Do You Believe Jesus Is the Son of God?

A yes to the question Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God? is true, it is necessary, and it is not the whole of the gospel that saves today. Those three things are all in Scripture, and an evangelist who holds the first two and treats a yes as the whole gospel has counted something the question never asked.

A preacher told me of a street evangelist in Florida who preached to cars stopped at a red light. He asked the drivers whether they believed that Jesus is the Son of God. When one said yes, he told the preacher, "Got another one."

That is the report as it reached me, and this study rests on the question and not on the man. The report gives us the question and the count. It does not give us the evangelist's whole message, or what any driver believed. So nothing below is said about him, and nothing is said about the drivers. The subject is the question: what a yes to it shows, and what it does not.

The question is Scripture, and the kingdom required its answer

Start with the words, because the evangelist's question is not his own. It is Scripture, nearly word for word, and it is written to a particular people. John's first epistle is written inside Israel's kingdom program, to the believing remnant, and not to the Body of Christ. In plain terms, the kingdom program is God's dealing with Israel, the nation promised a king and a kingdom; the remnant is the believing part of that nation; and the Body of Christ is the believers God is calling in this present age through the gospel Paul preached. Kingdom Salvation: The Conditions, the Covenant, and the Coming King sets out that program, and what is quoted in this section belongs to it. In that setting John asks:

"Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" (1 John 5:5 KJV)

The question this verse answers is what marks the man who overcomes in the kingdom program. The answer is a confession of who Jesus is. The same answer runs through John's Gospel, which says why it was written:

"But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name." (John 20:31 KJV)

The same answer is in the Lord's own words to Nicodemus, where the one who does not believe is condemned "because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God" (John 3:18). Martha gives it when the Lord asks her "Believest thou this?" and she says "Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world" (John 11:26–27). Peter gives it in Matthew, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16), and the eunuch in Acts, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God" (Acts 8:37).

John's first epistle states the same confession in more than one place: "Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God" (1 John 4:15), and "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God" (1 John 5:1). Justin Johnson reads 1 John 4:15 as required to enter the kingdom with God in Israel's prophecy program. The letter also tests the Spirit by a confession about the flesh: "Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God" (1 John 4:2), and the second letter calls those who deny it "a deceiver and an antichrist" (2 John 7). The kingdom's confession is the Son of God come in the flesh, as the article linked above sets out. The evangelist's question asks about the Son of God. It does not ask whether Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.

So the evangelist is asking the question the kingdom asked, and a man who answers it truthfully has said something true. Nothing in this study takes that back. Justin Johnson of Grace Ambassadors teaches in his article When Believing in Jesus Can't Save You that a man who does not know who Jesus is cannot be saved by him: "If you don't know that Jesus was Christ, the Son of God, then he cannot save you." Michael Hammond of Out of Tradition Into Truth says it from the other side: a man cannot knowingly deny that Jesus is the Son of God and still claim to believe Paul's gospel. That is about a man who denies the Son, not a believer who falters, which Rightly Dividing Denying Christ takes up separately. The Son's identity is necessary.

Belief that Jesus is the Son of God was one condition in the kingdom's package, which also asked repentance, baptism and endurance to the end. The article linked above sets all of them out, and this study takes the one the question tests. Johnson's article does not stop at identity. It goes on to ask what Jesus did and whether the work was finished: "If you don't know who Jesus is, what he did, or fail to trust his finished work, then believing in Jesus cannot save you."

The question is whether it is enough.

In Peter's sermons the death was Israel's act and the resurrection was God's

What was Israel told to believe about the cross? Read the sermons in the order Acts gives them, and one shape comes up in the ones quoted here. The death is put on one side and the resurrection on the other.

"Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it." (Acts 2:23–24 KJV)

Ye have crucified. God hath raised. Peter says it again at the temple, "And killed the Prince of life, whom God hath raised from the dead" (Acts 3:15). He says it before the council, "whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead" (Acts 4:10), and again, "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree" (Acts 5:30). He says it to Cornelius, "whom they slew and hanged on a tree: Him God raised up the third day" (Acts 10:39–40). In each of these the death is what men did and the resurrection is what God did. Peter also says that God had shown by the prophets that Christ should suffer, and had so fulfilled it (Acts 3:18), so the sermons place the death within God's plan. They do not say it was for their sins. Until Jerusalem Says It — The House Left Desolate and the Witness They Refused traces the charge Peter presses at Pentecost, at the temple and before the council.

