Before I can present to you my eight cautions for teaching people to pray a prayer to be saved, we must first set the basis of how one is actually saved.
In Ephesians 2:8 Paul states that one is saved by grace (God’s unmerited favor) through faith (belief, trust)[1]. The question is, faith in what? One must believe the Gospel. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul states that the Gospel, the good news, is “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (v. 3-4). In other words, one is saved by grace through truly believing that Christ died for His sins, was buried, and literally rose to life on the third day.
Now that we have formed a rather summary basis of how scripture states one is saved, let’s take a look at eight reasons why we shouldn’t teach people to pray a prayer to be saved.
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I would like to introduce the beginning of a new series entitled, “What Fundamentalism Must Do to Survive.” A large part of what has sparked this articles series is due to some recent events in which an extremely large segment (practically the entire movement) of Fundamentalism was attacked. (Without diverting from the issue at hand, I should add that the attack was done in a wrong method as well as included all of Fundamentalism in a critique that is only true of a portion of the movement). However, being quite a critic myself, this attack on Fundamentalism did make me think. Although this attack was invalid in several ways, it provides a great opportunity for Fundamentalists to do some searching and self-criticism in regards to what truth there was in the attack (no matter how small it may be) and to look for further problem areas of Fundamentalism, because that is always a good thing to do.
The world doesn’t need us. The world needs Christ.
There are many Christians who tend to believe that theology isn’t that important because, they will say, application and right living is all that really matters. But is this really the case? Is theology unimportant? Should theology take a back seat to application or is theology application’s back seat driver? Is right living and application the only thing that really matters?
Kirk E. Miller 