Faithbase

Good morning and welcome to Thinking About Salvation. In this episode of the series we're gonna look at Romans 10 9. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you shall be saved. Now there's a lot there. It's not simply just making this this mouthing the words, I guess you could say, confessing Jesus is Lord. The New Living Translation says if you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. And what it means to confess Jesus as Lord is to... there's a lot behind this. In other words, you need to embrace much of what we talked about early in this series where if you confess Jesus as Lord, you have to believe and commit yourself to this belief that he is the Eternal Son, he is God incarnate, and so you need to have an understanding, like we talked about at the very beginning of this series, that God is who he says he is. Otherwise, who are you confessing as Lord? If you believe in some other God, if you believe that God is something that the Bible teaches, he is not. And so to confess Jesus as Lord requires a certain amount of knowledge, but obviously as we grow in Christ, as we grow in our understanding of Christianity, of understanding of the Bible, our understanding of who God is and what he's all about, that will also increase. But to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, to confess him as Lord, to openly say that Jesus Christ is my Lord, I need to know enough about who he is to say that with intelligence, to say that with actual, I guess you say, meaning, so that it actually does have some meaning. And then to believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead. I mentioned in a couple episodes ago, I think it was, that Jesus said, I lay down my life and I take it up again. He also says that the Father raised him from the dead, and Scripture tells us that. So what we see there, again, it's part of this mystery of the Godhead, that Jesus is God. But to believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead means that you not only believe in the the physical resurrection, the actual literal resurrection of Jesus Christ, that he rose bodily from the grave, but again, the purpose and the meaning in that. So to say that I declare him as Lord, I have to understand certain things about God that I can say that this is the Lord that I declare. And if I believe in my heart that God raised him from the dead, I need to understand what that's all about. Well, that was the proof that he is, in fact, deity. That was a resurrection. His resurrection was to bring us into a life of resurrection as well. That he is the firstfruits of that resurrected life. That the resurrection power of Jesus is at work in our life. And in fact, it's that same power of God that makes us a new creation. Now there's a lot of other things that go into that. The beginning of a new era with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's something that you would learn down the road of peace. But primarily, if we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, we say that we understand that he is indeed God. And that God is the God of the Bible, is who we worship. And believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead. We say he's not simply a man who lay in the grave, but he arose in power that he might overcome death. And we overcome death in him. And we can live a life in that same resurrection power. So if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. Think about that today. And we'll be back looking at some more of what the Bible has to say about salvation as we continue this series, Thinking About Salvation.