Dr. John Bergsma

If all I need is Jesus, and I just know that Jesus saved me, why do we have all this?

Why do we have the Bible?

Why do we have the church, et cetera?

So there's a lot of things in scripture, and this is related to another frustration that I have, Matt, and that is people taking a single verse that talks about being saved.

Like if you believe in your, if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that he was raised from the dead, you will be saved.

So they'll take that and run with it.

That's all you need to do.

Just believe and confess, believe and confess, and you'll be saved.

Ignoring the fact that Jesus also says, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.

Ignoring that Mark 16, 16 says, he who believes and is baptized will be saved.

Um, ignoring the fact that, um, you know, say in Ephesians, we get a whole list of vices, you know, the, the, the fruit of the flesh and told that if anybody does any of these things, uh, they're not going to be saved.

Um, so there's, there's a whole bunch of, um,

all kinds of commands all through the New Testament that are relevant to salvation.

And we can't just pick one and run with it and ignore all the rest.

And I think that folks have a misconception of what it means to believe in Jesus.

When Jesus says, you know, have faith in me and you will be saved, something like this.

He says things like that all through the Gospel of John.

But if you really believe someone, you're going to obey what they tell you, correct?

And if you really believe them, you're gonna be interested in everything that they say.

So we can't be doing this technique of reducing the Christian faith to a single kind of act or some kind of simplistic disposition.