The last post Tired of Church? How to Rediscover the Joys of the Christian Tradition dealt with the use of rituals in church, especially communion (the ongoing sacrament). This post deals with the initiating sacrament of the church: baptism. For this article, I am concerned with false assurances of salvation, not providing a comprehensive treatment of infant baptism versus believer’s baptism.
My Conversion and Baptism
Shortly after my conversion experience at 14 years old, I began wanting to be baptized. I realized that I had not really been a Christian before. I had called myself a Christian and agreed with the tenets of Christianity, but I did not know God. On November 22nd, 2008, I heard the gospel in a way that I could understand, repented, and entrusted my life to God. It was a dramatic, internal experience. In a moment, I felt God’s presence for the first time. Suddenly, I understood phrases such as born again and saved.
I read about baptism in the New Testament and began learning more through a nondenominational church I was attending on Sunday nights at that time. When I told my parents that I wanted to be baptized, they informed me that I was baptized as a baby. That made no sense to me. Baptism in the Bible was often connected to repentance and conversion. I wondered, “Why baptize a baby? I had no say in the matter.”
My desire to be baptized only grew over the next year. I attended a class on baptism through a local church. Soon afterward, I chose to declare my union with Christ publicly in a baptism by immersion during a Sunday service. As I have continued my biblical studies, I have learned how and why infant baptism became a practice. I have developed a respect for some of the arguments from Scripture that proponents of the practice make. I certainly do not believe it to be wrong, but in practice I have seen it do more harm than good.[1]
What Being A Christian Does Not Mean
Ask many people in the Bible Belt if they’re Christian, and they will tell you about church attendance. If you ask about when they became a Christian, many will claim they have always been one. Such would have been my response prior to my conversion experience. If they indicate a specific moment, they will likely point to baptism or confirmation. As if we could induct children into God’s church merely by catechizing or baptizing them![2] Unfortunately, baptism, church attendance, Christian parents, and confirmation do not make one a Christian.
I am afraid that, by our lack of thorough and frequent theological teaching, we have given a false assurance of salvation to many churchgoers. The best thing in the world is for someone to know that they are a child of God. The second-best thing is for them to know that they are NOT a child of God. The worst thing is for them to believe they are a child of God when they are not.
Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace
Over 500 years before Christ, two contemporary prophets condemned the religious leaders of the time. Jeremiah and Ezekiel both twice denounced Israel’s priests and false prophets for their false assurances to God’s people:
From the least to the greatest,
All are greedy for gain,
Prophets and priests alike,
All practice deceit.
They dress the wound of my people,
As though it were not serious.
“Peace, peace,” they say,
When there is no peace.[3]
When God was warning Israel to repent or suffer the coming judgment, the religious leaders assured them all was well. Not long afterward, the Babylonians invaded, destroying the temple and putting an end to the nation of Israel for hundreds of years. The same thing is happening in our churches today: we need an awareness of the impending judgment to shake us out of our false assurances. We have all been tried and found wanting, guilty of sinful rebellion against God, and worshipping at the altar of self. We are up the creek without a paddle apart from God’s saving grace.
Many pastors, possibly due to fear of becoming unpopular or shrinking their congregations, refrain from “scaring” churchgoers. Imagine a pastor warning, “You may not be as saved as you think you are.” However unlikely, it would be better to offend now for the sake of eternal security than to comfort now for the sake of temporary benefit.[4]
Instead, it seems more often that the message is that we’re all Christians. Everything is fine! We’ve prayed the prayer, walked the aisle, believed the right things, attended on Sundays, completed confirmation, been baptized – you name it. We assure ourselves that of course we’re saved! Jesus had a different message.
What If You Are Not Saved?
Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Christ utters perhaps the most terrifying words in the Bible:
Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?” Then I will tell them plainly, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!”
Matthew 7:21-23
He equates doing God’s will not with ministry or miracles but with a relationship with himself. Only those with such a relationship enter his kingdom.