Then comes what Peter asks of them. The crowd asks what they should do, and the answer is "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins" (Acts 2:38). At the temple, of the lame man made whole, Peter says "his name through faith in his name hath made this man strong" (Acts 3:16), and the call is "Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out" (Acts 3:19). Before the council it is that God has exalted him "to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins" (Acts 5:31). The first time he says believeth in him in Acts is to Cornelius: "through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins" (Acts 10:43), and the forgiveness there comes through his name.

A word search of Acts 1 through 12 finds none of these: for our sins, died for, his blood, atonement, propitiation, redeem. The one place those chapters speak of Christ's blood at all is the council's charge that the apostles "intend to bring this man's blood upon us" (Acts 5:28). The first time Acts speaks of the church purchased with his own blood is Paul, in Acts 20:28. Luke gives the sermons as summaries, and a word search of a summary cannot say what was left out. Philip "began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus" (Acts 8:35), and the passage Luke quotes is "He was led as a sheep to the slaughter" (Acts 8:32); the page does not say what Philip said next. The search shows which words are missing from what Luke recorded, and that is all it shows.

Scripture also records what the Twelve understood about the cross before it happened. The Lord had told them what was coming: he would go up to Jerusalem, be delivered to the Gentiles, be mocked and scourged and put to death, and rise again the third day (Luke 18:31–33). They had not taken it in:

"And they understood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken." (Luke 18:34 KJV)

Peter shows what that looked like. In Matthew 16 he makes the true confession, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16). When the Lord begins to say he "must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed" (Matthew 16:21), Peter takes him aside: "Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee" (Matthew 16:22). Peter held the Son's identity and refused the Lord's word about the cross within six verses. Justin Johnson draws the lesson from that day: "believing in the name of Christ is different than trusting his finished work on the cross on our behalf." Michael Hammond makes the same point of Peter: he could confess the Christ and still not understand the death and resurrection. The text bears it out.

Even after the resurrection, "as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead" (John 20:9). Then, in Luke's words, "opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures" (Luke 24:45), and what he opened was this: "Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem" (Luke 24:46–47). That is the message Acts shows them preaching: the suffering and the rising as what the prophets wrote, and repentance and remission of sins in his name.

Justin Johnson says of Pentecost itself: "Peter did not preach the cross as a means of salvation, but as a murder indictment against the men of Judea and Israel." He adds that what the Lord opened to the apostles in Luke 24 is not to be equated with the meaning of the cross given to Paul. None of this says the cross was absent from any program. When Did Paul's Gospel Begin? draws the distinction: the cross is the basis for every dispensation, and what was revealed about it is a separate matter.

The cross was in the Lord's words and in the prophets, and the record still does not show it preached to Israel as the message to believe

An objection comes here, and it is a fair one: the Lord himself spoke of his death as given for others. It needs the verses. He said "the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28). At the table he said "this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins" (Matthew 26:28). John called him "the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29), and the Lord said "the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep" (John 10:11). None of it was foreign to Israel's Scriptures. After the resurrection the Lord asked, "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?" and then "beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:26–27).

So the cross stands in the Lord's own words and in Israel's Scriptures. What the record does not show is the apostles and the believing remnant preaching it to Israel as the thing to believe. They had heard it and "understood none of these things" (Luke 18:34), and what Acts records them preaching is what the sections above set out: ye crucified, God raised, repent, and remission in his name.

The epistles to the remnant were written after the cross and after the days when the Twelve understood none of these things, and they do speak of the blood: "the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin" (1 John 1:7), and "he is the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 2:2). Read 1 John 1:7 with the verses that follow it: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:8–9). That is a walk to be kept and a forgiveness sought again as sin comes, written to "you that believe on the name of the Son of God" (1 John 5:13). It is the remnant continuing to appeal to the blood. It is not the gospel that saves today, once for all, and Does the Body of Christ Need an Advocate? Why a Settled Standing Needs No Pleader sets out that frame and why 1 John 2:1–2 belongs in it.

So the blood stands in the Lord's words, in Israel's Scriptures and in the epistles to the remnant. What the record does not show is the cross preached to Israel as the thing to believe, and that is the only claim made here.

