In a thought-provoking discussion, Bob and Mike delve into the purpose and possible pitfalls of the believer’s prayer. They debunk the myth that reciting specific words can bring salvation, emphasizing instead the power of genuine belief in Jesus Christ. Discover why they advocate for a more open and ongoing conversation about faith, one that doesn’t rely on transactional practices borrowed from sales tactics.
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The following is a listener-supported ministry from the Grace Evangelical Society.
SPEAKER 02 :
Our website is faithalone.org. You can learn many things about the Grace Evangelical Society there, and we hope that you will sign up for our blog. Sign up to receive them, listen to them, and like them. That’s faithalone.org. Now, with today’s question and answer discussion, here are Bob Wilkin and Mike Lee.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right, we have a question here from John today, and he knows that we don’t advocate the sinner’s prayer when evangelizing, but he’s asking, well, what about the believer’s prayer?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, that’s a good question, and I appreciate the question, John. I’m not sure exactly what John means by the believer’s prayer, but let me explain what I think it is. First of all, let’s hit the first part. He talks about the sinner’s prayer, right? So lots of evangelistic booklets, tracts, have a prayer at the end, and they say, if this expresses the desire of your heart, please pray this prayer. Lots of evangelists have used that.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah. Sometimes they’ll even just say, would you like to receive Christ? Let’s go through this prayer.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right. So that’s done in lots of different ways with a large group, one on one, in written form, lots of things. They’re trying to get somebody to pray some prayer. And it’s called the sinner’s prayer because almost all these prayers, part of it is, I admit I’m a sinner and I’m separated from you, which is wrong, by the way. We are sinners, but our sins don’t separate us from God because the blood of Christ, the Lamb of God, takes away the sin of the world, John 129, so that we lack God’s life, but not because we’re sinners. We lack God’s life because we don’t believe in Christ. And if we do believe in him, then we have the life of God, we have everlasting life. So the sinner’s prayer is not biblical. We don’t find any place in the Gospel of John or anywhere where anyone’s told, pray this prayer and you’ll be born again, right? Or to use the language you were talking about, pray this prayer and you’ll receive Christ or whatever. That’s just some man-made thing that does much more harm than good, right? Right.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, it confuses people because instead of looking to the promise, they start, well, because I said this prayer, that’s why I have everlasting life.
SPEAKER 03 :
I can give you an example. In my own life, I invited Jesus into my heart hundreds of times before I was born again. And I remember I was teaching at Woodcrest College. It used to be called Dallas Bible College out in East Texas. And I had a missionary young man in my class, and he was about 20. And he said about the age of eight, he first prayed to receive Christ. He first prayed the prayer when he was at a camp. And he did it again and again and again. And like me, by the time he was about 16, he had prayed hundreds of times and he never gained assurance. And then finally, he was at another camp and someone said, It’s just a matter of believing in Jesus, and it clicked for him. And he stopped, you know, asking him in, and he stopped praying this prayer, whatever. And that’s the key we need to believe. Now, what is the believer’s prayer? Well, I have known people who say something like this. They’ll say, Jesus died on the cross for your sins, and he rose from the dead, and he said, the one who believes in me has everlasting life, and if you believe in him, you have everlasting life. And then they might say something like, do you believe this? Or they might just cut right to it and say, would you like to thank him? That he died for you. Thank him that he’s given you the free gift of eternal life. Or that’s kind of presumptuous, though, because if you don’t know yet if they believed, how can you have them thank him for giving me eternal life when you don’t know? So typically it’s used after the person affirms, yes, I believe. Right. But I think the purpose of people doing that is sometimes a bit confused, because I think sometimes the evangelist wants them to pray to kind of lock it in. You know what I mean, Mike? Right, yeah. There’s no locking it in. Either you believe or you don’t believe. Yeah. So if what you’re saying is, hey, let me hug you. You’re my brother in Christ. That’s terrific. I’m so glad. Why don’t we just pray right now and thank God? That’d be one thing. Yeah. And the evangelist can pray the prayer, right? He doesn’t have to have the other person pray the prayer. If the whole point is simply to thank God for this, either one can do that, right? Right. But if the purpose of it is kind of like the sinner’s prayer, but it’s kind of a sneakier way to do it, then you’re doing it this way. And, John, I wouldn’t be comfortable with the believer’s prayer saying, Mainly because I think that’s jumping the gun. Part of follow up, it seems to me, is we want to get someone in a local assembly. We want to get them in a local church. Maybe I shouldn’t say part of follow up. The main goal of follow up. should be to get somebody in a local church. So after they come to faith in Christ and they know they have everlasting life, well, then we would talk to them about how we grow and how we mature in the faith. But I should add to John’s question that Zane Hodges used to say, and I think he’s probably right here—this matches with my experience— that he found it’s not really productive to ask a person, do you believe this? After you explain the one who believes in Jesus has everlasting life, they’ll never perish, they’ll never hunger, they’ll never thirst, they’ll never die. that it’s best to maybe ask them if they have any questions or whatever, and then end the conversation for that day and leave it for another day to talk to them further. Now, if the person does believe, often they will say to them, fantastic, I get it, I believe, right? And if that happens, that’s great.