I will tell you something I would go back and tell myself if I could: if you’re not sure of your salvation, assume you are not saved. The alternative is too great a risk. Then hear this promise, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in [i.e., entrusts oneself to] him shall not perish but have eternal life.”[5]
Being Sure That You Are Saved
There is an assurance of our salvation, but it is not in baptism, confirmation, or anything else. It is in the Son of God. John writes,
And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.[6]
Jesus also teaches, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”[7] It’s not enough to know about him. Do you know him, certainly? Do you have a relationship with him? If you’re not sure, run to him today. Yes, you, even now. Entrust yourself to him, and you will have the right to be called a child of God.[8]
It really is good news.
And you can be sure of it.
[1] Not only have I known many people who have a false assurance of their own salvation due to infant baptism, but I have also met many parents who falsely believe that baptizing their infant has salvific merit. Additionally, when adolescents experience their own conversion and begin a relationship with Jesus, their infant baptism becomes a source of conflict. They agonize over whether to be “re-baptized” and sometimes argue with their parents or pastor over the matter.
[2] I would suggest we call the practice something like “infant dedication” and overemphasize the fact that confirmation and baptism do not make one a member of the body of Christ. Only God does! That being said, Christ modeled and commanded baptism as the initiating sacrament for the church, and every believer ought to obey him by being baptized.
[3] Jeremiah 6:13-14, repeated in 8:10-11
[4] Excessive, unhealthy fearmongering also poses its own dangers. I have one friend whose hyper-Calvinist youth pastor made her fear that she may not be part of “the elect.” She experienced extreme paranoia, combined with other mental health struggles, which eventually culminated in a suicide attempt. Although her story has a happy ending, let her experience be a warning to us!
[5] John 3:16, emphasis mine
[6] 1 John 5:11-13, emphasis mine
[7] John 17:3
[8] John 1:12
11 responses to “Am I Saved? How Poor Theology Leads to False Assurance”
This was a great article ! I heard a pastor who had moved from Las Vegas to SC say once sarcastically that there was no need for missionaries here because everyone went to church and was a “Christian” already.
Enjoy your Lords day!
Thank you for your devotion to making fisher’s of men. I’m praying for regeneration in the hearts of our youth.
Thanks for reading and for your support! Fortunately, God can reach right down and save a “Christian” like me – even when I didn’t know I needed saving!
“Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
What do you think it means to “do the will of my Father?”
I was hoping someone would ask! The scary part is the context of this statement in the Sermon on the Mount. Does Jesus mean we have to succeed in obeying all those teachings?! Good luck! In John 6, the crowd asks Jesus, “What must we do in order to the works God requires?” And Jesus responds, “The work of God is this: that you believe in the one he has sent.” So what is the will of God that we are to do? Entrust ourselves to Jesus! That’s good news. Circling back to the Sermon on the Mount, I believe that Jesus-trusting people ought to increasingly embody those ethics.
Sooooo…IN context it means following Jesus’ teachings from the sermon on the mount. Out of context but in conjunction with John it means believing in Jesus or entrusting yourself to him. I would say, it’s good to be holistic and take passages in conjunction with other passages to get a larger picture. But if you take the original context to be salvific words from Jesus, it seems to me you’d need to take the whole of the context. I think Matthew and John have different agendas in their telling of these interactions…mashing them together to create a doctrine seems inauthentic to the text in my opinion.
I agree that the gospel writers seem to have different agendas! We benefit from Matthew’s ethical emphasis in one way and from John’s Christological emphasis in another. God knows we need both. It’s not only holistic but mandatory to interpret scripture in light of other scripture – because both, inspired by the same Spirit, reveal the same Jesus!
