The Bible doesn't ever tell us how we can know whether someone else is saved or not. I think we can tell when someone has a genuine love for Jesus. However, we can't know that someone else doesn't have a genuine love for Jesus.
The status, fame or popularity of a person does not mean anything in terms of salvation, only God knows.
There are plenty of charlatans and fakers out there. Jesus tells us many will say to Him, 'Lord, Lord, didn't we do these things in your name?'
Jesus will say to them, 'Depart from me. I never knew you.'
Notice it is, 'I never knew you.' Not, 'I once knew you but now I do not.' Jesus is not speaking about fallen Christians. He is talking about people who misunderstood what following Jesus is. They came in another way. Not through the narrow gate, which is Jesus Himself. They did not come in believing in and trusting in the finished work of Jesus. Instead, they came in by believing and trusting in their own works.
Salvation is easy in the sense that Jesus told us that His yoke is easy, His burden is light and that whoever believes in Him crosses over from death to life. It really is 'Easy Believism.' That may well get under some people's skin. However, we need to challenge our understanding in order to be awakened to the simplicity of the gospel and the power of God's grace.
Here's the thing - it's easy believism on the front but we have to recognise what God does behind the scenes. When someone is humble enough to call upon the Lord as opposed to being arrogant and trying to achieve, earn, sustain and maintain. When someone is humble enough to simply say, 'Lord, I can't save myself. Only you can save me. I'm going to let you. It has to be free because I could never pay for it and me trying to pay for it is an absolute joke.' Then, that person is humble enough for easy believism. Yet to the arrogant, the proud and those who simply don't know any better, they will not submit to easy believism. They think they've got to work hard. Romans 4:5, says, 'Blessed is the one who does not work but believes.'
Likewise:
'For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God not by works, so that no one can boast.' Eph 2:8-9
‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ James 4:6b
So we have a decision to make - are we going to work to try and earn our salvation or are we going to believe? Only one of those leads to salvation.
Throughout my life, I have lived out each of three different views of the Christian life. Each time I came to a new understanding it was not arrived at easily. I was 25 before I was challenged to see that I need to invite Jesus into my heart and not just believe that He exists. Then possibly another 25-30 years before I realised what grace meant.
Let me outline these three different views:
The unsaved believer!
The first stage, for me, was that I believed I needed to make myself worthy of salvation. God is up there, we are down here, and one day, when we die we will find out whether we have been good enough and done enough to survive God's judgement.
To anyone outside, and especially to myself, I was a Christian. I went to church, read my bible, prayed, put 'Christian' on application forms and so on. I can remember actually being asked whether I believed that Jesus did all the Bible says He did, including ascending into heaven. I can remember answering that I can accept that. But what I didn't say is that I believe it wholeheartedly as if it is an obvious truth.
At this point, I was what Jesus called a tare, from the parable of the wheat and tares (Mat 13:24-30 & 36-43). A tare was a weed that looked like wheat.
So, if the Bible says that we are saved by believing in Jesus and I believed then how was I not saved? The difference was, that I only believed He existed. I did not believe 'in' Him in the sense of putting my whole faith in Him and Him alone.
We are not simply told to choose Jesus like giving one political party or another a go at the ballot box. We are told to believe in our hearts. That is not an emotional belief either. When the Bible speaks of the heart do not think of romantic poets and Valentine's cards! It is more in line with setting our hearts on something. It is a determination of the will to go a certain way.
Another example would be when we say someone has a heart for the poor, say. It would be meaningless if they just sat at home having warm fuzzy feelings about the poor! It means we can tell they have a heart for the poor because we can see how much they do for the poor.
We could say that if there are unsaved Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists who believe what they believe but do not have the Holy Spirit, then it follows that such a person could see Christianity in the same way. Nothing more than a set of dos, don'ts, rituals and ceremonies that make one a God-pleasing person (In their eyes).
It is like having a plate of healthy food placed in front of us. We can look at it and believe it would do us good, but if we do not actually eat it, it will do us no good at all.
Saved but working to earn God's favour
The second stage, for me, was to be challenged to realise that God actually comes into our lives when we 'open the door' as Jesus put it in Rev 3:20.
'Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will come in and will dine with that person, and they with me.' Rev 3:20.
I was told and came into the understanding that salvation was a free gift to all who believe and invite Jesus in. I can remember thinking, in my pride, if there is a God who communicates with His people, then why has he been talking to other people and not me? Surely, I'm the one person God would want to talk with? Anyway, I had to humble myself and accept that He was now speaking to me and I needed to respond in obedience.
At first, I was challenged to accept that God speaks with His people. Not just in the general sense of a feeling of calling, but specific things for specific situations. For example, God tells one person to give something to another. Then the person receiving the thing says they had asked for that exact thing in prayer.
Having been challenged beyond my belief that God was simply up there. But rather as an all-powerful God, of course He can talk to His children and why wouldn't He? At that point, I prayed a quiet prayer to the effect that I accept that He is there, and asked Him to make Himself known to me. I immediately felt a sense that every question was answered. My mind felt as clear as glass.
After a week of quizzing the person I had been speaking with, I spoke to another Christian. For the first time, I said something to the effect of, 'That's what we believe isn't it!' Walking away from speaking with that person I felt like my chest was going to explode. My head was full of, 'It's so easy, all you have to do is believe.'
My experience agrees with what Paul said in Romans 10:9 that if we believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths then we will be saved.
However, a lot of the teaching I heard was that although salvation is a free gift - we need to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. We need to work hard to stay in God's blessing. Although we are not under the Law, God gave us His Spirit so that we can live according to His law!
