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After the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, the apostles preached the good news of the salvation he accomplished and many people believed. The Apostle Paul traveled to share this good news in regions beyond Judea. While he was in the city of Philippi in Greece, he and his fellow-missionary Silas cast a demon out of a slave girl who made money for her owners by telling fortunes. Unfortunately for the owners, the demon was the source of her fortune-telling ability. No more demon meant no more money for them. To get back at Paul and Silas, the slave owners dragged them into court and made a few false accusations against them.

The court ordered that the two missionaries be beaten and thrown into prison. Late that night, as Paul and Silas sang hymns and prayed in jail, there was a huge earthquake. The whole prison shook, the prisoners’ chains broke loose, and the doors flew open. The jailer saw the open doors, assumed the prisoners had fled, and knew he would be in deep trouble for letting them escape. He was all set to kill himself when Paul called out to assure him that no one was missing. All the prisoners were still there.

The jailer rushed in, fell down in front of Paul and Silas, and asked them this question: “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

Perhaps he’d been listening to their prison prayers and songs, because he somehow knew he was guilty before God and deserving of divine judgment. What he didn’t know was how to avoid the judgment he deserved.

The answer from Paul and Silas was simple: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved ….” Believing in Jesus is all that is required for salvation from God’s judgment. As the great J. I. Packer wrote,

For the honor of Christ, it needs to be stressed that this was, and still is, a complete answer to the question asked.¹

This is the “faith alone” that the Reformers preached: Faith in the Lord Jesus is the full answer to the question of how to be saved.

Yes, it’s short, simple, and complete. But this doesn’t mean everyone who hears or reads this answer fully understands it immediately. There’s a whole lot of meaning packed into the six words “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.”

What does it mean to believe?

When they spoke of “believing,” Paul and Silas did not mean merely accepting that something is true. In the language of scripture, believing in Jesus is not just knowing true things about him and agreeing with them, although this is part of it. The one who believes in the Lord Jesus also trusts him to provide forgiveness for their sins and bring them into eternal life with God. Belief in Jesus means knowint who he is and what he has done, and depending on him to save.

We might say true belief (or saving faith) is confident, wholehearted trust, a “whole-souled” commitment, “involving mind, heart, will and affections.”² If you think of faith as a whole-souled commitment, you see why scripture presents repentance as inseparable from faith. Repentance is simply the other side of the commitment coin. It’s the radical change of life—of values, goals, desires, and actions—that comes from unreserved allegiance to Jesus. Anyone who is truly committed to Christ will want to leave their disobedience behind and walk in obedience to him.

What does it mean to believe in the Lord Jesus?

In the Bible, faith always has an object; it is trust in someone or something. Saving faith is faith “in the Lord Jesus Christ.” The person who truly believes trusts in the crucified and risen Jesus. They trust that his death and resurrection has accomplished full salvation. Faith is effective to save because its object—Christ and his atoning work—is effective to save.

To look at it another way, “[f]aith is an activity which takes men [or women] right out of themselves and makes them one with Christ.”³ Faith unites us to Christ, or, to use the language of Paul and Silas, it puts us “in the Lord Jesus Christ.” This gives us all of Jesus—all that he is and all that he has done. No one needs anything more to be saved than Christ’s perfect salvation.

Can you see why Packer wrote that seeing “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ” as the whole answer to the question of how to be saved preserves Christ’s honor? Nothing is required of us but a trust that looks away from ourselves to Christ and his work. The entire focus of “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ” is Christ himself, and not our works, or even our faith, so the honor and glory for our salvation belongs to Christ alone.

Where does true faith in the Lord Jesus come from?

Except for one post on the fall and original sin, every post in this series has been about God and his work. God spoke, planned, created, and saved, and the only thing we’ve contributed to the story so far is the sin we need to be saved from.

It might seem that this post is finally about something good we contribute—the faith that saves us. But Scripture tells us that when someone believes in Jesus for salvation, their belief has its source in God. Saving faith is God’s gift, too (Ephesians 2:8; Philippians 1:29). It is only because of God’s work within us that we can believe to be saved.

Still, we must believe. Seeing what goes on behind the curtain and understanding that saving faith is worked by God doesn’t change the fact that “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ” is a complete answer to the question of what we must do to be saved.

1 18 Words by J. I. Packer, page 128.
2 Concise Theology by J. I. Packer, page 159.
3 Leon Morris, quoted in Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem, page 711.

Previous posts in this series: