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Page 2 converts know but little and care less about a system of doctrine. They are prayerless, lifeless, and to all steady church work reprobate." "It is easy to get children to hold up their hands to indicate a decision, but that does not mean they are saved. The Bible says that no one can be saved unless he repents. . . . Repentance is being sorry enough for your sins to want to stop doing them." "Shallow preaching that does not grapple with the terrible fact of man's sinfulness and guilt, calling on ‘all men everywhere to repent,' results in shallow conversions; and so we have a myriad of glib-tongued professors today who give no evidence of regeneration. Prating of salvation by grace, they manifest no grace in their lives. Loudly declaring they are justified by faith alone, they fail to remember that ‘faith without works is dead.'" "Just now some professedly Christian teachers are misleading many by saying that ‘repentance is only a change of mind.' It is true that the original word does convey the idea of a change of mind; but the whole teaching of Scripture concerning the repentance which is not to be repented of is that it is a much more radical and complete change than is implied by our common phrase about changing one's mind. The repentance that does not include sincere sorrow for sin is not the saving grace that is wrought by the Holy Spirit." "Can't you see what fools we are? We preach a man-made, plastic gospel. We get people to come forward to `the altar' by bringing psychological pressures that have nothing to do with God. We `lead them' in a prayer that they are not yet convinced they need to say. And then to top it all off, we give them `counseling,' telling them it is a sin to doubt that they're really saved!" "‘Easy-prayerism' ... is a methodology which focuses on getting people to say a prayer.... What I am against is making this the focus of our evangelistic activity. Repeating a prayer is not necessarily salvation, and we must not confuse it with such. Just because 50 people pray a prayer, or raise their hands in a gospel meeting, or some other thing like this, is no evidence whatsoever that those people have been saved. It is one thing to show some interest in salvation; it is quite another thing to be saved." "No doubt the NUMBER ONE lie among Bible-believing people today is, ‘You must ask Jesus into your heart to be saved and trust him to do that (come into your heart),' etc. But look at what this is saying! ‘You are saved because you asked Jesus into your heart.' There is no Scriptural support for this false plan of salvation which is devastating to the cause of Christ; it places the emphasis upon a prayer that is said and what the sinner can do rather than upon what Christ has done." "One day I watched one of those trainees talk to a teenage fellow. As I listened, it was evident the teenager did not understand what he was doing and did not get saved. Yet when the counselor was done, the young man believed that he was saved. That high school student had no conviction of sin, no conception of Christ's dying in his place to pay for his sin, no comprehension of trusting in Christ alone for salvation. Rather, just about all he got was that he was to bow his head and ask Jesus into his heart. . . . That day, I doubted. I doubted that asking Jesus to come into your heart was valid. That provoked me to study. Since then I have come to the conclusion that the Bible does not teach that a person gets saved by asking Jesus Christ to come into his heart or into his life." "Decisionism is the belief that a person is saved by coming forward, raising the hand, saying a prayer, believing a doctrine, making a lordship commitment, or some other external, human act, which is taken as the equivalent to, and proof of, the miracle of inward conversion. . . . Decisionism is purely human, carnal, and natural. "Just as 75% of the church is not saved, a full 50% of the preachers are not either. . . . I have called the new way of getting saved ‘easy believism.' In simpler words, all a person has to do to be saved is to ‘accept Jesus Christ as your Savior.' Walk down the aisle and tell the preacher you have accepted Christ. He takes your word for it and admits you to church membership. Show me that condition of being saved in God's Word? "When you ‘convert' a child (or an adult) by the process of cheap methods, you do not convert him to Christ, but to a circus, or at best to a movement. This type of convert will return to his 'wallowing in the mire' as soon as the circus tent is taken away. . . . If these men could compute the increase of number they 'win' by these tactics they would know the number of false professions they will accumulate during their life." "The way of salvation is falsely defined. In most instances the modern ‘evangelist' assures his congregation that all any sinner has to do in order to escape hell and make sure of heaven is to ‘receive Christ as his personal Savior.' But such teaching is utterly misleading. No one can receive Christ as his Savior while he rejects Him as Lord! It is true, the preacher adds, that the one who accepts Christ should also surrender to Him as Lord, but he at once spoils it by asserting that though the convert fails to do so, nevertheless heaven is sure to him. That is one of the devil's lies! ... Those preachers who tell sinners that they may be saved without forsaking their idols, without repenting, without surrendering to the Lordship of Christ, are as erroneous and dangerous as others who insist that salvation is by works, and that heaven must be earned by our own efforts." "‘Easy believism' is mostly propagated by the Charismatic movement and the ‘Christian' Rock movement. ‘Easy believism' makes everyone a Christian that either speaks in tongues or simply shows up to some kind of a religious meeting and waves their hands around. This belief completely ignores repentance, humility, and sorrow for sin and behaving like a Christian. It retards Christian growth. This is how many liberal, compromising Christians get their big numbers. They try to make everyone feel comfortable in their sin and then they brag about their big numbers that they claim to have converted." "Usually these Arminian Baptists (and their Protestant fellow-travelers) describe the act on which they believe the new birth is predicated in certain terms which are accepted among them. They often require a ‘decision for Christ.' Sometimes they will speak of ‘praying the sinner's prayer' or ‘making a decision for Christ.' Others speak of ‘opening your heart's door to Jesus,' while some instruct lost people to ‘invite Jesus into your heart.'... But whatever exact term or terms may be used, the basic concept is that there is something which a lost person must be induced to do in order to bring about his or her new birth. I cannot see any essential difference between baptismal regeneration (requiring baptism in order to bring about the new birth) and decisional regeneration (requiring a decision in order to bring about the new birth). Both are fundamentally the same in that they require an act on the part of a spiritually dead sinner in order for God to make that sinner alive spiritually." "Why then do we read such books as "50 Ways to Give an Altar Call," "How to Draw in the Gospel Net" and other God-dishonoring humanistic instructions about how to get people ‘saved' by coming forward? We have made walking the aisle the fundamentalist sacrament. . . . If we cause people to understand that they were saved by walking the aisle, we'll define God's wonderful salvation. . .. We must never give the slightest impression that people have to ‘do' something in order to be saved." Page: 1 | 2 More Good Stuff:
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