What Is Confession? Series

INTRODUCTION

 As we started our “Christianity 101” series last week, we started off by looking at faith. We learned that faith is:

 Faith is whole-souled trust in God’s Word because of the sufficiency of the evidence, which leads to doing what God says.

 If you go to a local church and ask what you need to do to be saved, most all of them would say that you need to have faith, although there would be some disagreement as to how and if you could come to that point.

 To be saved is having faith all you need to do?

 Last week I told you that in our churches we teach that in order for a person to be saved, the bible teaches that they must have faith, that they must publicly confess Jesus as Lord, that they must repent of their sins and that they must be immersed into Christ Jesus. These things are essential to our salvation.

 Today, I want us to look at the step of confession.

 In the passage that we will look at today concerning confession, you will notice that it says that if we confess with our mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in our heart that God raised Jesus from the dead we will be saved. (Romans 10:9)

 The passage tells us that faith alone is not good enough, that God’s way of saving man includes a confession.

 Today we are going to look at three things concerning confession:

1. What is a biblical confession?

2. Why it is important to make a public confession?

3. Does our confession go beyond the initial public announcement?

 (Context of chapter 10. Paul is telling the people that God’s word brings salvation and that a response to that word is essential to salvation. Verse 8 is a quote from Deuteronomy 30:14.)

READ ROMANS 10:8-13

SERMON

I. WHAT IS A BIBLICAL CONFESSION? VERSE 9

A. The nature of the confession.

 In the attempts that have been made to simplify and clarify the steps in the gospel plan of salvation, this step has been designated in the New Testament as “confession.” To get the full impact of this step it is important to have its full New Testament description. It is not just a confession, but it is a confession of ‘faith’ in Jesus, ‘with the mouth’ ‘before men’. This is what verse 9 tells us.

 That is the confession that is a definite step and an important part of God’s way of saving man.

 If Jesus is eliminated from the confession, the significance of the lost. Listen to a few verses that we will look at today.

 MATTHEW 16:16 Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."

 ACTS 8:37 [And Philip said, "If you believe with all your heart, you may." And he answered and said, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God."]

 1 John 4:15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.

 MATTHEW 10:32 "Therefore everyone who confesses Me before men, I will also confess him before My Father who is in heaven.

 ROM 10:9-10 that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.

B. The confession is a statement of belief of faith that comes from the heart.

 When we make a public confession of our faith, we are telling the world that we believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that He was crucified died and was buried and on the third day He rose from the dead.

 Notice that the confession is not some empty statement of something that we think may be true, but instead it is something that we have such conviction about that we are willing to lay our life down for it.

 The conviction is so strong that we are determined to live our lives for Jesus.

 We are saying that we know that Jesus is the way the truth and the life.

 We are saying that we know that without Jesus we are lost that without Jesus our lives have no meaning and purpose.

 We are saying that we know that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father!

 1Corinthians 15:14 and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain.

C. We must boldly proclaim that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God!

 In Matthew 16:16, Peter made this statement of faith and Jesus told him that upon that statement, the church would be built and the gates of Hades would not prevail over it!