Salvation: Do we pray a sinner’s prayer or what?

I hate the understanding that you can just say a few words and we can know for sure that a person is born again and has God living inside of them, simply because they said those words sincerely. “Dear God, I admit I’m a sinner and I believe that you Jesus are God, and that you are the only way to heaven. Come into my heart, make me born again, save me. I’m yours.” It’s so mechanistic, legalistic and spell-like!

I mean, do you really need to put your trust in God when you put it like that? It sounds like you are putting your trust in the mechanism. It’s like an older man coaching a younger man on how to ‘get’ a girl: “just say these things and you’ll get the girl.” (Sincerely, of course.) Is that how the Bible really counsels us to approach God?

But, there are a few groups of Christians—Pentecostals, Keswick adherents and Wesleyans—who use this but then insist that you have another experience of God: one obtained through surrender, and one confirmed through manifestations of the Spirit. Then you’ll experience victory over sin, a flooding of the Spirit, and a changed sanctified life. And that sounds like the biblical way to get saved! I’d just call this second experience salvation, but hey, it’s a good starting point.

At the risk of totally contradicting myself, I also almost totally agree with Paul Washer on this, who rails against them. There’s only one step, not two. And there’s no such thing as that intermediate place which is where a person has accepted Christ as Saviour, but not as Lord—and thus they are justified, but carnal, stagnant, and virtually fruitless. “You shall know them by their fruit” comes to mind.

Nevertheless, I’d prefer to be in a Pentecostal church that has the two steps, rather than a Conservative one that only practices a type of Sinner’s Prayer. The insistence of surrendering to God and seeing Him change your life and give you gifts is key to finding God.

This mini-series on salvation is my attempt to sort out these issues properly.

Part 1 continues:

The Pentecostal approach to salvation

Let me describe the typical on-the-street version of the Pentecostal approach.

So you have this idea that you become a Christian through a little prayer, and then need a second experience of the Spirit, after which you are transformed and become victorious. Before that experience of the Spirit, you may not feel like a Christian at all, and indeed many people embrace the idea of a ‘carnal Christian’ who can be like the world and yet still be saved. They draw upon the Romans experience of Paul who talks about wanting to do what is good but being stuck doing sin (Romans 7:14-20). And for the two-part reality, they draw upon the experiences of the early disciples of John, some of whom were baptised but then did not have the Spirit, and subsequently received the Spirit, with various evidences of the Spirit afterwards, such as speaking in tongues (Acts 2:17-18; 2:38; 8:14-20; 9:17; 10:44-48; 11:15-17; 19:1-7).

The conservative way is quite different, notably only having one stage.

The Conservative approach to salvation

Most conservative churches—typically Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and so on—have just the sinner’s prayer part, and leave the idea of surrendering behind, as well as the expectation that the Spirit would move or show himself! So the conservative salvation process is neutered by trusting in the power of mere words to transform, and then cut off from any place in Scripture by imagining that one can then merely come along to church, understand a few things about God, and assume to be right with God!

They do expect character change (the fruit of the Spirit), and conviction of the Spirit, but nothing immediate. It’s a much longer process, then, to work out if you’ve genuinely been born again, because they reject the idea of charismatic gifts or being led by the Spirit in your daily walk.

What I strangely love about a two stage approach

What I love about the Pentecostal approach to salvation is that from the testimonies of people who have been through this ‘Baptism of the Spirit’, I can see that they’ve both genuinely surrendered to God, and have experienced genuine objective signs of the Spirit (those who don’t exhibit such signs, I am not impressed by whatsoever—their theory is not sound, and their lives show that they are false Christians). These signs include: conviction of sin, gifts of the Spirit, fruit of the Spirit such as love and peace, leading of the Spirit, a thirst for the Word of God, a change of heart away from the things of the world, an understanding of the Word of God, and other similar things. These are things that John writes to us about in 1 John, when trying to determine which confessing Christian was genuine or not. This is what I love to see, because this is truly salvation! I’d just say they weren’t Christian during stage 1, which if you recall for Pentecostals is this period where you are headed to heaven (justified) but still a slave to sin (not sanctified). But I don’t want to dissuade them from pursuing such a second experience, because it’s from these times that genuine conversions are (sometimes) happening.

The difficulty with the conservative approach, then, is that they don’t demand or expect that a person surrender to God, nor do they seek to see the Spirit’s work in a believer’s life. If they look for anything, it’s character—and that is done from a non-spiritual perspective. Therefore, they can just let religious people remain religious all their days. This is a tragedy. These people can only trust in the fact that at one point in their life they prayed a prayer and the preacher told them that they were saved (thanks Paul Washer for that line, burned in my memory!).

Those who have simply prayed a mechanical ‘sinner’s prayer’, even sincerely, typically can’t see a change in their life like Romans talks about (I have to say ‘typically’ because God does use our weaknesses and save some people through this). They can’t see the gifts of the Spirit like Acts and 1 Corinthians show. They can’t see the vast difference between a true and false Christian in 1 John. They can’t resonate with a fully surrendered “take up your cross” approach to life in the Gospels. They don’t find themselves maturing in the Body like in many of the Epistles. They are not enamoured with the Word to find connections with the Old Testament like the writer of Hebrews, or many other places. They can’t sing to God out of the Psalms, or re-arrange their lives out of Proverbs. They won’t return to the Bible like the Prophets call them too, nor do they resonate with David who looked to the law with love—a man after God’s heart.

What place can so-called carnal Christians find comfort, then? Since they still love their sin, and their sinful habits, addictions and idols, that’s where’d they find comfort. If you want to call those people “Christian”, despite no Scriptural space for them, you are making up your own doctrine from thin air. No Scripture describes such a carnal experience for the Christian.

This is Part 1 on a mini-series on salvation. Part 2 goes into Romans 7, which is the main alleged grounds for the doctrine of the carnal Christian. Part 3 describes a third approach to salvation. Part 4 finishes off my analysis of Romans 7.