Born-Againism?

In America, we now have become guilty of "Born-Againism." We have replaced the Catholics' baptism for salvation with a silly prayer at the end of the four spiritual laws or the Romans Road. We make a person pray a prayer, and then declare that their sins have been forgiven! If the rich young ruler had come to one of our churches, he would have been asked to walk down the aisle, say a prayer, and fill out a card. We would send him through the baptismal, and assure him of his salvation. We would, of course, be consigning his soul to Hell by our negligence.

I say he said "something like this" because I was scribbling in my notebook as fast as I could, but I know I didn't get it all. When I get my CDs of the audio from the conference I'll try to clarify a little.

Born-Againism was a new term for me, but I think he's got it completely right. American evangelical theology is as watered down as American beer. In an effort to make the gospel simpler and easier to comprehend, we have lost the very gospel itself. We've made the gospel comfortable for the very "lost" we are trying to save. In our zeal to proclaim salvation by grace alone, we've conveniently erased repentance from the equation. We think we need to "get someone saved" and then move on to repentance and growth as step two, at some later date.

In fact, many of our churches don't even teach their members theological terms and their meanings, leading to great ignorance about salvation and evangelism even in their simples forms. If you're in an SBC church, I'm sure you've heard that people need to "accept Jesus into their heart" if they want to be saved, though the Bible mentions no such event. But, do you have any idea what the terms regeneration, justification, sanctification, and glorification mean? We can't understand how Paul can say salvation is "not of works" and yet James says "a person is justified by works and not by faith alone." If you don't understand the words describing the categories or stages of salvation, this will never make sense to you. So, you throw out James in an effort to preserve the grace of God.

If that's the case, what do you do with Philippians 2, where Paul tells us to work out our salvation? What do you do with 1 John 2, where John says "whoever says 'I know him' but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him"? What do you do with Peter when he says, in 2 Peter 1, that you are to "make your calling and election sure" by practicing a long list of virtues?

In classic Christian over reaction,?we have completely discounted the role of works in any sense in the life of the believer. Before you accuse me of preaching a works-based gospel, let me state this truth clearly: Man is saved by grace alone. Man deserves hell, and God is not obligated in any way shape or form to do anything but send him there. Man cannot earn heaven or somehow atone for his sins, period. Man hates God and gladly rebels against him. In fact, man is so fallen and dead in his sin that he can't even accept the salvation God freely offers him without God first changing his heart.

So, the only thing we can say is that God saves man, without any meritorious work from man.

Yet, don't stop there. How can a man know that he's been saved? How can he be sure that he isn't still a depraved and deceived hater of God? Can he look back at some point in his life when he walked down an aisle or repeated a prayer someone told him to say, as long as he meant it in his heart? I know I've seen a lot of aisle walkers who also walked away from their "faith" later in life. So, either you can lose your salvation, or maybe they weren't really saved in the first place.

We get in such a hurry to slap a Christian sticker on people that we end up giving false assurance to anyone who has jumped through our Born-Againist hoops. Paul was fooled into thinking that one of his own co-laborers was saved (1 Tim 4:9-10), only to see the truth revealed when Demas deserted him because he loved the world. If we aren't careful, we join the devil in the work of telling lost sinners that they are Christians and have nothing to worry about. Quite simply, we can't really tell if someone else is saved or not. If they ask, we need to point them to Jesus and suggest they consider whether they love him and hate their sin, or love their sin and hate Jesus.

Can we know if we ourselves are saved? Based on 1 John 5:13, I would say that we can, but not because we can look back at one event or commitment that "sealed the deal" for us. If the very nature of salvation comes down to God taking a God-hating, sin loving rebel and changing his very heart that he would love God, hate his sin, and follow Christ toward holiness, then that is where we should start our assesment.

Do you hate your sin? I didn't ask if you sin or not… Do you hate your sin? If you used to love your sin and hate God, but now you hate your sin and desire holiness, that is one good sign that you have been, and are being saved. Do you desire to please God? Do you strive, even imperfectly, to do the things you know God commands you to do? This struggle is a sign of LIFE. The spiritually dead don't struggle to mortify their sin any more than Lazarus struggled to get out of the tomb before Christ brought him back to life. In fact, sinners revel in their sin. I was in a fraternity in college, so trust me on this one. They would even give out a weekly award for the guy who had done the dumbest thing while drunk.

What a stark and obvious contrast to the life of a true believer. The believer struggles and fights and sweats and bleeds to overcome sin in his life. One one hand, this is discouraging because this fight against the "old man" will continue for the rest of man's life (until he is glorified… if you don't know what that means, ask a puritan). On the other hand, this struggle is greatly encouraging because it is proof to the believer that he is a child of God.

If you do not hate your sin (the "world" in 1 John 2), then you have no reason to think you are a Christian, no matter how many prayers you've prayed or aisles you've walked. And, if you are confident that you have been saved by God, do not hate your neighbor by giving him some kind of false assurance of salvation based on some outward thing you saw in his life. Let's leave the business of false assurance to the Devil.