Paul's gospel says who Christ is and what he did for our sins

Paul starts from the same death and resurrection and says what they mean. He says what he preached, and so what belief is belief in:

"Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:" (1 Corinthians 15:1–4 KJV)

The question this passage answers is what is the gospel by which the Corinthians are saved? The answer is three events, and what the death was for: "Christ died for our sins." Where Peter said ye crucified, Paul says for our sins. The same death carries a different meaning in the message, and the message is what is believed.

The rest of Paul keeps the cross at the center. "For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1:18). "For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2). "In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins" (Ephesians 1:7), and the proof of love is that "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). He states the thing believed in one short line: "if we believe that Jesus died and rose again" (1 Thessalonians 4:14). He asks how anyone will believe without hearing, "how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?" (Romans 10:14), and he has already said what his preaching is: the preaching of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:18). The Blood of Christ and the Preaching of the Cross: Why Paul Could Not Preach a Bloodless or Generic Death traces what that death accomplished.

The jailer at Philippi asks a question like the one Peter's hearers asked, and is given a different answer.

"And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house. And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house." (Acts 16:30–32 KJV)

In Acts 2:37 the crowd asks what they should do, and in Acts 16:30 the jailer asks what he must do to be saved. Peter answers with repentance and baptism, and Paul and Silas answer with belief. Verse 31 is the command, and verse 32 says they gave him "the word of the Lord". The text does not repeat what they said. What the jailer was told in verse 32 is not on the page, and this article does not put words there. Paul's own use of the words does say what believing on him is: "if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead" (Romans 4:24), on the one "that justifieth the ungodly" (Romans 4:5). The command in verse 31 is the command for this present age, and Is Confessing Christ with Your Mouth Necessary? shows that it asks for faith and no performance. That article also takes up Romans 10:9–10, where confessing the Lord Jesus stands beside believing that God raised him from the dead, in its setting in Romans 9–11.

None of this removes who Jesus is from Paul's preaching. At Thessalonica he reasoned out of the Scriptures, "Opening and alleging, that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead; and that this Jesus, whom I preach unto you, is Christ" (Acts 17:3). Both are in the one sentence, the work and the person. Paul opens Romans the same way: he was "separated unto the gospel of God" (Romans 1:1), and that gospel is "Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh" (Romans 1:3). The flesh is in Paul's teaching too, and a section below takes it up. Under grace the Son's identity is not dropped, and it is not a step before the gospel. It is in the gospel, joined to what Christ did.

The Son's identity is necessary because of what the sacrifice had to be

Why is the identity necessary, and not an optional extra? Because of what the sacrifice required. The text lays the chain out link by link, and each link is a verse.

Sin came in by one man: "as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Romans 5:12), and "by one man's disobedience many were made sinners" (Romans 5:19). That is true of all men. Christ was not born as men are born, and Luke says why:

"And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." (Luke 1:35 KJV)

The word therefore joins the two halves of the verse. The conception by the Holy Ghost is the reason he is holy and the reason he is called the Son of God. Justin Johnson gives both grounds in a teaching on Ephesians: "He wasn't born in Adam, which is why he had to be virgin born. He was the Son of God. And so he was sinless." This is the point of the virgin birth. It is what keeps the sacrifice from being the death of one more child of Adam.

Paul says plainly what that made him. "For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him" (2 Corinthians 5:21). God sent "his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin" (Romans 8:3). Those two verses are enough by themselves, and a reader who stopped here would not be wrong.

Two epistles written to Israel's believing remnant describe the same sacrifice. Hebrews and 1 Peter are not addressed to the Body of Christ, and nothing in the argument rests on them, but they confirm what Paul says. Christ was "holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners", so that he needed no sacrifice "first for his own sins" (Hebrews 7:26–27), and he "offered himself without spot to God" (Hebrews 9:14). Peter tells the scattered believers of that remnant that they were redeemed "with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot" (1 Peter 1:19).

Put the chain together. A man who sins has sin of his own to answer for, and has nothing to offer for another's. If Jesus were not the Son of God, conceived of the Holy Ghost and without sin, his death would be the death of a sinner like every other, and Christ died for our sins would not be true of him. That is why the identity matters, and why a man cannot knowingly deny the Son and still claim to believe Paul's gospel. The identity is the ground the sacrifice stands on. Paul's gospel holds both, the Son and what the Son did, and a yes to the question of the Son speaks only to who he is.

