Featured Pushing your beliefs on others

Prayed the prayer?
That's a false gospel you're peddling right there

 

Then why would you peddle it?

 

Here's one for you:

Charles Spurgeon (from 1888 sermon A Free Grace Promise):

 

So, what would you do?

Sent from my Moto Droid Turbo.

 

Works salvation.

God doesn't need to hear someone begging before He knows they believe. And charlatans shouldn't be putting words in sinners' mouths and giving them false hope that God listened

 

No, God doesn't need to hear us to know we believe. Yet there is Romans 10:9-10:

9 that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.
10 For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

God wants us to do this, so we should.

He also doesn't need to hear us pray to know our hearts, but he tells us to pray.

So, what would you tell someone who was asking you how they should repent and how they can believe?

Sent from my Moto Droid Turbo.

 

Better write him a note.

 

Amen!!

 

Romans 10:9-10 is not in the context of conversion, it's in the context of Christian living. There are two parts there:
believe unto righteousness
confess unto salvation

being made righteous, and being saved, are not the same thing. Jesus said "If you confess Me before men, I will confess you before My Father." He also said "If you're ashamed of Me, I'll be ashamed of you"

Interestingly, the confessing Him is in the context of persecution (Matt 10:32-33)
And Him being ashamed of some will be at His coming (Luke 9:26)

This shame is also mentioned in Romans 10:11
It's also mentioned in 1John, chapter 2. Verse 23 mentions confessing the Son, and verse 28 says that we will have confidence when He is revealed, and not be put to shame

It's an eschatological salvation, not conversion

First, I try to dispel the notion that repenting is doing, because the Greek word means to have a change of mind

Then I explain that we don't "do" anything. Jesus has already done it. That if he/she has confidence that Jesus has accomplished it, and are fully assured that His death and blood are sufficient for redemption and eternal life, scripture calls that belief - the same as in John 3:16. spelled out in Romans 4:21-24

 

I wonder if the new Grand Mac would be against the prayer.

 

I see a bit of a disconnect with this statement and your hard-core version of Calvinism.

 

I think the two views may be reconciled.
Surely almost everybody who comes to Christ will pray some sort of 'sinner's prayer' acknowledging himself as a sinner and confessing Christ as his Lord and Saviour. That isn't the problem.

Yet it is not the prayer that saves a person but the faith that leads him to pray. The problem with a 'sinner's prayer' arises if one is told that one becomes a Christian by making the prayer and thereby it becomes a substitute for true faith and repentance.

In 2015, I went with the Gideons on a brief mission to Lesotho in Africa. We had many opportunities to speak to young people and to tell them about the Lord Jesus Christ and the cross and to urge them to trust in Him for salvation. But there was one of my Gideon colleagues who was forever telling the children to sign their names under the prayer in the back of the New Testaments that we were giving them. He seemed more interested in having them sign their names than in knowing about what they were signing, as if the signature could save them rather than trusting in Christ.

That, I think, is the attitude that worries John MacArthur, and I expect it would have worried Spurgeon also.

 

I understand why it would be a problem theologically speaking, but, for a Calvinist, why would any of the methods really be particularly worrisome?

False conversion wouldn't make a difference, as the elect would come to Christ no matter what, and for the rest, false conversions wouldn't really matter anyway.

I can see why someone would oppose the practice, for the sake of accuracy, though.

 

I really can appreciate this sentiment. Because even though I am a vehement opponent of a sinner's prayer version, you used the words "almost everybody"

That removes any notion that it is inevitable - will happen

That removes any notion that it is an integral aspect of the gospel - required element

And it is those two false notions - either Integral or inevitable - which have make-believe evangelist pushing people to simply pray a prayer. Or, as in the example you gave, pushing someone to simply sign their name on a card

 

That is because you confuse Calvinism with a particularly extreme form of Hyper-Calvinism.

 

So how many of the elect will not be saved because of false conversions?