The Trap

     I said the prayer of salvation for the first time as a child, I was about 5 years old at that time and I didn't really understand it at all. I had no clue what it meant to be saved and the kind of life a saved person should live. I had no idea that what I was really saying was 'Lord let me serve you with a loving heart." No one explained to me what it meant to be a Christian other than you believe in God and that Jesus was His son who died for your sins. I didn't grow up in a church, but there was one I attended sometimes by my house with friends, and occasionally I would go with one of my grandma's on Sundays to the church where I first said the prayer of salvation. This lack of instruction about faith left me really vulnerable to the ways of the world, without a genuine foundation or knowledge of who God was most of what I knew bout Him came from the world. This quickly left me very confused, especially after I began suffering from anxiety and depression around the age of 12. Not long after that I began drinking and smoking cigarettes, in a stupid and desperate attempt at coping.
    Then in my junior year of high school I got really sick and spent most of the year at home in bed, at the doctors, or in the hospital. It was during this time that I started looking at where I was heading and not being satisfied with myself or my choices, but I wouldn't actually make a change then, instead I continued on that path not believing I could change it. A year later I decided what was missing in my life was a relationship with God after hearing a fiery sermon given by an old timey Reverend at the church my mom was making us go to at the time. Hearing his sermon on sin and it's consequences, I knew I needed to change my life. So in May 2006 I gave my life to God a second time, but I really didn't have an idea of what it meant still. I knew what I thought it meant, but I've realized since then I was wrong, it was a very shallow understanding of things, and I now that I have learned better I see a lot of people falling into this same trap that I did.
      If I am really honest, at that time in my life when I said the prayer of salvation it was less because I really wanted a relationship with God, and more because I was afraid of going to hell. And the fact that the boy I liked at that time also said he was a Christian, helped to influence this decision. So I said the prayer, but I still had no one guiding me, no one helping me to understand what it meant to be Christian, no one explaining to me what repentance really was, or what it meant to walk in His ways, despite spending every Sunday and Wednesday at church. I ended up in a lifestyle of working hard all week, getting drunk at party's every weekend, then confessing my sins on Sunday, without any desire or reason to change. I still told more lies than I could keep straight, and was callous and cold with the people around me. I claimed to love God, to be a Christian, to be saved, but I was really a hypocrite and I couldn't see it. I had said the prayer and that was all that mattered, I was going to heaven no matter what I did, or so I thought.
      I didn't know I had been deceived, I didn't know that I was one of the ones who would hear "Depart me from you workers of inequity" because of the life I was living then. I didn't know that repentance meant change, meant turning from sin not just saying I'm sorry. I didn't know these things and I didn't start to truly understand God, truly love Him, and truly start to serve Him until shortly before I got married. Something changed in me at that time as I began to want more than the shallow relationship I had. I started to really seek God for the first since I was child. Slowly God went from something I said was a priority and didn't actually give much thought too, to something I thought about and someone I talked to increasingly. As this changed occurred I started to understand love, and once I did that, I began to understand who God is. I started to change then and put aside things that took away from Him, I started to realize that loving God meant pleasing God.
       I wanted to share this because week after week in churches everywhere we are having children, teens, and adults say the prayer of salvation without really teaching them what it means. They become just another tally mark and the congregation cheers for another one saved, but then we lose them because, from experience, we don't help them to understand the gospel. We aren't teaching them about agape love, or the meaning of repentance, we aren't focusing on the cross or sacrifice of sins. And we aren't helping them to understand that love is service to God and each other. Without understanding those important concepts it's easy to live as a Sunday Christian and think you are saved. It's easy to live in this trap and think you are okay when in reality you are still sick. We need to do more to reach people, teach people, serve people, and love them, because its through love and learning His word that God becomes real to us, that we form a relationship with Him and start to recognize His presence in our lives. We need to do more to teach our spiritually new Christians about what it really means to say the prayer of salvation, what it really means to repent, and that being a Christian isn't a religion, it's a lifestyle, it's a life of dying to oneself and  representing Christ!
     
1 John 4:16
And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.

Romans 6:20-23
20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. 22 But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.