Paul names the Son come in the flesh, and 1 Timothy 3:16 is about Christ

John's test for the remnant was that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh (1 John 4:2). Paul names the flesh as well, in Romans 1:3 and Romans 8:3, quoted above. To Timothy he writes the plainest line of all, and it needs its setting. Verse 15 is about conduct, "how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God". Then:

"And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory." (1 Timothy 3:16 KJV)

The question this verse answers is what is the mystery that godliness rests on? Paul's answer opens in the present, great is the mystery, and then every clause is past: was manifest, justified, seen, preached, believed on, received up.

Some who hold the virgin birth and the deity of Christ read the verse otherwise. Cornelius Stam holds both and still says the subject is godliness as lived by the church, partly because "if we make this verse apply to the Lord Jesus Christ the order does not hold good": Christ was preached to the Gentiles and believed on in the world after he was received up. That assumes the six clauses are an order, and the verse does not say they are. Grant the order for the sake of argument and the church fares no better: when was the church received up into glory, or believed on in the world? The clauses fit the church in no order at all.

The text answers that reading first by its tense. On Stam's reading the manifestation is going on now, in the church, and a verse about it would say is. This verse says was, and all six clauses are past. Stam's own wording shows the strain: in godliness, he writes, "God is manifested in the flesh" and the church "will be received up into glory," the first clause moved into the present and the last into the future, where the verse has them both in the past. The clauses about the Gentiles and the world agree. The church is not what is preached unto the Gentiles or believed on in the world, for "we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord" (2 Corinthians 4:5), and Paul puts the believer's glory still ahead: "When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory" (Colossians 3:4).

So the verse names the Son as the one who was manifest in the flesh, and Paul sets that in one line with his being justified, preached, believed on and received up. The confession that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is in Paul's teaching as it is in John's. The King James reads God, and Preserved, Not Re-Inspired: Why We Hold the King James shows what the modern text does to that word. Justin Johnson makes the same case from the same text, on the tense and on the order, in his lesson on 1 Timothy 3 and in his article God Manifest in the Flesh Is Not You.

The devils make the same confession

This article says devils, because that is the King James word, and there is a reason for it. The English word demon comes from a Greek word that did not mean only an evil spirit. Hesiod, the poet of Greek myth, says the men of the golden age became after death "pure spirits dwelling on the earth," "kindly, delivering from harm, and guardians of mortal men" (Works and Days 121–126, tr. Evelyn-White). Socrates, on trial in Athens, spoke of something divine that came to him: "it is a sort of voice that comes to me, and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward," and he said of its opposition, "I think this opposition is a very good thing" (Plato, Apology 31d). Plato has Diotima place the whole class of such beings between gods and men: "A great spirit, Socrates: for the whole of the spiritual is between divine and mortal," "interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men" (Plato, Symposium 202e). The Greek lexicon of Liddell and Scott lists those golden-age guardians, "the good or evil genius of a family or person," and "spiritual or semi-divine being inferior to the Gods," with "evil spirit" as one use among them, and Thayer gives the word in Greek writers as "an inferior deity, whether good or bad," noting that the Greeks distinguished the good ones from the bad.

The King James does not leave the reader that choice. It says devils, in the Gospels and of what idols are sacrificed to: "They sacrificed unto devils, not to God" (Deuteronomy 32:17), and "the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God" (1 Corinthians 10:20). The Greeks had a word for a spirit who might be good or bad. No one has heard of a good devil.

If a true confession of the Son were what divides saved from unsaved, the devils would stand on the saved side, and they do not. Three Gospel records give their confession.

"And devils also came out of many, crying out, and saying, Thou art Christ the Son of God. And he rebuking them suffered them not to speak: for they knew that he was Christ." (Luke 4:41 KJV)

In the country of the Gergesenes, the two possessed with devils cried out "What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?" (Matthew 8:29). Mark says it of the unclean spirits: "Thou art the Son of God" (Mark 3:11). In Luke the Lord silenced the confession.

Justin Johnson pairs Luke 4:41 with James 2:19 to show that believing who Jesus is does not save. Luke is the verse about the Son. James's verse is about one God: "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble" (James 2:19). James is writing to the twelve tribes (James 1:1).

