If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. – Romans 10:9
This is wonderfully simple!
We are sometimes confused about what it takes to be “saved.” We may believe we have to please God, that we have to stop doing wrong, or that if we do enough good things then God will accept us. We think that God holds up a scale, and if the good outweighs the bad then He lets us into heaven. If we go to church, don’t do anything really bad, and perform the right rituals then the balance will tip in our favor.
But God is not impressed with our good deeds. He is holy, the maker of the universe, and everything He does is good. How do we compare to that? The problem is not what we do or don’t do, it is who we are. We are sinful and broken, and even our best efforts look unclean next to God’s righteousness.
Even so, He loves us and He has made a simple way for us to get close to Him—so close we can be called His family. He became one of us and took away our sinfulness with His death and resurrection. He changes who we are and transforms us into His children. We could never do that ourselves, no matter how many “good deeds” we do or how hard we might try.
All that God wants is for us to recognize what He has done. We do that through simple faith. Inwardly we believe that Jesus has been raised from the dead, and outwardly we declare that belief and proclaim Him as Lord. We don’t have to worry about whether our good outweighs our bad, whether we have said perfect prayers or been religious enough. All we need is humble faith.
God transforms us. We are saved only by His grace, not anything that we can bring about ourselves. The changes God makes in us allows us to become who He created us to be. We go from not even being capable of doing anything good, to being filled with His love and constantly wanting to do good. All we have to do is believe Him!