Stop Asking Jesus into Your Heart

J.D. Greear. Stop Asking Jesus into your Heart: How to Know for Sure You are Saved. Nashville, Tenn.: B&H Publishing, 2013. 128 pp. $12.99.

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In Stop Asking Jesus into your Heart, J.D. Greear is less concerned with critiquing the oft-used method of walking someone through the sinner’s prayer as he is with ensuring that believers are not resting on that prayer, that moment, that ritual as the basis of their assurance and security in Christ. This is an intensely personal subject to Greear who announces at the very onset, “If there were a Guinness Book of World Records record for ‘amount of times having asked Jesus into your heart,’ I’m pretty sure I would hold it,” before relaying his own story of wrestling with assurance of salvation (1).

Does the doctrine of perseverance or eternal security imply that as long as someone prays a prayer and perhaps gets baptized, they can anything they want after that moment assured that they’re, “good with God?” Greear argues instead that, “Salvation is not a prayer you pray in a one-time ceremony and then move on from: salvation is a posture of repentance and faith that you begin in a moment and maintain for the rest of your life” (5). This is the thesis of Greear’s work who spends the rest of the book unpacking this idea.

In Stop Asking Jesus into your Heart, J.D. Greear has presented evangelicalism with a very accessible resource for pastors to put into the hands of their congregants who may be wrestling with assurance. Using his 15 years of pastoral experience, Greear will challenge them to look to Christ, rather than any action on their part for assurance. He will call them to place the weight of their security upon Christ, and submit to His Lordship.

In short, he challenges the reader to stop doing in hopes of ensuring his own salvation, but rather to recognize the finished work of Christ and live in the reality of that truth, for that is the basis of our assurance. If we are relying on Jesus, and living submitted to Him, we can stop asking Jesus into our hearts – he has already taken residence there.

J.D. Greear, Stop Asking Jesus into your Heart: How to Know for Sure You are Saved


I received this book free from the publisher through LibraryThing.com‘s Early Reviewer Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

2 Comments

  1. I’ve been chewing on this aspect of salvation for a while. Thank you for reccomending this book, I want to read!

  2. Isn’t it odd that if the Baptists and evangelicals are correct that their “born again experience” is the true and ONLY means of salvation, the term “born again” is only mentioned three times in the King James Bible? If “making a decision for Christ” is the only means of salvation, why doesn’t God mention it more often in his Word? Why only THREE times? Isn’t that REALLY, REALLY odd?

    Why is it that the Apostle Paul, the author of much of the New Testament, NEVER uses this term? Why is this term never used in the Book of Acts to describe the many mentioned Christian conversions? Why is this term only used by Jesus in a late night conversation with Nicodemus, and by Peter once in just one letter to Christians in Asia Minor?

    If you attend a Baptist/evangelical worship service what will you hear? You will hear this: “You must be born again: you must make a decision for Christ. You must ask Jesus into your heart. You must pray to God and ask him to forgive you of your sins, come into your heart, and be your Lord and Savior (the Sinner’s Prayer). You must be an older child or adult who has the mental capacity to make a decision to believe, to make a decision to repent, and to make a decision to ask Jesus into your heart.”

    It is very strange, however, that other than “you must be born again” none of this terminology is anywhere to be found in the Bible! Why do Baptists and evangelicals use this non-biblical terminology when discussing salvation?

    Maybe it’s because…making a “decision” for Christ is NOT the manner in which sinners are saved!

    Gary

    Luther, Baptists, and Evangelicals

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