what's required

"Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved..." Acts 16:31


Paul & Silas were in Philippi, had been arrested, beaten, & locked up.

While they were singing & praising God (yeah, after been severely beaten), there was an earthquake, every prisoner's chains fell off, & the doors to the cells & the gates to the prison were knocked open.

The jailer, fearing the prisoners had escape, was about to kill himself, because the authorities would have killed him for letting them get away.

But Paul yelled out they they were all still there.

The jailer then said, "What must I do to be saved?"

And Paul answered him with the above verse.


Believe on the Lord Jesus & you will be saved...

iow, if you believe Jesus' perfect life, death,& resurrection is the way God provided for us to reconnect with Him, then that is all that is required for us to reconnect with God.


And "believe on the Lord Jesus Christ & you will be saved" is a complete sentence.

We like to tack a lot of other things onto that statement, some of which are our own likes & dislikes, while others are just the way things are in our culture.

We want people to conform to what we are comfortable with when thinking what a Christian has to be & do to be reconnected with God.


Not so.

The thing we must do is believe Jesus is who He said He is.

That's what "gets us on the bus."


Now, after we become reconnected with God, He will certainly start the process of recreating us into the image of Himself.

But what "gets us in the gate," what makes this reconnection possible, is something so scandalously simple that many people just can't believe that that is all there is too it.


I remember informally talking to a small group of college students out in the hall during a conference we had at Christ Chapel Macon one weekend.

They were asking me if they were this kind of person or that kind of person, would they go to hell.

I told them that, correct me if I'm wrong, but reconnecting with God, being "saved", is all about believing in Jesus - that's what "gets us in the door".

And that's all there is to it.

Then, from the start of our belief in Jesus & trust in His provision for our reconnection to God, God will be trying to make us into what He dreamed & created us to be & do.