Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How Do I Know if I'm Saved? | Questions You're Asking | Romans 10.9

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

Are you saved? Are you sure? How can you be sure? Find out from https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Pastor Keith Simon) as he starts out our new series on of answering https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcast-series/questions-youre-asking/ (Questions You're Asking). Interested in more content like this? Listen to https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/how-to-become-a-christian-learning-to-follow-jesus-luke/ (How to Become a Christians) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/what-it-means-to-pledge-allegiance-to-king-jesus-a-guest-interview-with-matthew-bates/ (I Pledge Allegiance to King Jesus) from our last series on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcast-series/how-to-follow-jesus/ (Learning to Follow Jesus). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10 Minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. Right now, we're answering questions that you're asking. A lot of these are coming from our Facebook page. So if you follow 10 Minute Bible Talks on Facebook, you can ask questions that you want us to answer or vote on questions that other people are asking. Well, as I've already said, we are getting ready to kick off a new series here on 10 Minute Bible Talk. And if you've been with us from the beginning, you know that so far, Patrick and I have walked through 1 Corinthians 13.

And in that series, we just talked about love. What does love look like on a really practical basis? Then we walked through the gospel of Luke and just looked at the life of Jesus. And then the life of David from 1st and 2nd Samuel. Of course, all those past episodes are available to listen to any time you want. But it leads us back to our new series. You see, we were sitting around our office trying to figure out, okay, what comes next?

And we had a lot of good options, but we weren't really sold on any of them. That's when we had the idea to ask you what questions you have about faith and then do our best to answer them. You know, we all have questions, and sometimes we're embarrassed to ask them because we feel like we should already know the answer. or maybe we're not exactly sure who we should ask. Of course, you could always Google your question, but then you're not sure whether you're going to get a trustworthy answer or not.

I mean, you can find almost any crazy thing on Google. I recently had more than one person tell me that they were cautious about getting any vaccine related to COVID-19 because they had heard that that vaccine was going to be the mark of the beat. And if you got the vaccine for COVID-19, you wouldn't go to heaven. That's crazy, folks. Yeah, that's crazy, but some people believe that, or some people are at least asking, should I believe that?

Because they read an article on it. And maybe someone sent them that article, or maybe they found it surfing the net, or maybe they Googled the question, what should I think about a vaccine for COVID-19? I don't know. All I'm saying is that you can find anything out there and you might not always want to trust it. Is that fair? I think it is. So we thought we'd try to answer questions maybe in a little more reliable way than Google.

And so many of you went to our 10-minute Bible Talk Facebook page and you asked questions and others of you went and voted on those questions. And by the way, you can still do that. Voting is still open. You can still throw out completely new questions. But today we're going to kick off the series, and we're going to try to answer this question. How do I know if I'm saved? Or another way to frame it is, how do I know if I'm a Christian? And that's one of those questions that seems so easy and so obvious that you might be embarrassed to ask it.

And yet, a lot of people have this same question. It's a great question to kick off our new series, because I can't think of too many more questions that are more important to ask, more important to have a good answer to. So before we dive into this, how do I know if I'm a Christian? How do I know if I'm saved? Let's just make sure that we understand the range of possibilities. It's possible to be a Christian, like to really genuinely be a Christian, but not have confidence you are. To be a forgiven child of God, but you don't feel that's true. You're unsure of where you stand with God. And then it's also possible to be very sure you're a Christian, but in reality,

you're not. I mean, just think of the Pharisees. They were very sure that they were accepted by God, that they were on God's team, God's side. But of course, they were deceived. Jesus had some of his harshest words for the Pharisees. So whether it's being a genuine Christian but being unsure about it or not being a Christian and being very sure about it. Well, neither of those are good situations to be in. We want to have an accurate understanding of where we stand with God. So if we're going to try to answer this question, I think the best place to start is with the Bible's definition of what it means to be a Christian, or to put it in the terms of the way the question was asked, what does it mean to be saved. In Romans chapter 10, verse 9, the apostle Paul says, if you declare with your mouth,

Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. So who is saved from sin in God's wrath? Well, it's pretty clear that those who believe inwardly, those who believe in their heart, and outwardly confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and that he was raised from the dead will be saved. What does it mean to believe that Jesus is Lord? Well, in the first century, everyone knew who the Lord was. It was Caesar, of course. Caesar is Lord was even written on the coins of the Roman Empire. Caesar was the king of the empire, and as such, he was the object of people's praise, devotion, and obedience. So to say that Jesus was Lord was to say that Caesar wasn't. And when you think about that, it becomes obvious why Jesus was killed, why it was often dangerous to be a Christian in the Roman Empire.

