Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart: How to Know for Sure You Are Saved

by J.D. Greear

Salvation is not a prayer you pray in a one-time ceremony and then move on from; salvation is a posture of repentance and faith that you begin in a moment and maintain for the rest of your life.

The Enemy—one of whose names in Scripture is “the Deceiver”—loves to keep truly saved believers unsure of their salvation because he knows that if he does they’ll never experience the freedom, joy, and confidence that God wants them to have. But he also loves to keep those on their way to hell deluded into thinking they are on their way to heaven, their consciences immunized from Jesus’ pleas to repent.

You can “ask Jesus into your heart” without repenting and believing, and you can repent and believe without articulating a request for Jesus to come into your heart.

Placing an overemphasis on phrases like “ask Jesus into your heart” gives assurance to some who shouldn’t have it and keeps it from some who should.

Salvation comes not because you prayed a prayer correctly, but because you have leaned the hopes of your soul on the finished work of Christ.

believe it is time to put the shorthand aside and preach simply salvation by repentance toward God and faith in the finished work of Christ. Or, at least, to be careful to explain exactly what we mean when we call for a response to the gospel.

At our church we say that you can summarize the gospel in four words: Jesus in my place.