That doesn't make any sense does it? We are not under the Law but we are to live according to the Law?!
I had this image of grace that grace made up for my failings. For example, imagine a tall glass half-filled with liquid. That liquid represents how much I can do by my efforts. To me, grace was what made up the other half. However, that's not a good picture. Take the glass and pour the liquid away, now throw the glass away, now put Jesus where the glass used to be. Now stop acting like a teenager comparing yourself to some imagined standard! It's not about what we do, it's about what Jesus has done.
I was told that we are leaky vessels and need to be constantly topped up. I went to church services where we would ask for things like 'more of Jesus in our lives'; 'more holy Spirit' and 'fall afresh on me.' And probably the worst, 'We need another Pentecost!' Services would begin by inviting the Holy Spirit in!
There was an idea that we had to invoke God's presence. We had to pursue and grovel and then God would show up. But none of this is scriptural. This has more in common with the Baal worshippers on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:20-40)!
We are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Christ dwells in us and we in Him. How can we invite the Holy Spirit in when He is already there and promises to never leave us? How can we ask for more when we already have every spiritual blessing (Eph 1:3) and have everything we need for life and godliness (2 Pet 1:3)? We need to live by faith in what we have and stop listening to those who tell us we still need to get it.
Paul says of the Jews:
'Being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.' Rom 10:3Whereas, Jesus tells us to first seek God’s Kingdom and His righteousness (Mat 6:33). Whether we accept God's righteousness or pursue our own is clearly a choice. If we do not understand God's righteousness then we fall victim of needing to work to achieve our own. Galatians 5:4, tells us that we both alienate ourselves from Christ and fall from grace when we seek to be justified (put right) by our own efforts.
'God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to become sin for us, so that in Him we would become the righteousness of God.' 2 Cor 5:21Look up: God made us righteous
Living under God's grace
The third stage, for me, was to be challenged to accept God's grace for my life. The key to 'working out our salvation' is that we are working out what God has already put in us. It is not to get it in us. We already have everything we need and every spiritual blessing, we are in Jesus and He is in us. Everything we do is in response to the abundant love He has lavished on us. It is not to invoke more love, more forgiveness, more salvation and so on. We cannot make ourselves more holy or more righteous than we already are.
It is a matter of status. A royal can act like a commoner but they are still royal. A commoner can act like a royal but they are still a commoner. When we come to Jesus we have our status changed. We are not on a sliding scale of achievement.
We are not fifty percent saved. We are not half in Adam and half in Jesus. We are not half sheep and half goat. It was a finished work the moment we believed. We are not half in grace and half in the Law, we are dead to the Law.
To be blunt, when we look at how much stupid, fallen and broken there is in the world, if you believe that God loves everyone and wants everyone to have equal opportunity to be saved, His whole plan needs to be simple. If you are a Calvinist, then it can't get any more simple than God does it!
The church is not immune. If we look at the church across the whole world we see a lot of stupid being spoken and done supposedly in Jesus' name! That's how "idiot-proof" it needs to be. It is not a case of having to know this or that. It is a case of knowing Jesus. I am so grateful for the simplicity of the Gospel and of grace because otherwise I would have messed it up!
If you were to ask two works-based Christians what works a person needs to do, you'd get three different answers at least. I would challenge a works-based Christian to produce a definitive list of exactly what a person needs to do. It is always so vague and so impossible to do everything they imagine needs to be done. One will say pay a tithe, another will say keep the Sabbath and another will say pay a tithe and keep the Sabbath! It gets even crazier when Christians invent rules for keeping the Sabbath on a Sunday rather than Friday sundown to Saturday sundown.
Observer bias
There is a thing known as observer bias. What this means is a person basically sees what they expect to see. So, for example, if a person believes that it always rains on Tuesdays, they will notice when it is raining on a Tuesday and not notice when it isn't. That is a silly example, but it hopefully explains what observer bias means.
When it comes to the Bible, we often come with a prefixed idea of what we believe. So, for example, if a person thinks that God is distant and we will not know whether we are saved until the day of judgement, then that is what they will see in the Bible. After all the Jehovah's Witnesses as a whole religion believe this.
Likewise, if we believe that we need to work to earn God's favour, that is what we will see in the Bible.
It wasn't until I started pulling out verses that talk of God's grace and what God has done for us, that I was able to see past my own bias. Before that, I was walking a double walk and talking a double talk. Saying, 'It's grace' from one side of my mouth and, 'Got to stay in God's favour' from the other.
Conserving
Another term I have come across is "conserving." It is a term used in childhood development. The idea is that if, say, you take two separate pint jugs of water and pour one into a tall narrow vase, and pour the other into a shallow bowl. As adults, we would know there is a pint of water in each. However, if you asked a child under seven which had more, they would more likely say the tall vase.
You can do the same thing with coins. Take two rows of ten coins, one closely spaced and the other slightly more widely spaced. The more widely spaced row would be longer, so the child would say there is more in that row. (I should say, I tried these on a child under seven and they got the answers right.)
Anyway, what has that got to do with this? We read a verse like 'By grace, free gift of God, not by works' and then start trying to live by works. We read about the narrow door and start to imagine all kinds of hoops and obstacles yet miss that Jesus said He is the door. We read that Jesus will say, 'I never knew you' and assume He is talking about those he knows in terms of those who have believed in Him. We read, 'We are under grace not law.' then start applying the verses that clearly state they are Law. It is no different from seeing a pint poured into two different vessels and thinking there is now a different amount in each. We all do it!
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