Are You Saved? # 7

Last time I was saying that some people mistakenly believe that they are saved because they believe in a God

Most people believe in a God, but who or what is the God they believe in?

Christians believe that there is only one God, and He has ONLY made Himself known to us in Jesus Christ, who is Himself God

John 10: 30 ‘The Father and I are One’

John 8:24 “Unless you believe that I am who I claim to be, you will die in your sins.”

Believing in a God doesn’t save us – but believing that Jesus Christ is God, Lord and Savior does save us

This time I want to talk about those people who mistakenly believe that they are saved because they DO GOOD THINGS

In the New Testament time of Christ, the Jewish Religious Leaders (J.R. L’s) created the belief that they could be saved by doing good things - this belief gave them a sense of self-righteousness

Their sense of self-righteousness came from practicing the thousands of extra laws they had invented in addition to the 613 laws that Moses had given Israel

These extra laws were called ‘traditions’ and the J.R. L’s demanded that people obey these laws and criticized Jesus when the disciples disobeyed them

Matthew 15: 2 ‘Why do Your disciples disobey our age-old tradition’?

Here’s are just 3 examples of the 1, 500 ‘traditions’ that related to the Sabbath:

1/ If you ate an egg from a chicken and later found out that the chicken laid the egg on the Sabbath, the chicken had to be killed because it had ‘worked’ on the Sabbath

2/ You were prohibited walking more than 800 meters on the Sabbath

3/ You were prohibited carrying both a needle and a thread at the same time on the Sabbath

So, according to the J.R. L’s, to be saved, a person had to observe all the ‘traditions’ – thousands of them!

The J.R L’s were fanatical about practicing the Law of Moses and their ‘traditions’ - they prayed, they fasted, they paid their tithes and as Jesus said about them,

Matthew 23:24 ‘You strain your water, so you won’t accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel!

Jesus did in fact reject their traditions and criticized them for rejecting God’s Word

Matthew 15: 3 “And why do you, by your ‘traditions’, violate the direct commandments of God”?

Matthew 23:27-28 “What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness”.

Jesus condemned the belief of the J.R. L’s that we could be saved by doing good things and said something that would have shocked those who heard Him say this:

Matthew 5: 20 “But I warn you—unless your righteousness is better than the righteousness of the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven”!

Anyone who heard Jesus say that must have thought, “How can I practice the Law of Moses and the ‘traditions’ better than the J.R. L’s”? “Salvation by doing good things is impossible for me to achieve”!

And that’s the point of what Jesus was saying!

Salvation IS impossible by doing good things, and a sense of self-righteousness does not save us

The Apostle Paul reminds us

Romans 10: 3a ‘For they don’t understand God’s way of making people right with Himself. Refusing to accept God’s way, they cling to their own way of getting right with God’

So, what is God’s way of salvation?

God’s way of salvation is to make us righteous-right with Him, through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior

Romans 3: 25b ‘People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed His life, shedding his blood’

We would like to think that we somehow contribute to our own salvation (synergism), but we don’t - our salvation is a sovereign act of God’s mercy and grace in our life

Ephesians 2: 4-5 ‘But God is so rich in mercy, and He loved us so much, that even though we were dead because of our sins, He gave us life when He raised Christ from the dead’.

Romans 9: 15-16 ‘For God said to Moses, “I will show mercy to anyone I choose, and I will show compassion to anyone I choose. So, it is God who decides to show mercy. We can neither choose it nor work for it’.

Ephesians 2: 8-9 ‘God saved you by His grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it’.