The False
Teaching
The
deceivers are thriving and their victims are perishing due to a subtle
misreading of the Word of Truth.The Word states:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only
Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have
eternal
3:16) This means, according
to Paul: . . because, if you confess with your lips that
Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the
dead, you will be saved.(Romans 10:9)
Believing in Jesus thus means to believe something about Jesus,
i.e., that God raised him from the dead. Billy Graham concurs:
The Bible says that "if we confess with our mouth the Lord Jesus,
and believe in our heart that God has raised Him
from the dead, then we shall be saved." Will you be saved?
A Baptist statement says: All that's
left for you to do is to accept the gift that Jesus is holding out
for you right now."If you
confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe
in your heart that God raised him from the dead,
you will be saved." (Romans 10:9) God says that if you believe
in His son, Jesus, you can live forever with Him in glory.
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Exposing
the Error
There are other things that one
must seemingly believe about Jesus so as to be saved.
Here is another from
Paul: For I delivered to you as
of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our
sins in accordance with the scriptures (ICor. 15:3) Jesus also mandates that
we must believe something about him: ...you will die in your sins unless you believe that
I am he.(Jn.8:24) By this he means that we must believe he is the anointed
one promised by the prophets. Since this is also a belief about him,
it is easy for people to assume that this is all one must believe,
i.e., things about Jesus. The Catholic
creeds and the confessions, including Lutheran, Baptist Presbyterian, and
Methodist,
reflect this thinking. These documents make only limited appeals to
the Word of Jesus, their major authorities being other biblical sources,
mainly Paul, and statements by church fathers, including Augustine and
Ambrose. Appeals to the Word of Jesus are few and are not primary. One
could omit them entirely and arrive at the same result! You who recite
a creed during Sunday worship should ask: Does Jesus teach
this?
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Declaring
the Truth
Jesus
would have us believe him,not just things about him! This
ancient and subtle switch from hearing & believing what he teaches
to believing things said about him is deceiving all of Christendom. If one
believes Jesus, the correct belief's about him
will follow. Here is the Truth: Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does
not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. (Jn. 5:24) My teaching
is not mine, but his who sent me;
(Jn 7:16)
The words of Jesus are the words
of God, and Jesus is the teacher. The only valid recipe for eternal life
is to listen to what Jesus teaches and then believe him, which is to believe
God. Eternal life comes only through the words He has spoken:
It is the spirit
that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have
spoken to you are spirit and life.
Eternal life comes only through hearing Jesus.
His words are the precepts of God; all else are the precepts of men.
Jesus gave the implication of this when he quoted Isaiah:
in
vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.
(Mark 7:7)
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