Here is the limit of the argument. The devils are lost for a different reason, and they speak of a time of torment ahead of them: they ask whether he has come "to torment us before the time" (Matthew 8:29). Hebrews, written to the remnant and so confirming here and not the ground, adds that "he took not on him the nature of angels" (Hebrews 2:16). So their confession does not show what saves a man. It shows something narrower and still decisive: a true confession of the Son is not what separates the saved from the lost. A devil makes it and is not saved by it. What saves a man is what Paul preached, the cross heard and believed.

What he did is the only means, and nothing is added to it

Paul does not offer the cross as one road among several. He says it is how a man is justified, and he refuses every other way in.

The question Galatians 2:16 answers is by what is a man justified? The answer comes with its own exclusion built in:

"Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified." (Galatians 2:16 KJV)

Then Paul asks what follows if there were another way: "I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain" (Galatians 2:21). If anything else could bring righteousness, his death was for nothing. So the death is not one means among others. It is the means, and Paul says that to set another way beside it would frustrate the grace of God.

He says the same in Romans. We are "justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 3:24), and faith is counted for righteousness to the man who "worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly" (Romans 4:5). Nothing is placed beside the redemption, and no work of the man is placed beside the faith.

This is why calling him Savior does not settle it. The word says who he is. Paul says what he did, and that nothing stands beside it.

The question cannot tell the saved from the unsaved

Now return to the red light. A driver is asked whether he believes that Jesus is the Son of God, and he says yes. Who says yes?

A man who has believed Paul's gospel for years says yes. He believes the Son is who Scripture says he is, and that is part of the gospel he believes. A kingdom believer under the earlier program said yes, as Martha did. A devil made the same confession, and the Lord silenced it. The same answer comes from all three, so the answer shows nothing about which of the three the man is.

That is the whole difficulty, and it lies in the question and not in the driver. The question collects a confession of who Jesus is. It does not collect belief in what Christ did for our sins, which is the gospel that saves today (1 Corinthians 15:1–4). So counting a yes as a convert counts something the question never gathered. The driver may have believed Paul's gospel long before that light turned red. He answered the question he was asked.

Nothing in this makes the question wrong to ask. It is the kingdom's question, and it is Scripture. Justin Johnson says of the question Who do you say Jesus is? that "It remains a good question to ask before you explain what Jesus did according to the mystery." He also says that "The only way you and I can determine if someone's saved is if they tell us the gospel plainly." The question is a place to start, and it does not tell us where a man stands. What it cannot be is the whole of what is said to a man, because the gospel that saves today is the cross preached and believed, and Paul says the cross is the thing that must be preached and heard.

What to say to the man at the light

Say the whole message. Tell him who Jesus is, because that is necessary, and the sacrifice stands on it. Then tell him what Christ did: "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Tell him this is what saves, and ask him whether he believes it.

And check yourself by the same verses. A reader who has said yes to the question of the Son all his life, or who has believed all his life that Jesus is the Savior, has said something true. But a church can bear the name of Christ, say that he is the Savior, and still teach a man to rest on more than his work. Rome's Council of Trent pronounced anathema on anyone who says "that justifying faith is nothing else but confidence in the divine mercy which remits sins for Christ's sake" (Session VI, Canon XII), and on anyone who says "that baptism is free, that is, not necessary unto salvation" (Session VII, Canon V). Transformed as the Ministers of Righteousness: The Disguise Is Perfect and the Test Is Doctrine sets out how large a share of the world's professing Christians belong to communions that do not teach justification by faith alone. Calling him Savior is not the same as resting everything on what he did.

So ask where your trust sits. Is it on his death, on his blood shed as the full payment for your sins, on his burial and resurrection, and on God's acceptance of that and nothing else? Or is it on that and something beside it: your baptism, your church, your record, your sincerity? Paul leaves no room for the second answer. We are "justified by his blood" (Romans 5:9). God "hath made us accepted in the beloved" (Ephesians 1:6), and the next verse says it is "through his blood" (Ephesians 1:7). And "by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9). God accepts the blood of his Son, and he accepts nothing added to it.

Put the rest of the gospel to your own heart: do you believe that Christ died for your sins, shed his blood as the full payment, was buried, and rose again, and are you trusting that and nothing else? If you are, you have believed the gospel that saves, and the Son you confess is the Son who did it. If you have not, believe it now, and when you speak to another man about Christ, do not stop at who he is.