What must we do?
The answer is simple, yet such a response to our words is infrequent. What would it take for it to become inevitable again?
There is an outcome from all of our words that we would like to think is inevitable.
A result of all our speaking and writing and even the verbally silent aspects of our lives - the way we carry ourselves, our emotions, affections, choices, character, affiliations, and so forth.
From all of these actions, there is a single response we would like to think is inevitable. It is a response of those who would see and hear us, and that response is a question, “What must we do to be saved?”
“Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Men and brethen, what shall we do?’” (Acts 2:37)
This was no reasoned decision, no debating of the facts, no persuading through human measure, no filling out of a card or a simple raising of a hand to acknowledge a choice. No, this was a question of desperation. Men and women under conviction, realizing the state of their souls, their crimes against God, and the complete and total uncleanness of their condition.
If we were to expand their plea it might sound something like this:
“What must we do to be clean? To free ourselves from this burden? To be made right before a holy God? For we see our sins and we cannot escape them, they torment us! What must we do to be saved, set free, delivered?”
Have we known this response to the words we speak and the lives we live?
We see the Apostles operating under a command to, “bear witness of what you have seen and heard,” and further explained, you “will bear witness because you have been with Me.” (Acts 22:15, John 15:27)
And so it was this simple bearing of witness of what they had seen and heard, combined with the outpouring of the Spirit, that led men to exclaim, “What must we do to be saved?”
“Then he [the jailer] called for a light, ran in, and fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. And he brought them out and said, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’” (Acts 16:29-30)
This response certainly cannot be a surprise to us though, for we know that He is God who, “sits above the circle of the earth,” and we are, “like grasshoppers.” We know too that, “All flesh is grass,” and, “the grass withers…when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass.” (Isaiah 40)
Can we not think it inevitable then that men who are confronted by God would respond in such a way, “What must we do to be saved?”
The glory of God causes this. He lays men low. The Spirit of God does this. He reveals sin. The presence of God fills the temple to the point that we cannot move, cannot speak, can barely breathe.
And what of us? What is the response we receive?
Do our words know much of these three; the glory, the Spirit and the presence? Does our life manifest them? Are we those who carry about in our bodies the noticeable fragrance and aroma of Christ? Life unto life for some and death unto death for others? (2 Corinthians 2:16)
I’m afraid many of us must answer no.
We may speak all of the right words until we are blue in the face, but never get such a God-dependent response as, “What must I do to be saved?”
We may attend, read, believe, all of the right things, but never get such a Spirit-reliant response, for it is, “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit.”
Does the devotion of our lives bear witness to the fact that we are unable on our own? That we are completely and utterly reliant on Him? That we have come to the end of ourselves as we’ve realized the people don’t need us or our words and if that’s all they ever get, they will be a people sorely lacking.
Our people need God and they need men and women of God who actually bear witness to the reality of the Spirit of God.
Imagine the glory of God filling the room you are in right now, the manifest presence, His very Spirit. What would happen? And if you happened to have another in the room with you, a person you loved very much, but who did not yet believe, what would happen to them?
We would have to say even just a glimpse, let alone the filling of the room with God’s glory, and both would be overcome, crying out for relief.
“What must we do to be saved?” The answer to the question is a simple one, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household.” (Acts 16:31)
The answer is simple, yet such a response to our words is infrequent. What would it take for it to become inevitable again?
I pray you will join me in taking this question before the Lord, asking Him for an answer with unrelenting persistence. Wait on Him, truly wait, with a posture that declares, “However long it takes, You are worth the wait.” Not unlike the posture instructed by Joel as he declared to the priests, “Come, lie all night in sackcloth.” (Joel 1:13)
Then, perhaps a revival will come.
In love,
Derek