The Big Questions About Salvation and FaithSample

How Can I Be Saved?

Religion often turns the issue of how to be saved into a very complicated affair. You need to know all these teachings, things you have to comply with, and standards to maintain! As a result, many people don’t want to be Christians!

The good news is those things have nothing to do with how to be saved. I want to peel back the layers and go to the core – the essentials.

First, we need to define ‘salvation.’ In the Christian faith, salvation means your status changes from someone unworthy of eternal life to someone given the gift of eternal life. That’s the prime meaning of salvation. From that, everything else flows. The power of God transforms your life, and you experience love, joy, and peace. That sounds good, so how can you be saved?

Let’s look first at ways how not to be saved.

As surprising as it may be to some, you’re not saved by going to church. You’re not saved by avoiding doing bad things and doing good things instead. Neither are you saved by knowing a lot of things about the Bible. These may be good things to strive for, but they’re not how you are saved!

The first thing to understand is that at its root, salvation has nothing to do with what you do, where you go, or even what you know. Instead, it has to do with Jesus and what he has done.

Salvation is Good News, but to appreciate and understand the Good News, you need to get your head around the bad news first. The bad news is that all of humanity is fallen and lost, separated from God, and we are helpless – unable to rescue ourselves or save ourselves. Sin warps our thoughts and desires from the very core of our beings. So, what is the only way you can be saved?

Here’s the more complicated version from the theologian Paul in the Bible:

“For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.Yet God, in his grace, freely makes us right in his sight. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins.For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood. This sacrifice shows that God was being fair when he held back and did not punish those who sinned in times past” (Romans 3:23–25, NLT).

The simple version now - you can be saved by God’s grace by trusting in Jesus for what he has already done to save you. Your performance is not the basis of your salvation.

That sounds very much like having a relationship of trust with Jesus, and that’s exactly what it is!

– Eliezer Gonzalez