What must I do to be saved?

This is the most important question anybody can ever ask.

The fact is that there will come a time when the circumstances of your present earthly existence cease to be – your whole life as you know it now, with its possessions, family and friends, job maybe and holidays perhaps, its joys and its worries – and you stand before God for judgement (Hebrews 9:27). Suddenly, everything which at the moment seems to be so important will become not important at all.

The critical thing is whether, when you stand before God you do so as a saved person or as an unsaved one, because this will determine where you spend eternity. Don’t be misled – everybody will spend eternity conscious somewhere, either in heaven or in the lake of fire.

This question is recorded in the Bible, asked by a Roman jailor at Philippi who had just seen the Apostle Paul and his companion Silas miraculously released from the prison for which he was responsible (Acts 16:30), so it is worth paying attention to the answer it received.

Before we look at that answer, though, notice something about the question – it assumes that there is something to be ‘done’ by a person to secure their salvation. Perhaps you think this way too, or at least assume this to be the case, that if you do enough ‘good things’, or maybe start doing the right ‘good things’, then you can curry favour with God and gain salvation for yourself.

This in fact is not the case, and the answer the jailor received shows this. In answer to his question the jailor was told, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved’ (Acts 16:31). Notice that there is nothing in this reply about ‘doing’ anything. How can that be? you say. Well let’s see.

The problem everyone starts with is not that they do not work hard enough to please God (although in truth many people do not even attempt to please him at all), but rather that the sinful nature with which they were born (inherited from the first man, Adam) separates them from the righteousness of God. If lack of good works was the problem then working harder to please God would be the answer. But lack of good works isn’t our problem; our problem is our lack of righteousness.

So how do you get the required righteousness, if not by doing good deeds? The Bible says that when we believe and trust (have faith) for our salvation in the fact that Jesus took the punishment for our sin which we deserve, and that three days after dying and being buried he was resurrected, then the righteousness of Jesus is imputed (or ‘reckoned’) to us (Romans 4:24). Then, ‘clothed’ in the righteousness of Christ, we are reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:18), and can thereby be in his presence in heaven.

So you see the righteousness we require in order to be saved is available to us as a free gift, and we are not required to ‘do’ anything (Romans 5:18) to get it.

And why did God make it so – because he knows that our problem (our lack of righteousness) is not one which we can solve for ourselves, but which he had to solve for us. We cannot earn righteousness, so we must be offered it as a gift.

Naturally, and as with any offer, everybody has the choice to either accept or reject this gift. The Philippian jailor chose to accept it, as did the rest of his household, so they were all saved that night (Acts 16:34).

Some people nowadays will act likewise, while others will reject or ignore the offer and carry on either trying to please God by their good works or just plain ignoring him.

To return to our question then, there is nothing that we must do to be saved, because Christ has done it all for us.