THE SINNER'S PRAYER
If you have much experience at all with evangelical Christianity, you have heard
of or perhaps have even prayed the sinner's prayer. The sinner's prayer is purported
to be a prayer to pray when a person comes to faith in Jesus for the first time
or wishes to rededicate themselves to faith in Jesus as a response to God in
Christ done by faith. While there is no one set edition of the sinner's prayer,
the version Billy Graham encouraged people to pray proves representative of
the genre:
Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness.
I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins and
invite You to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow You as
my Lord and Savior. In Your Name, Amen.
You may be astonished to learn that no one in the New Testament prayed the sinner's
prayer; no Apostle exhorted people to pray such a prayer; the sinner's prayer
has no basis or ground in Scripture! There may be seventeenth century antecedents
for the sinner's prayer, and some editions may have been in use in the nineteenth
century, but the prevalence of the sinner's prayer has only been established
in the past century. If one needs to pray the sinner's prayer to demonstrate
how they have been saved in Jesus, what will become of all of those who lived
for 1900 years before the prayer became popular?
Most of its advocates admit that the sinner's prayer, as such, is not found
in the pages of Scripture. They often appeal to Romans 10:9-10 and Revelation
3:20 to justify the practice, suggesting the sinner's prayer is the means by
which one would confess with the mouth unto salvation and to open the door to
the heart to allow Jesus to enter. Unfortunately, this reasoning seems to wish
to justify an existing practice more than to make sense of what Paul and Jesus
were addressing. The confession of which Paul spoke in Romans 10:9-10 is not
of sin, which, while true, is not said to lead to salvation in the New Testament;
instead, Paul referred to the confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of
the Living God, a profession of that which one has now come to believe through
the Gospel (cf. Matthew 16:16, 1 Timothy 6:12-13). Jesus did declare to the
Laodiceans that He stood at the door and knock in Revelation 3:20, but no specific
reference is made to the heart; instead, the metaphor is that of sharing a meal
at a table, a demonstration of association. In context Jesus wanted to give
the Laodiceans assurance: if they repented, Jesus would again dwell in their
midst, and would consider them as part of His people. Jesus certainly continues
to invite people to come and abide with and in Him, but the sinner's prayer
is nowhere considered the means by which this would transpire.
Furthermore, to what end does the sinner's prayer exist? After all, those who
tend to advocate for the sinner's prayer also advocate for salvation by faith
alone. Many will in fact stress how the sinner's prayer itself does not provide
salvation but is designed to be a response a person can make in order to have
some kind of moment they can point to as the moment at which they became saved.
When the sinner's prayer is offered at type of "altar call" it also
becomes a public demonstration of one's faith. Thus the sinner's prayer seems
to exist because it provides a type of experience which demonstrates the change
inherent in the point of conversion.
James the Lord's brother warned us against the idea that anyone is justified
by faith alone (James 2:24); nevertheless, Christians are saved by grace through
faith, since none of us can earn salvation by any works we might do for merit
(Romans 3:20, Ephesians 2:1-8). As Revelation 3:20 would suggest, Jesus stands
at the door and knocks: He has done all that is necessary for us to be saved
if we would only accept His salvation according to what He has set forth for
us.
How did people respond to the Gospel message in the first century? We find a
consistent pattern throughout the pages of Scripture. When people open to the
Gospel message heard the declaration of Jesus' life, death, resurrection, ascension,
lordship, and imminent return, they recognized Jesus as Lord and Christ by first
believing in Him, trusting Him as Lord, then confessing that He was the Christ,
the Son of the Living God and repenting of sin and committing to follow Jesus
as Lord, and then were baptized in the name of Christ for the forgiveness of
their sins (Acts 2:38, 8:35-38, 16:31-33, etc.).
It is good to see that those who would advocate for faith only nevertheless
recognize that there ought to be some action or means by which one's conversion
is memorialized, both for the believer him or herself and for others as well.
And yet God anticipated such needs already and has established prescribed actions
and behaviors in His Word to this end: confession and baptism. These represent
ancient practices which have been maintained consistently for as long as Christianity
has existed. On what basis should we prefer a twentieth century innovation over
what was proclaimed by the Apostles in the name of Jesus?
The sinner's prayer cannot provide salvation; it cannot attest to salvation;
it has no standing or even purpose according to what God has made known in Christ
through the Scriptures. Instead, the only "prayer" of the sinner is
to believe in Jesus, confess Jesus before others, repent, and to be immersed
in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit for the remission
of his or her sin (Acts 2:38, Romans 6:3-7, 10:9-10). The prayer, or appeal,
of the sinner is accomplished in the act of baptism, defined as an appeal to
God for a cleansed conscience through the resurrection of Jesus, and for salvation
in 1 Peter 3:21. May all seek to be saved in Christ by the means which He established
from the beginning, believe, confess, repent, and be baptized, and thus put
on Christ!
By Ethan R. Longhenry
Return to the General Articles page
Home / Bible studies / Bible Survey / Special Studies / General Articles / Non-Bible Articles / Sermons / Sermon Outlines / Links / Questions and Answers / What Saith The Scriptures /Daily Devotional / Correspondence Courses / What is the Church of Christ / Book: Christian Growth / Website Policy / E-mail / About Me /