What Must I Do to Be Saved?

I posted at Out of the Ordinary this morning on what it means to believe in the Lord Jesus.

Do you remember the story of the Philippian jailer’s conversion (Acts 16:25-34)? Paul and Silas were jailed in Philippi when a “great earthquake” freed the prisoners. The prisoners’ bonds were broken loose and the doors of the prison were shaken open. The jailer saw the open prison door, assumed the prisoners had escaped, and was about to kill himself when Paul assured him that no one was missing. All the prisoners were still there.

Then the jailer fell down in front of Paul and Silas and asked this question: “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” Perhaps he’d been listening to their prison prayers and songs, because somehow he knew he was guilty before God and needed to be saved from divine judgment. The answer from Paul and Silas was simple: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved … .” 

Read the rest of We Must Believe.

This post is the latest in a series of posts on truths every Christian woman should know. Here are the previous posts:

1. God Has Spoken (posted at the True Woman Blog)
2. God Is Three and God Is One
3. God Is Who He Is
4. God Had a Plan
5. God Created the Universe
6. We Are Made in God’s Image
7. We Are All Sinners
8. God Saves
9. The Son Came
10. Jesus Lived and Died
11. Jesus Is Risen
12. Jesus Is Lord

About Faith

From J. I. Packer, a summary of what the book of Hebrews says about faith. 

1. Faith is “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (11:1 NIV) — the emphasis being, as always in Scripture, on the reality of faith’s objects rather than the degree of confidence we feel about them.
2. Specifically, faith honours and pleases God by taking His word about things (creation, 11:3; rewards 11:6; God’s faithfulness to His promises, 11:11; this life as a journey home, 11:13-16; the fact that obedience always makes sense, even when it looks like nonsense, 11:17-19, etc.).
3. Faith approaches God boldly through Christ (4:16; 10:19-22) to find help and strength for the winning of the moral, spiritual and circumstantial victories (11:32-38; 4:16) and for the enduring of hostility both from within and from outside oneself (sin within, 12:1-4; ill-treatment from without, 10:32-34; 12:3).
4. Faith interprets trouble as God’s discipline of his child (12:5-11) and, so far from being daunted, rejoices to think of it as proving one’s sonship to God and preparing one for peace and pleasure to come.
5. Faith takes courage from examples of living by faith which the “great cloud of witnesses” have left us (12:1; 13:7), from thoughts of their present happiness (12:23), and from knowing that when we come to God here on earth we plug into the present worship and fellowship of the heaven that will be our own home one day (12:22-24).
6. Faith battle against temptations to unbelief, apathy and disobedience, sustaining against them the quality sometimes called “stickability” (Canadians say, “stick-to-it-iveness”), and referrred to in the letter as patience and endurance (Greek, hypomone) (6:11f.; 10:36; 12:1). Faith in God produces faithfulness to God.

Quoted from 18 Words: The Most Important Words you will Ever Know, page 132.

Theological Term of the Week

nihilism
“[T]he view that there are no objective values,” particularly no objective moral values, and “no objective purpose or meaning in human life or the universe at large.” 1

• From What’s Your Worldview? by James N. Anderson:

[Nihilism] conflicts with our strongest moral intuitions. Most people recognize that some things are just plain wrong, no matter what. For example, torturing and murdering children for sadistic pleasure is objectively wrong. Even is everyone in the world enjoyed it and wanted to do it, it would still be wrong. Some moral values really are independent of human preferences.

Of course, the Nihilist might insist that our moral intuitions are completely unreliable and should be disregarded. But we would need to have very good reasons to dismiss such strong and widely held intuitions. Are there reasons to embrace Nihilism that are more obvious to us than our moral intuitions? And if our moral intuitions are so thoroughly misleading, why should we trust any of our other intuitions? Why should we trust our rational intuitions? Nihilism threatens to undermine our rationality just as much as it undermines our morality.

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