What must I do...

A friend recently asked me a great question about salvation. She wanted to know what the minimum is that a person needs to believe to be saved. Her point was that there are a lot of people out there calling themselves Christians that tend to believe that salvation rests in, “Jesus and.” Jesus AND baptism. Jesus AND good works. Jesus AND sacraments. Jesus AND having a bus load of kids so you can populate your own planet after you die…

Honestly, it’s a hard question to answer. I mean, who wants to be the one who says that someone is or isn’t going to heaven based on a conjunction? And frankly, I have a lot in common with a host of those folks. Still, it’s an honest question that deserves an honest answer. So, here it is. Simply put, Jesus saves. Jesus alone saves. I think where most cults and false religions go wrong is with the conjunction of faith and works. “Jesus and,” is a killer. There is no "AND." There is salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Not Jesus and baptism. Not Jesus and good works. Not Jesus and populating your own special planet. Not Jesus and any other thing. Just Jesus. "Jesus and," means that I'm not really depending on Him for salvation. He's just helping me out a bit. But that's a theological crock of pooh. When I was an undergrad at the University of Oregon, my campus minister put it to me this way, "Jesus isn't my crutch, He's my iron lung." I like that. It shows how silly it is to think that I have anything to do with my own salvation, which is what all those “Jesus and” people want to think.


At the end of the day though “Jesus and” is really only subtraction by addition. “Jesus and” teaches that Jesus Himself is not enough to save us. It subtracts from the power of the cross by adding some other prerequisite for admission into God’s presence in Heaven, which is totally bogus. Jesus is pretty explicit in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.” He didn’t say that He is one of many ways, or part of the way, or the way for some people but not others; He is THE way. The only way. “Jesus and” implies that He’s not enough on His own. It implies that something else is necessary, something I supply, something I am responsible for. And that just isn’t true.

I think the real problem for all those “Jesus and” people out there is that they haven’t really put their faith in Jesus Christ. Oh, they say they have, certainly. But they don’t mean it the same way that the “Jesus only” people do. You see, their understanding of who Jesus is is fundamentally flawed. They make Him less than savior and lord. They make him partially responsible for salvation, and I’m just not sure that’s enough. As I read the New Testament accounts of who Jesus is, I am struck by how totally clear it is that salvation comes by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and I just don’t think “Jesus and” fits that description. (I wonder if this could all be summed up by pointing out that Jesus is THE Christ, the Messiah, the one who saves. You can believe in some dude named Jesus, but if your Jesus isn’t Christ, you’ve got the wrong Jesus.)


SO, I’ll stop short of condemning all the “Jesus and” people to hell. After all, it isn’t my job to determine their eternal destiny, BUT I will say that I’m pretty I’m glad I’m not the one who has to face God the Father and explain why I don’t believe that his Son’s death, burial and resurrection are insufficient for salvation and He should let me into heaven because I also got dunked in the right church, knocked on enough doors, and tithed properly.
Diatribe over.