Everyone

Text: Romans 10:8-13

Focus: Salvation

Function: the salvation is for everyone

⁸But what does it say?

“The word is near you,
    on your lips and in your heart”

(that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); ⁹because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. ¹¹The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” ¹²For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. ¹³For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

I have relied on verses 9 and 10 as a sort of “formula” for salvation for most of my ministry as an evangelical pastor. Let me re-read them: ⁹because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.

And although I have primarily used the verse as an assurance of salvation for those who have prayed the “sinners prayer,” I find that that those two verses, taken out of context, can describe either who is in, or who is out.

My conversations with people along the lines of those two verses went something like this:

“In order to be saved, you must do two things. First, you must believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And of course, that involves believing in His Deity, His salvific mission of providing the atoning sacrifice as a substitution for us, and His power over death and the punishment for sins that might fall on us.

Second, you must say so with your mouth.

It is one of the reasons why baptism is so important to us as Brethren. We consider baptism to be our public confession of our faith. We see the importance of this practice by looking at Matthew 10:32, whoever confesses me before men, I will confess before my Father in heaven.

There is power in confession. When we confess Jesus before others, we are witnesses to the good news that Jesus has indeed saved us. But it might even go beyond that. There is power in our words. God spoke and the worlds were created. By the power of His Word. We believe that God has filled us with the power of the Holy Spirit and the same force that raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us and gives strength and power to our very lives.

I used to feel like:it was us confessing, and through the power of our confession, we created salvation for ourselves.

The problem with that understanding and preaching of the passage is that it does not include the significance of the last verse, “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.”

In our text for this morning, Paul is doing something clever. He conflates our confession of faith with the importance of loving people that are different from us.

And, one can take the verse out of context, or in context, depending on how you want to look at it to mean that Paul was making sure in this passage that it didn’t make a difference if you claimed a Jewish heritage (that is the context of Romans Chapter 10). Faith in Christ is what saves us, not our lineage.

One might interpret it like this: It doesn’t make any difference what kind of person is calling on God, everyone who does will be saved.

“Don’t worry about Jewish heritage” comes from the context of Romans chapter 10 as Paul is trying to, as my Romans professor in Bible College put it: “settle the Jewish Question.”

It was the question of whether or not they were saved by their lineage, or did they have to have faith in Christ.

But when Paul talks about how “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved,” he is not asserting a new doctrine here, but he is quoting the Old Testament. Joel 2:32

The context of that passage has nothing to do with Paul adding in the importance of overcoming the barriers between races, but has to do with what it means to have faith in God.

Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

One translation, The Good News Translation says it like this: “But all who ask the Lord for help will be saved.”

So, I hope I am not getting to technical here, but the context of the passage is this. If you have a problem, ask God for Help. God will help you. The people who ask God for help are people who at some level or another have some sort of trust, or hope, or faith in God.

In times past, I used this passage to talk about doctrine and how important it is to have just the correct doctrine in order to be saved.

But Joel is saying something different here, and Brother Paul picks up on it. We learn that when people pray, God listens.

People who call upon the name of the Lord are people who live acknowledging that God is real and will judge the earth in a righteous and just way.

They live their lives knowing, or in the faith, that God is observing and that God cares about what is happening here on planet earth.

They are people who ask God for help.

I have often wondered just what kind of prayer qualifies as “calling upon the name of the Lord?”

Is it a formal prayer to Jehovah God like I used to preach with the right confession, the right doctrine and understanding behind it? Or is it a simple request for help from God?

The thief on the cross did not understand the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. The thief on the cross did not get baptized or pray the sinners prayer.

The extent of his life was one of sin. He acknowledged that he was guilty and accepted his fate. He was probably not the very nice, just and kind of person you would send your kids to after school.

He didn’t earn his salvation with godly clean living. And yet, at the end of his life, he simply said to God, “remember me…”

It wasn’t much of a prayer, but it was enough to save him.

He turned to God for help in his hour of need and that is the kind of faith that pleases God. What kind of prayer does God hear? Every prayer. I confess that sometimes during the Lord’s prayer in morning worship, I get a little bit lost in the liturgy and forget that I am actually praying.

I wondered at time if that was sincere. But I realize that even the ritual of calling on God in a formal, or informal way is enough.

I believe that the Kingdom of God is God’s family and that God wants everyone to join that family in a way to lovingly care for others.

If that happened, we would not have war, by the way. And God is seeking people to say even the tiniest prayer of faith with the hope that maybe God is listening. And everyone who does that will find the salvation of God.

I love the word everyone, I believe that it is the controlling word to the verse and it changes my understanding of what it means to trust God.

So, let us learn to call on God because God is near.