Articles
What It Takes to Be Saved 14 – Man’s Part - A Commitment to Jesus
What It Takes to Be Saved 14 – Man’s Part
A Commitment to Jesus
Mike Willis
When one looks at what happens in modern Christianity, he sees something is missing. Many Christians live, dress, and act like the world. Many who consider themselves Christians rarely go to church or go so irregularly, one would never know that they consider themselves Christians or a member of a local church. The fact is that many of the preachers are responsible for this problem.
Preachers have been preaching all of my life that all it takes to be a Christian is to pray the sinner’s prayer, “Lord Jesus, I’m a sinner. I believe you died for my sins so I could be forgiven. I receive you as my Lord and Savior. Thank You for coming into my life. Amen.” Many of the preachers then add, a saved person can never fall from grace. The consequence is that there is no motive to change one’s life!
Believing in Jesus requires that one make a commitment to become Jesus’s disciple. Four times in the Gospel of John and once in 1 John, Jesus said loving Him required one to keep His commandments (John 14:21, 23; 15:10, 14; 1 John 5:3). One who believes in Jesus becomes Jesus’s disciple. When sending the Apostles out on the Great Commission, Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:18-20). A “disciple” is a person who has become the pupil of his teacher (Jesus). A disciple of a teacher will learn to do what the teacher teaches him to do: he will keep the commandments of the teacher.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “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. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness’ ” (Matt. 7:21-23). It is not enough to call Jesus Lord but not do what He commands one to do. Salvation requires a commitment to follow the teachings of Jesus.
Simply put, a person cannot be saved without changing his life. Those things that he has been doing that God forbids His disciples to do must cease. Those things that Jesus commands His disciples to do that one has not been in the habit of doing must begin to be done. Hard choices will need to be made, choices that reach into the inner recesses of who one is so that God’s commandments take priority over one’s personal desires.
Jesus explained the cost of discipleship saying: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26-33). Are you ready to pay the price of being a disciple of Jesus? That is the commitment one must make to receive the salvation Jesus gives.