Caesar wasn't kind to rivals. So to say that Jesus is Lord is to say that not only is Caesar not Lord, but neither is anyone or anything else in my life. To say that Jesus is Lord is to give Jesus my praise, my devotion, and my God. my obedience because he is the true king of the whole world. So if the question is, how do I know if I'm saved, the answer we get from Romans 10 is that everyone who gives their allegiance, who puts their hope and faith in King Jesus, is saved from sin and its consequences. Now, John, the apostle, says the same thing, but in his way, a little differently. At the end of his gospel, the gospel according to John, he writes this. But these are written, in other words, this whole gospel

was written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. So John says, I wrote all this about Jesus with a specific purpose in mind, and that is, I have the hope that you'll believe that he is the Messiah, which is just God's anointed king and that you'd find life in him. So it seems pretty clear. There is life in King Jesus, calling Jesus Lord, believing that he rose from the dead, putting your faith in him. That's what it means to be a Christian. But of course there's another way to ask this question. You could ask, well, how do I know if I truly believe? believe that Jesus is Lord? How do I know if I really am depending on him alone for my salvation,

or if it's just meaningless words? Well, what did Jesus call people to do? Just as you read the Gospels, what did he call people to do? Did he say, ask me into your heart or ask me to be your Savior? No. What Jesus called people to do was to follow him. So you could ask the question, am I following Jesus? Am I listening to him, obeying him, learning from him, loving him? Consider 1. John 513. The Apostle John again, but in a later letter, writes, I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you eternal life. So clearly, John believes that there are people who really truly genuinely believe in the name of the Son of God, believe in Jesus, and yet they're unsure where they stand. They're not

confident that they have life in Him. And so John wrote this book of 1st John to help people know where they stood with God. Were they right with God? And throughout this letter of 1st John, he gives us little tests, tests that help us understand where we are with God. One of the tests might surprise you. In 1.1.8, he says, if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. So here's a test. If you claim to be without sin, if you claim to have overcome sin, then that means that the truth is not in you. You're not a genuine Christian. but then he goes on in verse 9.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all in righteousness. So if claiming to be without sin or to have overcome sin, if that is a mark of a person who's not a Christian, then the mark of a Christian is one who sees their sin and who confesses their sin to Jesus, knowing that he will forgive them. The mark of a Christian is that they see their sin and run to Jesus with it. John also tells us in this letter of 1 John that when we believe in Jesus, that we will begin to walk in the light. So we can ask ourselves, is there a change going on in my life? Now, of course, never perfectly, never even approaching perfectly.

But over time, over six months, a year, five years, do we? notice that we are growing in patience, in humility, in servant-heartedness? Do we have a growing love for Jesus? So is Jesus my Lord? Have I put my faith in him? And am I seeing him at work in my life? Never perfectly, but over time am I seeing that I am growing in my love for Jesus, and my desire to obey Jesus. Now, notice what the Bible doesn't talk about. It doesn't talk about the amount of your faith or the strength of your faith. Instead, it puts the focus on what your faith is in, not how much faith you have, not how strong

your faith is. So imagine you were going to go ice skating one day, and you were going to go out on this lake, and you were really confident that the ice was thick enough to hold you up. But unfortunately for you, the ice was only about a quarter inch thick on that lake. And so no matter how confident you are that things would work out fine, you're going to go crashing through the ice because the ice is not thick enough to hold you up. Now imagine a different day. And this day you're very unsure that the ice is thick enough to hold you up. You're afraid you're going to go crashing through, but it turns out the ice is a foot thick.

So no matter how insecure or unsure you are, there really isn't going to be a problem. Notice that what determined whether or not you crashed into the water or were held up by the ice and it had a great day skating, was not how confident you were. It's how thick the ice was. What saves us is not our faith. What saves us is Jesus, King Jesus. He is the one who. who saves us through his death and resurrection and that he is the ascended king. Our faith can be weak. Our faith can be strong. Some days it will be different than other days. But our faith never saves us. Only Jesus saves. Put your faith in him. Weak or strong, he is able to save all those who come to him.

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