SPEAKER 02 :
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SPEAKER 03 :
But what Zane found, especially working with Hispanics, which a lot of his ministry was among Hispanics, they so wanted to please him that if he said, do you believe this? They’d say yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, not getting an honest answer. You really want them to tell you what they believe, but you don’t want to force them to just tell you what you want to hear.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, exactly. I remember we had an evangelist at Victor Street Bible Chapel, and we brought in 20 or 30 family and friends that were Mexican-Americans, and 12 of them checked their card that they had prayed the prayer that the evangelist had given. And when Zane and Lewis followed them up, they found none of those people understood what they were doing. But they all wanted to be pleasing to the evangelist, right? And since the check was a way for the evangelist to say I was successful, they put the check there. And that’s my experience as well. So I don’t like asking people, do you believe this? I think they’ll tell you when they believe. Also, it keeps the door open for further conversation. Besides, what we want them to understand is the issue is simply believing, right? Right. We don’t want to give any impression that they have to verbalize that they believe in order to be born again.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right. Whether it’s saying a prayer, walking an aisle, raising a hand.
SPEAKER 03 :
Or just telling me. Right. You don’t have to tell me if you believe you’re born again. And so I think it’s best to do that, and it keeps the door open. It’s kind of like this. If I was talking to you, let’s say, and we were talking politics, and I was talking about why, let’s say, I think Pete Hegseth would be a good secretary of defense, which he ended up being confirmed, and you didn’t agree. Well, if we talked about it, I’d give you some reasonable things. You might say why you disagree. I wouldn’t ask you if I persuaded you. Mm-hmm. I would leave the door open, and if we talked another time, I might say, hey, have you thought about that some more or whatever, especially if it was important to me. And whatever the topic is, if you just discuss it and talk about the fact that what you’re looking for here is someone to be persuaded. You’re not looking for them to pray a prayer, to walk an aisle, to raise their hand, to put a check on the card, or even to tell me you’ve believed. None of that. Now, the telling me you believed is good for baptism. Down the road, I can say, okay, if I know you believe, part of follow-up is you’re plugging into a local church and you’re getting baptized, hopefully.
SPEAKER 01 :
It sounds like you want to create an environment where they feel open to tell you. Also, if they don’t believe, I’d like to know why you don’t believe so we can discuss it further. But you don’t want to force them into something where they feel uncomfortable and they have to tell you something just to please you. But you want them to have an honest, open conversation with you on this.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and my experience has been, and I’m sure yours has too, that oftentimes people who don’t believe are not shy to tell you why they don’t believe, right? And that can lead to some discussion. But I think we shouldn’t be afraid to leave the discussion open-ended. In other words, if we’re talking with somebody and we’ve been talking for 10 or 15 minutes and the person needs to go, fine. Or you need to go, fine. Don’t feel like you’ve got to wrap up the conversation saying, As long as you’re getting the message out there that if they believe in Jesus, they have everlasting life, which you can get that across in the first 20 seconds. Right. Well, then anything above and beyond that is laying the foundation for them understanding why that’s true.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, it seems like a lot of these things come from almost like sales practices that people have taken. Like, you’ve got to close the deal. I remember an early evangelism book I read was like, well, you haven’t finished your presentation until you give them the opportunity to receive Christ by saying a prayer or something. In a sense, it’s almost like a sales. You’ve got to close the deal. Give them an opportunity to close the deal.
SPEAKER 03 :
You’re exactly right. I remember that Bill Bright said that about the four spiritual laws that, you know, he would share with students and things. And he would write down on a napkin what he was sharing. And finally, someone told him, you need to make this transferable so other people can do the same thing. And so he prayed about it and came up with the four spiritual laws, which worked. When I went on staff, I kind of thought the four laws were inspired, you know? I mean, I learned when I was getting my staff interview that, no, no, Crusade doesn’t claim that the four laws are inspired, but we do think they were given by God. So it’s like, wait a minute, how can it be not inspired, but yet God told Dr. Bright what to write? So it was kind of funny in that regard. But yeah, a lot of people have this idea that you need to pray some prayer. You need to nail it down. I remember that’s why Bill Bright said he put in the part about the closing prayer. And I remember talking to one of the people with Crusade who had the doctorate. an earned doctorate in theology. And he told me, he said, before Bill shared with me about the four laws, I would evangelize people, but there was no close. I didn’t have any way of closing the deal. But he said he gave us a beautiful way to close the deal. I agree with you. We’re not told to close the deal. This isn’t a sales job. We’re trying to persuade people, but we’re giving it away. We’re not selling it. And so as we share the message with them, If they’re open, the conversation will continue like it did with the woman at the well in John 4.
SPEAKER 01 :
You’re telling people to evangelize the way Jesus evangelized. Yeah. All right. That was a great discussion. And thank you, John, for this question. And remember, keep grace in focus.
SPEAKER 02 :
We invite you to check out our Monday, Wednesday and Friday five minute YouTube videos at YouTube Grace Evangelical Society. You will love the content and learn a lot. There are a lot of costs involved in staying on the air. That’s why we so much appreciate our financial partners. If you’d like to learn how to become one, you can find out more by going to faithalone.org. On our next episode, can believers experience God’s wrath? Please join us for that. And until then, let’s keep grace in focus.
SPEAKER 01 :
The preceding has been a listener supported ministry from the Grace Evangelical Society.
