The New Birth

As I was in prayer early Sunday morning, February 13, 2000, the Lord put it in my heart to write about the seven lies His people believe. I had no idea when I began to write what even the second lie would be, much less the third or fourth. I just knew they would come to me as I went along if it was indeed the Spirit of God that prompted me to begin writing. And they did. Here is the fourth of the seven principal lies that Christian ministers have persuaded God's children to believe.

It is mind-boggling that this lie has gained such a foothold in the hearts of God's children in this century. For many, the idea of "going up to the 'altar' to get saved" has become the heart of the gospel, even though there is not one instance of any such thing being done, or even suggested, in the entire New Testament. For this generation, it seems as if "going up to the altar to get saved" has always been the way to come to Christ because it has been taught all of our short lifetimes. But it is a modern idea.

In 1925, my father was a twenty-four-year-old student in the Baptist seminary in Ayden, North Carolina. Even though he had been reared as a Baptist, it was in the seminary that he first heard the phrase "get saved" used as a synonym for conversion. It was from the tongue of a speaker from California, and after he had used the term "get saved" several times in this new and startling way, my father turned to a fellow student and asked, "Blackwelder, what's he talking about when he says 'get saved'?" His friend responded, "I'm not sure, but I think he means 'converted'." It was a new thing to his fellow Baptist friend, Blackwelder, too.

They decided to study their Bibles to learn if "salvation" was another word for "conversion". It did not take long for these two young seminarians to find that the guest speaker was wrong in using "salvation" as a synonym for "conversion", and they shrugged it off as the strange notion of an unimportant man. Little did they know, indeed they could not have imagined, that the new false doctrine that he was teaching would completely sweep Christianity off its feet in the twentieth century, taking with it the children of God who were inside that religion.

The truth about this is simple. Conversion is the New Birth. But salvation is the reward for the faithful that Jesus will bring with him when he comes. Conversion is at the beginning; salvation is at the end. Conversion is an experience we must have now in order to be prepared to receive the salvation that Jesus will bring to us when he returns. With this understanding, Paul wrote that the saint's salvation is nearer now than when they became believers (Rom. 13:11). With this understanding, Peter described salvation as being the "end of your faith". And with this understanding, Jesus warned his followers that only those who were faithful to God in His love until the end would be saved (Mt. 24:13).

Referring humorously to the verse in Psalms which promises that God will "beautify the meek with salvation", my father told a congregation in Louisville, Kentucky, that he could look around at them and see that they were not saved yet. The plain truth is that in these corruptible bodies, we all are too "ugly" to be saved already.

Salvation is glorification, and until Jesus brings those beautiful, glorified bodies to us, it is ungodly to boast of already being saved. Our own frail, aging bodies testify against us whenever we claim that we are already saved.

That conversion is salvation is the Fourth Lie that God's children believe.

For more information, check our web site for tract #6, "What Is Salvation?"