Can you comment on the teaching today of the lordship of Christ required from salvation, versus easy ‘believism’, which is those who say that all you have to do is believe and you’re saved?
Well the shortest comment is that the only way of salvation is to confess Jesus as Lord. I myself was brought up by God-fearing men who thought that repentance was a Jewish term, and to preach repentance was to preach works; and that in the day of grace, this was inappropriate, so we mustn't preach repentance: you only preach faith in Christ. They meant it well, but this was dispensationalism gone to seed. We read that Paul went about everywhere—he told the church at Ephesus, and that was certainly a Gentile church predominantly—preaching repentance towards God and faith in the Lord Jesus. We must preach repentance. Secondly, yes it is through faith in Christ, and that involves confessing him as Lord.
Someone told me at one stage when he was discussing this thing that he was persuaded of this doctrine that you can be a believer without confessing Jesus as Lord. When I quoted to him Romans 10:9, he gave me the explanation that had been given him: that here the word 'Lord' doesn't mean Lord of our lives, it simply means you confess Jesus as Jehovah, because in Old Testament Hebrew, the name Yahweh, Jehovah, is in the ancient Greek Septuagint translation translated in Greek as Kurios, which means Lord. And that comes about because Jews, by the time the New Testament was written and by the time those early translations were made, wouldn't pronounce the name Yahweh. Anywhere that it occurred in the text, they said Adonai, which means Lord. They do it today still. So the Greek translators being Jews translating into Greek, put Kurios for Yahweh.
So to come back to what my friend said, 'Romans 10:9 simply means that you are to confess that Jesus is God—Jehovah—not that he's Lord of your life', I found that bordering on the comical. Fancy coming to God and saying, 'Now, Lord God Almighty, I now declare I do believe that Jesus is your Son, the Son of God—in fact, God incarnate. But I'm not intending just at the moment to make him Lord of my life. Thank you for salvation. I can have salvation if I merely admit that he is the Son of God.'
Really? You want forgiveness of sins: what are you being saved from? Well, the first commandment is 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength' (see Deuternomy 6:5). Fancy coming to God and saying, 'I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, God incarnate. I'm obliged by your law to love him with all my heart, mind, soul and strength. Thank you, God, but I don't need to do that. I'm here for forgiveness and I'm going to ask for forgiveness with the intention for the moment of carrying on with the biggest sin there ever is and could be—for not loving him with all my heart, mind, soul and strength.' It's one thing to say that I want to love him with all my heart, soul, mind and strength, but I'm a weakling, have mercy on me. But to say that I don't need to receive him as Lord of my life—that I can be forgiven even if I've no intention for the moment of loving him as my Lord and God—would be a complete and dangerous nonsense.
Children and 'believism'
Our Lord is on record saying that little children can believe (see Matthew 19:14), and I have a sister whose age is undisclosable, but she's older than I am and she says she was saved when she was five and has lived now for eighty years to prove the truth of it!
But on the other side, we don't always help young people if we force them into professions of salvation when they haven't understood what's happening anyway and therefore, when they grow older, they feel a bit like hypocrites and they feel there was nothing in it. They're much more difficult to reach then than they would have been if one had let them develop naturally.
