia means a change of mind that produces a change of direction, and the change of life follows conversion rather than preceding it. Nobody has ever been saved by reforming first.

Faith is trust, not agreement. I have gone into the difference in saving faith and intellectual belief, because a great many people who believe every word of the creed have never actually leaned their weight on the one it describes.

What Happens the Moment a Person Is Saved

Rather a lot, and all of it at once. You are justified, which means declared righteous before God on the basis of what Jesus did. You are regenerated, given new spiritual life by the Holy Spirit. You are adopted into God’s family with all the rights of a son. You are indwelt by the Spirit and sealed by him for the day of redemption.

None of that is felt as a sequence, and much of it may not be felt at all. Ephesians 1:13 sets out the order plainly enough: you heard the word of truth, you believed, and having believed you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. Hearing, believing, sealing. The believing comes before the sealing, which is why I hold that faith precedes the new birth rather than following it.

The change is legal, relational and spiritual all at once, and it is instantaneous. There is no probation.

What Is Not Required

This list matters as much as the other one, because people add conditions constantly. You do not have to be baptised in order to be saved, though you should be baptised afterwards, and I take that up in whether baptism is necessary for salvation. You do not have to belong to a particular denomination, mine included.

You do not have to feel anything in particular. Some people weep and some feel nothing at all, and the second group are not second class. You do not have to understand every doctrine. The thief on the cross had a theology you could write on the back of a stamp and he was in paradise that day.

And you do not have to repeat a set form of words. There is such a thing as a helpful prayer to pray, but the prayer does not save anybody. The Saviour does. What saves is the trust behind the words, not the words themselves, and I would rather someone stammered their way to Jesus than recited a polished formula to nobody in particular.

Whose Work Is It?

I want to be careful not to leave the impression that a person saves himself by an act of will. The Spirit convicts, the word is preached, circumstances are arranged, and a person who would never have gone looking finds himself unable to stop thinking about God. All of that is grace, and none of it is earned.

But the response is genuinely ours to make. When Jesus wept over Jerusalem and said that he would have gathered her children together and she was not willing, he was not performing. The refusal was real, and so is the acceptance when it comes.

So I have no hesitation in telling anyone at all that they may be saved today. The invitation in Revelation 22:17 is that let the one who desires take the water of life without price, and the one who desires is anybody who desires.

How to Do It, Plainly

Tell God the truth about yourself. Say that you have gone your own way and that you know it. Do not dress it up; he has heard worse and he already knows anyway.

Then tell him that you are trusting what Jesus did at the cross rather than anything you have done or intend to do. Ask him to forgive you on that basis. Ask him for the new life he has promised. Use your own words, out loud or silently, in a church or in a car park.

Then tell somebody. Romans 10:9 ties confession with the mouth to belief in the heart, and there is something about saying it aloud to another human being that settles it in a way private conviction rarely does. Find a Bible-teaching church and get baptised.

There is one more thing worth saying here, because it trips people up. Being saved is not the same as being sorted. You will still lose your temper, still worry about money, still have the same difficult relatives you had last week. What changes is that you now belong to God, that his Spirit is inside you working on all of it, and that the outcome is no longer in doubt. Conversion is a birth, not a graduation, and nobody expects a newborn to run.

What If It Does Not Take?

People sometimes come back to me a fortnight later saying they think nothing happened. Almost always the problem is that they were watching for a feeling rather than resting on a promise. God did not undertake to give you goosebumps. He undertook to receive everyone who comes.

Take him at his word. John 6:37 says that whoever comes to him he will never cast out, and that sentence has no small print. If you came, you are in, whatever your emotional weather is doing this week.

If doubt keeps circling, read what to do when you do not feel saved, and talk to a pastor rather than carrying it alone.

So, now what?

So the answer to how a person can be saved turns out to be short enough to fit in one breath and deep enough to take a lifetime to explore. Jesus has done everything. You bring nothing but your need, which you have in abundance.

If you have never done this, why not do it now, before the phone rings and the moment passes? And if you did it years ago and have been quietly wondering ever since, would you let his promise settle the matter rather than your memory of how it felt?

Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.

Acts 16:31 (ESV)