Chapter 18: The ball is in your court now

This is the last chapter of this book. We have come a long way, and it might be prudent to take a few moments to summarize what we have seen so far.

We began by noting that nothing is more important than being saved. Yet, we saw that the way of salvation preached today couldn’t be the correct way. This is because Jesus said that few will be saved, and yet so many claim to be saved with respect to the way of salvation being preached today. We therefore endeavored to do a careful study of what is really required to be saved. We determined that the best way to go about doing this was to study all that God had to say on the topic, not just a few verses. This was the best way because God said that the sum of His word is truth.

We determined that repentance is a requirement for salvation. We saw that pretty much everybody in Jesus’ times preached the need to repent in order to be saved. We then saw that repentance is not obedience or a moving from unbelief to belief. Neither is it guilt, regret or remorse. Instead, it is a decision to stop sinning in every way. We also saw that repentance is not a work, and that both God and man play a part in man’s repentance.

Next, we saw that faith is another requirement for salvation. We saw that there are very specific things that one must believe in order to be saved. We also saw why God requires us to believe these things. We defined faith and discussed how to increase in faith. We saw that faith is a gift from God – a gift that God makes available to all.

Then we saw that our forgiving others is also a requirement for our salvation. Therefore, we defined what it means to forgive, and answered some common objections that people have about this requirement. We also explored how to forgive, and why God made forgiveness a requirement for salvation.

Finally, we saw that confessing and not denying Christ is also a requirement for salvation. Therefore, we defined what it means to confess and not deny Christ. We also examined why God made confessing and not denying Christ a requirement for salvation, and how to get the strength to confess even if it means the loss of our life.

We then saw that these four requirements are independent of each other and each of them is necessary for getting saved. We also saw that even though these requirements exist it is still accurate to say that salvation is a free gift of God.

Then we explored why good works, water baptism and becoming like a little child are not requirements for salvation. We also explored what happens when a person gets saved. We examined in some detail what is and is not needed to stay saved. We then examined how we can test whether we are saved. Finally, we examined how God made salvation possible for man.

Having seen all these things, the ball is now in our court. God has done His part. It is now up to us to respond to Him. Therefore, in this chapter we focus on three things. Specifically, we need to apply to ourselves what we have come to know to be true, to tell others about what we know is true, and to be grateful to God for the hope that we have in Christ Jesus. We deal with each of these in the sections that follow.