The Phrase “Accepting Christ” – Why I Hate It

I hate phrases like “accepting Christ” or “you have to “accept Christ to be saved”, not because I am anti-Christian but rather the opposite. I am pro-Bible and pro-biblical truth and the Bible does not teach that a person becomes one of God’s children by “accepting” the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is God, God in the flesh. He needs no one to accept Him in order for the salvation of a sinner to occur. Jesus can save a person without their help and in fact, He MUST save them without their help or acceptance or approval or cooperation because the unsaved are spiritually DEAD and in no condition to accept a God whom they don’t know yet. God, by the power of His Spirit and by the Word of God, turns spiritually dead sinners into new creatures in Christ. Also, God can and will use a preacher (evangelist) to preach to the spiritually dead sinner to convict and convert sinners – in conjunction with the Holy Spirit, but that is as far as it goes. The sinner being brought to newness of spiritual life will NEVER be able to say that he or she DID something to “get saved”. Lazarus didn’t do anything to get resurrected from the dead by Jesus Christ and he couldn’t COME to Christ UNTIL AFTER Christ brought him back to life. And so it is with the salvation of a sinner’s soul. You CANNOT come to Christ UNTIL AFTER you become saved, AFTER you are REGENERATED by the Holy Spirit. Don’t kid yourself and think that God saved you because YOU first CAME to Christ. A person wants NOTHING TO DO WITH the REAL Jesus Christ until God FIRST takes out their heart of stone and gives them a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26).
 
Contrary to popular teaching, God is not waiting around for people to accept Him. The Bible clearly and repeatedly states that it is God who:

• calls people to Himself
• draws sinners
• convicts sinners of sin and of their sinfulness
• converts sinners
• adopts sinners into His family
• makes alive
• regenerates spiritually dead sinners
• seeks lost sheep
• revives from the dead
• makes people heirs

It is man who is at God’s mercy, spiritually dead, waiting in blind ignorance for God – if He wills – to be:

• called
• drawn
• convicted
• converted
• adopted
• made alive
• regenerated
• sought out by the Good Shepherd
• revived
• made heirs

If you think God the Father is sitting in Heaven waiting and hoping for you to accept His son as your savior, then you have no clue as to how spiritually lost you really are (dead in sin) and how much you – and the eternal destiny of your soul – are completely and utterly at God’s mercy, and that your salvation from Hell is entirely a matter of God exercising His good pleasure to save – or not save – YOU.
 
Don’t be surprised if this view of God and salvation is strange or at odds with what you may have been taught or heard elsewhere. Scripture does indeed urge us to seek the Lord while He may be found and to call upon Him while He is near. But nowhere are we told that the Lord is at our mercy waiting for rebellious, god-hating SPIRITUALLY DEAD sinners to accept Him.
 

“And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins” [Ephesians 2:1]

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