Sharing Salvation

As a group leader you will surely encounter opportunities to lead people to Christ, and even more assuredly encounter opportunities to refine and redirect individual's belief in and walk with Jesus. Because of this need we want to offer you a quick reference on What We Must Believe to be Saved.

Now, evangelism and discipleship can take many different forms and there is no formula or single way to do either. They happen organically, within relationships and conversations and don't often allow for neat, prepackaged presentations. For that reason, this is not a 5 step system for exactly what you must do and how you must do it, but rather a 5 point reminder of the key beliefs necessary for salvation.

“What must we do to be saved?”

In Acts 2, Peter answers “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

We’ll start with the idea of being baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins. This is the very heart of the gospel, and is the core belief we need to be saved, as all the other beliefs are built off of this one.

To be baptized in the name of Jesus, very simply, is to accept that Jesus took our place before God, and paid the price we owed with His own life, so that we could be resurrected with Him to a new life restored in relationship to our good God.

So the first key belief necessary for salvation is:

1. We are saved by accepting Jesus’ death and resurrection in our place.

Now there are several implications of this truth that are necessary to believe as well.

Because we are accepting Jesus’ death as a payment for our sins, we must believe that we are sinners in need of saving. And because sin only has meaning as falling short of the expectations of our Creator, we must believe that there is a God who created everything good, and has expectations that we love him, trust him, and live for him; and we have fallen short of those expectations and are therefore in his debt and deserving of his punishment.

Thus, the second key belief is:

2. There is a good God who created us and rightly expects us to obey Him and we have failed to obey Him, and deserve His righteous judgement.

Third, we see that we must repent. Peter says, “Repent and be baptized...in the name of Jesus…” Repentance means to turn away from sin, and turn toward God, both in desire and in action. So to truly repent, we must acknowledge that we have fallen short of God’s expectations, or sinned, and that the only way back into right relationship with Him is to run to Jesus for the forgiveness of our sins. Now repentance does not stop with a simple, "I’m sorry”, but rather continues on with a change in action. In other words, we must then seek to obey Him and follow Him as we were originally created to do. Repentance is not just something we do when we first get started with following Jesus, but is something that we continue to progress in as we mature in our relationship with Him.

The third key belief is:

3. We must repent; turn away from our sin, and turn back to God, in desire and in action.

Next, we must believe that our next steps come out of receiving the Holy Spirit. Jesus tells us in John 15 that He will send the Holy Spirit to be a guide, a helper, and a comforter to those who believe. And that the Holy Spirit will bear in us His fruit. Essentially, Jesus says that the next steps someone takes as a believer are to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit in accomplishing the good works that were planned for us to do. Jesus did not only save us from sin, but He saved us to a new purpose, to be the display of His love and grace to the rest of the world

The fourth key belief is:

4. Our next steps are faith filled obedience to God by the power of the Holy Spirit

The final key belief is that we are saved by grace, the free gift of God, and not by anything we accomplished. Simply put, we can not save ourselves or add to Jesus’ salvation by what we do, but rather we trust what he did for us. We cannot earn His favor or His love, and we do not do good works in order to appease Him, but rather because of His grace we are now free to obey Him, love Him, and live for Him, and that pleases Him and us.

5. We are saved by grace alone through faith in what Jesus did for us.

To recap, the most core belief necessary for salvation is that Jesus died in our place for the forgiveness of our sins and raised us to life with Him so that we might be restored to relationship with God. The beliefs necessary to understand this core are that, there is a good God who rightly has expectations that we obey Him, and we have fallen short of those expectations and deserve his punishment. We need to repent of that sin in both desire and action, and by the grace of God alone through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus we are saved from our sin and to a new purpose which is to follow the Holy Spirit’s guidance as He leads us to display the love and grace of God to the world.