I would agree that it is inauthentic to cherry-pick scriptures to construct a doctrine (in fact, I would use the word disingenuous), but we cannot construct doctrine on them in isolation either. We must first interpret them in their immediate context THEN in the greater context of Scripture – only then can we construct doctrine. For example, the early church fathers hotly contested whether James should be recognized as canonical because, in isolation, it seemed to preach works-righteousness. I’m glad for our sake that the Spirit guided them to recognize it because it balances Paul’s writings well.
My message is best summarized by one of my professors, “Faith alone saves, but the faith that saves is never alone.” Lastly, the propositional phrases in Ephesians 2:8-10 have always helped my understanding of salvation: BY grace, THROUGH faith, FOR (not by!) good works!
I hear ya. I think the doctrine oversimplifies the complexity present in scripture. There is a tension between Matthew’s “entering the kingdom” through doing God’s will found in the the sermon on the mount, and Johns “food for eternal life” through believing in Jesus. Neither of these passages say that they are about Salvation from Hell…that is an assumption built into the doctrine, and I think that’s why it’s lacking. The tension should be resolved in our working it out relationally and through action. Hope that makes sense…more convo can be had in person lol
Cole after the change that happened in my life in 1987, for myself, I came to believe that receiving Christ through confession and repentance is necessary and walking through Baptism becomes a demonstration of my belief in all Christ has done for me. But in 1987 when I experienced a demonic deliverance, having already confessed and repented years earlier and was baptized, attended CBC etc., I came to believe that receiving the Holy Spirit as explained here by Paul’s actions after addressing the disciples was as important if not more important than the salvation experience and was not an option and was not something that happened when I accepted Christ as my Savior as is so often taught.
Baptism addressed here is a demonstration of a relationship with Jesus Christ, not a demonstration of repentance and confession. The relationship with Jesus Christ culminates in receiving the Holy Spirit which brings a person to an understanding and a relationship with The Kingdom of God. This relationship with the Kingdom culminates in boldly proclaiming the Kingdom of God and becomes evident in a persons life with signs and wonders and openly declaring and proclaiming the Kingdom of God even if it means torture, prison and death.
MEV ACTS 19
While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul passed through the upper regions and came to Ephesus. He found some disciples 2 and said to them, “Have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed?”
They said to him, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”
3 He said to them, “Into what then were you baptized?”
They said, “Into John’s baptism.”
4 Paul said, “John indeed baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people that they should believe in the One coming after him, that is, in Christ Jesus.” 5 When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. 6 When Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in other tongues and prophesied. 7 There were about twelve men in all.
Thanks for sharing your story! I may address doctrine regarding “baptism of the Spirit” another time, but suffice it to say that we need the Spirit much more than we need baptism! My hope is that we will be more intentional in our pastoring of people who have been baptized but do not have the Spirit. It is always interesting to me to hear when people identify the time they were saved. I won’t pretend to understand fully the ways God works his salvation in us, so I appreciate the mystery in the variety of our experiences!
This one challenged me! I was so paranoid as a kid that maybe I wasn’t really saved. I know that I have acknowledged who He is and I can distinctly remember being baptized by the Holy Spirit for the first time. But I cannot pin point the 1st time I said “the prayer” but I say it every night when I acknowledge who He is and give Him access to my life. Sometimes doubt still creeps in but I just run to Jesus and say it again.
Thanks for sharing, Lexi! You are not alone! I’ve been encouraged by the writings of Luther – even he spoke about his angfechtungen (his German word for the moments when darkness, doubt, and fear overtook him), and his need to run to Jesus over and over again, trusting the truth of the gospel over against his feelings. Because we cannot know the state of anyone else’s salvation for certain, we should refrain from making any potentially false assurances: “Of course you’re saved, you’ve been baptized! Or, remember, you went through confirmation!” It is all a matter of faith, which works through love (for God and for people). A cause for self-concern would be habits of intentional, repeated sin in one’s life (1 John 3:9), an absence of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23), or a glaring lack of good and loving works (Eph. 2:10, James 2).