The most prevalent and popular form of Christianity in the part of the world in which I live is what I call decisional Christianity. It is Christianity defined by decision. It is usually tied closely to an altar call at the end of a time of worship where people who do not know Jesus are called to make a decision for Jesus by “coming to the front of the church and speaking with the preacher about the decision that they need to be make.” So, you ask, what is wrong with that? I want in the rest of what is here to address that question not so much in terms of what is wrong with it but what it has come to represent in too many of our churches.
Let’s begin with a short statement about what the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord. We are all born into a deep and deadly spiritual crisis that we cannot resolve on our own. We are born under the holy and perfect standard of the law of God as the way of being right with God. God has so made us that we instinctively know that we cannot meet this standard. We fall woefully short of this standard. And along the way whether at age 10 or 50 we hear the Gospel of what God has done in and through Jesus Christ in His coming to keep the law for us, to be for us the only acceptable sacrifice for our sin to satisfy God’s just requirement for us and so to take our place on the cross to receive from God the punishment that we deserve that pays the price for our sins. We hear. We believe. And in deep conviction of our sin we turn from our sin to God to believe this good news and to give our lives to Jesus as Lord. We are saved by this grace that comes from God in and through the gift given to us in Jesus Christ. We express what God has done for us by connecting with a local church in baptism as we begin to learn what it means through the teachings of the Bible in and through the church to follow Jesus. We have taken the first “decisive/decision” step in being a Christian. BUT we are not saved by the decision; we are saved by the decisive act of God on our behalf that brings into our lives the very presence of God in His Spirit who begins and continues to change us to conform us more and more into the image of Jesus. No decision can save us. Only the declaration of God about us based on what He has done for us in Christ can save us.
Here is my great fear in far too many of our churches: we have come to believe that anyone and everyone who responds to the call to come to the front or to speak with the preacher at the front is truly and biblically saved. We have no biblical evidence that such a thing is true. My own sense is that it has been used of the devil to deceive thousands of people who sincerely believe that they are saved when they are not. I heard a preacher in the area in which I live who gives a public invitation at the end of every service of worship that those who come forward are simply taking the first small step in a life-long commitment to learn and to live out what it means to follow Jesus as a part of the church. Amen! May his tribe increase.
I did not give an “altar call” the last five or so years of serving as a pastor in a local church. I became deeply burdened over the number of people I knew who had “walked the aisle” whom I had baptized whose lives over time showed no real fruit. Some of that is on me, I am sure; for failing in putting together a genuine discipleship process. I grieve even still over that. But so much of it is that we have developed an “atmosphere” in too many of our churches where “coming to the front” is the guarantee of being saved regardless of the kind of life that follows.
A man met the great doctor Lloyd-Jones at the end of one of his services and said, “if you had given an altar call tonight, I would have come forward and been saved, but the time has passed now.” Lloyd-Jones responded, my dear chap, if the presence and power of God was not powerful enough to trouble you for days and compel you to surrender your life, then I am glad that I did not; it would have put you in a far worse predicament than you are even now.
I have no axe to grind with those who plead for an altar call. My plea is that if we would employ it, we understand that it is extra-biblical and that we use it biblically. As the preacher that I quoted above says, “it is a first small step in a lifetime of learning and living out what it means to follow Jesus.” It is not our decision that saves us. It is God’s decisive action in our behalf through the life, death, and resurrection of HIs Son that we receive by grace through faith. And that faith that itself is a gift of God sets all that we are on all that He is as we seek to be and to become more and more HIS. He gives us as His children all that we need to become more and more His. Nobody can decide for Jesus and then decide at some point later to walk away from His Way, His Word, and His people believing that at least they are going to heaven because of some decision they made when they were ten. That is worse than heresy. That is hell.