I Am Saved! I Know I Am! I Gave My Heart to Christ

Matthew 7:21 – “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

Revelation 3:20 – “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me”

Acts 16:14 – “One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshipper of God. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.”

More and more in North America today, there is what is called the “Sinner’s Prayer” which goes like below

“Heavenly Father, have mercy on me, a sinner. I believe in you and that your word is true. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God and that he died on the cross so that I may now have forgiveness for my sins and eternal life. I know that without you in my heart my life is meaningless.
I believe in my heart that you, Lord God, raised Him from the dead. Please Jesus forgive me, for every sin I have ever committed or done in my heart, please Lord Jesus forgive me and come into my heart as my personal Lord and Savior today. I need you to be my Father and my friend.
I give you my life and ask you to take full control from this moment on; I pray this in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Amen.

This has to be one of the biggest lies for salvation there is. You ask, why a prayer to God would be misleading to salvation? Well, if we look at the words of Christ, He was saying over and over again “Repent and believe”. There is no repentance in this prayer. It’s simply saying something like “Dear God, I have everything in my life that I need, but I am missing one more thing to add to my list of accomplishments. I want Christ so that when I die, if I want to believe in God, so that way, if He does exist, I took the right gamble.

This falls in the philosophy of Pascal’s wager. Blaise Pascal was a philosopher that lived between 1623 and 1662. He only lived 39 yrs (according to documented). His philosophy is in point form as follows.

The philosophy uses the following logic (excerpts from Pensées, part III, §233):
1. “God is, or He is not”
2. A Game is being played… where heads or tails will turn up.
3. According to reason, you can defend either of the propositions.
4. You must wager. (It’s not optional.)
5. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
6. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (…) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.

He was basically arguing that you can have a life of happiness if you wager believing in God. This is basically saying that you don’t want to take a chance and have a bad eternity, you still want everything you might not have received on earth. But even if you live as an Atheist, and you die and God doesn’t exist, you didn’t lose anything anyway.
My dear friend, don’t fall for this. There is no such thing as “gambling” on God. You have a choice, not a gamble. Here’s the issue. God does exist. You believing in Him or not doesn’t change His existence. And the big kicker, He won’t accept YOU in His heaven if your sins are not forgiven. Your sins are everything that you do that offends him. Basically before you are saved, that’s EVERYTHING you do.

Isaiah 64:6 – All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.

What do you do with a rag that is beyond being washed? Soiled with oil and grease and every kind of chemical you can throw at it…to the point that it’s not even worth washing? You throw it out. That is how God sees you. You are worth Hell and the lake of fire.
But there is good news in all of this. Christ. He died for EXACTLY that reason. Because since you were worthless in your condition to God, Christ washed your sins with his blood. His blood was the only detergent that has the power to clean your offences toward God.

But there is one issue, you can’t just say you believe in Christ, you must first see your sin the way God does. Absolutely repulsive. When you looked at that woman walking down the street, and wanted her more than your wife. When you saw that man smiling back at you, and you wish your husband did the same thing. When you forgot that pen in your pocket at work, and you brought it home? You say it’s just a pen!!! I agree, it’s not the size of theft that counts, it’s the size of the God you offended that counts.
When you see your sin the way God does, and you are convicted of it, and you realize you can’t get rid of it, that’s the beginning of repentance. Then when you repent and then believe in Christ, you can have his promise of eternal life.

I pray with each article that you, my fellow reader, won’t take a gamble and “believe” in God because you want to avoid a bad ending. I pray you will repent of your sin and believe in Christ.