There are several steps to becoming Born Again, listed below:
1. Understand that ALL men ever born are sinners. Romans 3:23, says, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” This message that all men are sinners is amply repeated through Scripture . This means you are a sinner in the eyes of an angry God, Who must punish all sin. Do you believe you are a sinner?
2. Since man is an imperfect sinner, and God is a perfect God, no man can save himself. Jesus made this fact very plain in Matthew 5:48, when He said, “Be ye, therefore, perfect, even as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”!!!
If we all have to be perfect in God’s eyes, how can there be anyone in Heaven, especially since the Bible declares, repeatedly, that ALL people are sinners? Obviously, no one is going to get to Heaven this way, by trying to be ‘good enough’ to merit Heaven. Since the Bible says there are going to be untold millions of people in Heaven, there must be some other way to get there, other than by trying to be ‘good enough’.
You must also be very sorry for your sins, and want to have them forgiven. This is known as Repentance. The word Repent means to both be very sorry for your sins, and to want to not sin anymore. Repentance means the desire to turn your life around 180 degrees. This does not mean you will never sin again, but it does mean that sin will become the exception in your life, not the rule.
3. When the sinless Son of God, Jesus Christ, shed His precious blood on the cross at Calvary, He died for the sins of His people in their place as a sacrificial substitute. And in doing so, He suffered the wrath of God the Father upon their sin. He paid the penalty for that sin in His own body and purchased their eternal redemption. This enables Him to give as a free gift His own holiness and righteousness to those who believe in Him and trust Him for salvation. making them absolutely perfect in God. s sight! Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” None of us deserve to be saved; in His love and mercy God extends grace to those who will believe. Grace is defined as “undeserved favor” and perhaps this little acrostic will help you to remember its meaning: G od. s Riches At Christ. s Expense. [The true meaning of GRACE]
4. In Ephesians 2:8-9, the Apostle Paul reiterates this teaching that eternal life with God is a free gift. “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God; Not of works, lest any man should boast.” No man can stand before God in eternity, and boast that they ‘earned’ their way to Heaven. All people in Heaven will be there only because of Jesus’ FREE Gift, which He obtained from God because of His substitutionary death sacrifice on the Cross. Rather than punishing each person’s individual sins, God heaped all those sins on Jesus on the Cross Isaiah 53:2-12]
Now, you are probably thinking, ‘How can I obtain this free gift of eternal life’? Again, the Bible is not silent. In Acts 16:25-33, the jailer anxiously asked Paul, “What must I do to be saved”? Paul answered “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved …” verse 31″. You must BELIEVE on Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. To truly believe, you must place your complete faith and trust in Christ and rely upon Him as your only hope of salvation and eternal life. This is a matter of the heart and you cannot hope to deceive God by putting on an act because He knows everything about you. Many people mistakenly think that by merely believing the facts concerning Jesus Christ. s death, burial, and resurrection, they will be automatically be given the gift of eternal life. But such is not the case. Preachers call that a “head knowledge and not a heart knowledge.” Salvation is freely given, but only to those who are genuine believers.
5. In John 1:1, 14, we see that Jesus Christ is God, equal with God, present with God from before the beginning of time, and the actual Creator of the Universe. He is 100% God and 100% human at the same time, which is why He used both titles during His ministry, Son of God and Son of Man. To become Born Again, you must believe this doctrine about Jesus Christ.
Verse 14 is most important, the teaching that Jesus God became man. This teaching becomes a point of separation between the followers of Christ and Antichrist. In 1 John 4:1-3, we see that anyone who denies that Jesus has come in the flesh is the spirit of antichrist. That is just what the Gnostics of that day were saying, i.e., that Jesus the human was not God Messiah come in the flesh; rather, the ‘Christ Consciousness’ the ‘Messiah’ Consciousness, came on Jesus at His baptism and left Him on the Cross; they believe Jesus was not God and Man. The New Age Movement and Freemasonry have resurrected this blasphemy with a vengeance.
6. Isaiah 53:6 foretells exactly what Jesus Christ did for us on the Cross; “the Lord [God the Father] has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” Praise God!! Only the Wisdom, Grace, and Power of God Almighty could conceive of such a gracious Plan of Salvation!! God’s Nature is such that sin must be punished. Period! But, God set up a Plan whereby an innocent substitute was to be punished instead of the guilty person. In the Old Testament, God allowed the lamb to be the substitute sacrifice for sin; Jesus then became the ultimate substitute sacrifice, for all the sins of the world. His was the Perfect sacrifice, that never needs to be repeated, and that saves all people forever more.
You must believe in, and understand, this principle of Substitute Punishment, before you can become Born Again. And, you must believe that Jesus Christ became the Perfect Substitute Punishment for YOU, before you can become Born Again.
Now that you understand these Truths, and believe them for your life, you now need to understand how you can obtain this FREE Gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ. After all, if I were to attempt to give you a FREE gift, that gift would not become yours if you were to refuse to reach out and take that gift from my hand. So it is here. You must reach out and take this FREE Gift of Eternal Life from the hand of Jesus Christ. How is this done?
Through Saving Faith .
Notice I said Saving Faith . There are types of faith that will not get you saved. You may have ‘head knowledge’ faith that merely intellectually assents to the facts of Jesus Christ’s person, but that is not Saving Faith. You may be in a ‘church’ or a cult that teaches many truths about Jesus Christ, but who teach that you must do many things to earn your way to Heaven. This is not Saving Faith.
