“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved”: but what does that call sound like? a reflection

“If you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

When I first started attending Christian gatherings as a younger non-Christian, there would come a time during the end of the gathering, more often than not scheduled in after a very intense time of worship music or at the end of a very compelling sermon, when people were invited to come to the front of the auditorium and, using Paul’s famous one-liner, confess that “Jesus is Lord.” And as the story would go, this was all that sufficed in order to claim the salvation that Jesus wrought for them on the cross. Are any of you familiar with this practice of altar calls? From Billy Graham crusades or from other televangelists, for example? It’s quite the spectacle – in the most respectful way possible.

The Apostle Paul tells us that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” But what does that call sound like?

I think many of us intuitively know exactly what that call sounds like, what pitch it has, how the sentences are formed, and what words are used. I’m sure you’ve heard stories, or witnessed people first-hand responding to altar calls, the like of which I described before. But is that the only way that a worshipping community can faithfully bring itself before God, confessing faith in Jesus and trusting in the redemptive work of Christ on the cross? Most certainly not! So, the question remains, in lieu of extravagant altar calls, what practices do we have that enable us as a collective, and also as individuals, to come before our God with repentant hearts, acknowledging that we like everyone else have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God? And that as such, we, too, need a saviour?

Before I respond to that question – and I will come back to it in a very circuitous way – I just wanted to clear the air of something first – address an elephant in the room, that potentially may not even be that apparent to us at first glance. And that’s the idea that when we confess belief in Jesus Christ, that our salvation is secured. Otherwise said, once you’ve prayed a certain prayer or said the right thing salvation is yours. Done and dusted.

But I don’t think this could be any further from the truth, and I’m sorry if that statement causes offense. Instead, what I would like to suggest is that a confession of our belief in Jesus Christ as Lord is a daily affair: that is, repentance coupled with a confession of our faith, renewed every morning. While Paul’s famously quoted altar call passage sounds like a definitive, one and done event, made possible by a good, good God who gives generously to those who call on his name, we know from personally lived experience and from reading and writing our history books that, despite humanity’s best attempts we’re not as good as we think we are. But God gets that. Having come to us in Jesus Christ and lived and breathed our humanness, God understands our humanity. He understands how fickle we are but also how constantly changing the world is around us. He knows that we have our good days. And that we have our bad days. And while one day we might confess from the hilltop place of prayer and worship that ‘Jesus Christ is Lord,’ the next day we might find ourselves so deep in the pit of our human misery, loneliness, anxiety, and fear that all we can muster is a lament that God has forsaken us. And God can handle that, too. After all, we worship a God who not only calms storms but also shows his wounded hands to those who are in doubt. He can handle a lot more than we can throw at him, and then some.

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

As I was reading through our Romans passage the other day, interestingly the last image that came to mind was that of a victorious, bold proclamation of faith the likes of which we might imagine from someone at an altar call. Initially, I had imagined the cry of a woman who had just lost her husband; the disbelief of a grandson at the side of his grandfather’s deathbed; and the deep despair of a son who’d received news that his mother’s cancer had rapidly advanced and only had months to live. I pictured these three people, lost, confused, and in a quiet, near inaudible whisper calling out to God, “Jesus, are you even there?” Can this be considered an attempt at a confession of faith?

I said I’d come back to it, so let’s follow the breadcrumbs back to that unanswered question from a little earlier.

Confessing our faith takes practice. It’s not something we’re trained to do. It’s not something we see helpfully modelled around us. Yet it is identified as a critical aspect of God’s promise of salvation to us, a gift that is generously given to all who call on the name of Jesus. What’s more, we live in a society that is disinterested and discouraging at best, dismissive at worst of Christians sharing their faith. So, it’s not like we even have opportunities to share our confession, even if we were equipped with how to go about doing it. And while, we are part of a confessing tradition, where corporately and communally as Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans and Church of Christ members we say the historic creeds of the Church. Yet for many of us, the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and many others, as beautiful as they are, are weighed down in clunky theological language, requiring footnotes of interpretation, disconnected from everyday language, written in a way that simply doesn’t engage the creative imagination. Or at least that’s my humble opinion. So, what are we left with? To quote the Psalmist, stuck in exile in Babylon, “how do we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

Thankfully for us, God’s already done the heavy lifting.

“The word is near you,

on your lips and in your heart.”

The words that were on the Apostle Paul’s lips and in his heart as he was writing this letter to the house churches in Rome came to him from an intimate knowing – not a head knowing but a heart knowing – of the Hebrew Scriptures. When looking for words to articulate his faith and belief in Jesus as Lord, he turned to the texts of the Hebrew Bible.

One of the roles of a faith community the likes of ours is to equip our people for corporate confession of faith. What we do when we gather together, with the songs that we sing, the prayers that we pray, and the liturgy that we join in saying together is a beautiful variety of different expressions of our calling out to God, articulating our corporate but also our very personal and individual belief in the saving work of Jesus Christ. And while our worship is not always as polished or as spectacular as an altar call, it is faithful, nonetheless. After all, all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved, whether this call is perfectly in tune or just a jumbled joyful noise.

Perfecting the pitch of this call is a life-long journey. It takes practice. But why wouldn’t we use the words that are already near to us; the words on our lips and in our hearts, knowing that they find their source in the Word made flesh.

I wonder what the invitation from this passage might be for us in this Lenten season? As we journey toward Easter, how might we practically prepare ourselves for learning to make that joyful noise to the Lord? Perhaps we could take a leaf out of Paul’s book and immerse ourselves in one of the prophets. One suggestion is that we could journey with the prophet Isaiah, who Paul quotes when he says “no one who believes in him will be put to shame.” Another suggestion is that we might like to journal our prayers, in preparation for when the words God has placed on our lips and in our heart don’t come as easily one day. Or perhaps we might find renewed meaning in listening to some of the hymns that have been instrumental to us in our faith journey, that they might inspire us once again as we daily seek to make our confession about the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

What a radically inclusive, expansively embracing, norm-smashing God we worship. One who crosses all and every barrier to reach us, one who sees the broken-hearted and draws near, one who’s removed the shame from needing to say or believe the ‘right’ thing, and who delights in those who call out to him in strength as in weakness. It is this same God who puts the words of belief in our hearts and confession on our lips and having done the heavy lifting leaves the rest over to us.

My prayer for us this week is that we would recognise the words that God has brought near to us, those words on our lips and in our hearts that enable us to connect with the generous gift of God made known to us in Jesus Christ.

Kororia ki te Matua, ki te Tamaiti, ki te Wairua Tapu,

Glory to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Brett Reid
Ministry Intern.