Saving Faith is trusting in Jesus Christ, and Him alone, for your Salvation.
If you think you need to do anything for Salvation except trust in Jesus work on the cross, you are guilty of violating Ephesians 2:8-9 and Isaiah 53:6b. Most cults and false Christian religions err at this point; they add things that are “necessary” for Salvation, or they offer a counterfeit way to Heaven, i.e., Salvation by Baptism.
Do you want this Gift of Eternal Life that Jesus left Heaven and died on a cross to give you? If your answer is, ‘Yes’, you can immediately have Eternal Life.
Let me clarify exactly what this involves. First, you are going to transfer your trust, your hope of eternal life from what you have been doing to what Jesus Christ has done for you on the cross. Jesus will take your sin and transfer TO YOU His right standing with God the Father, what we call His righteousness . This means that though we have failed repeatedly to keep God’s commandments, Christ perfectly obeyed all the laws of God. He lived the perfect life, so He could be the perfect, innocent substitutionary sacrifice that God would accept for your sins, and the sin of the entire world, for all who will believe.
http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/salvation.html !!!!!!!!
I will prove that salvation is escape from the bondage of sin and the deserved judgment of God, through no human effort, but wholly on the basis of Christ’s atoning death on the cross.
I will use the Bible as my source of authority. It has a consistent doctrine of salvation, and its trustworthiness has been confirmed by Jesus’ words, validated by his bodily resurrection from the dead.
This resolution does not concern the Mormon doctrine of “unconditional or general salvation,” that is, what Mormon doctrine considers synonymous with immortality. Everyone, according to Mormonism, will be resurrected: not everyone will be exalted. Mormon apostle Bruce McConkie said, “But this is not the salvation of righteousness, the salvation which the Saints seek . . . . Salvation, in its true and full meaning, is synonymous with exaltation or eternal life and consists in getting an inheritance in the highest of the three heavens within the celestial kingdom. With few exceptions this is the salvation of which the scriptures speak.”
This resolution also does not concern whether or not it is possible to lose one’s salvation. The question is, how is salvation accomplished, not how salvation is lost.
Salvation is being rescued from the deserved wrath of God. Romans 5:9 says, “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him.”
The alternative to salvation is destruction (Philippians 1:28), and eternal, conscious punishment (Matthew 25:46).
The moment of conversion is considered to be the moment of salvation, as Titus 3:5- 7 points out: “. . . not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by His grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” We are in need of rescue from the deserved wrath of God because we are bound by sin, both the sin guilt we inherited from Adam, and the weight of our own sins (Romans 3:23; 5:12-14).
Man is bound by sin. In Romans 3:9 Paul says, “we have previously charged both Jews and Greeks that they are all under sin.” Galatians 3:22 declares, “But the Scripture has confined all under sin.”
This bondage comes in part from our representative participation in Adam’s original sin and in part from our own sins, as Romans 5:12 clearly states, “through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.”
Man cannot free himself from this bondage to sin, as Paul makes it clear in Romans 3:11-12 (quoting Psalm 5:9): “There is none righteous, no not one; There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God. They have all gone out of the way; They have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not one.”
Atonement means the reconciliation of the guilty to God by divine sacrifice, that of Jesus Christ on the cross.
There are four results of the atonement:
Christ’s role in the atonement includes
Because Christ’s atonement accomplishes all this, there is nothing left for us to do. All of our sins are forgiven, atoned for, and covered by Christ’s one sacrifice on the cross. No human effort can add to Christ’s all-sufficiency. As Hebrews 7 reminds us, “Therefore He is also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him. . . . who does not need daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the people’s, for this He did once for all when He offered up Himself.”
Justification means accounting the guilty just before God. The New Testament Greek term is dikaioo, to be acquitted, pronounced and treated as righteous. 2 Corinthians 5:21 declares, “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
Justification is initiated by God’s action, not man’s. Romans 4:5, speaking of Abraham as representative of all mankind, says, “But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.”
Faith is not a human work or effort (Ephesians 2:8), but is the divinely prompted heart-response of the individual (Romans 10:9-10) to the gospel (Acts 15:7-11).
Faith and repentance are corollary to salvation, meaning they accompany salvation, but they are not the cause of salvation (Acts 11:18; Acts 5:31).
Sanctification is how the Christian lives his newly justified life. Justification is completed at conversion (Ephesians 2:5); sanctification begins at conversion (Philippians 1:6; Hebrews 10:38-39).
One who has been saved (Ephesians 2:8) produces good works as a result of salvation, not a cause of salvation (Ephesians 4:1, 13). Ephesians 4:23-24 declares, “be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in righteousness and true holiness.”
The Bible clearly teaches that salvation is accomplished wholly apart from human effort or work:
Passages associating works with salvation do not teach that works contribute to or cause salvation. Some of the most common misinterpreted by Mormons and others include
The Bible is God’s perfect Word, and it clearly and consistently teaches that salvation is accomplished wholly without human effort. Verses misinterpreted to teach the necessity of human effort in securing salvation actually show that works follow salvation, they do not cause it.
On the basis of the argumentation and biblical evidence presented here, I affirm the resolution: Yes, salvation is accomplished wholly without human effort.
http://answers.org/theology/salvation.html
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Do you believe that sanctification brought on through your efforts (repentance) is a requirement for salvation?
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