THE SINNER’S PRAYER — JACK COTTRELL – 2020

     QUESTION:  In my evangelistic efforts I occasionally encounter someone who says something like this:  “I have already said the sinner’s prayer; thus I am saved and I do not need to do anything else.”  How can I respond to this kind of statement?  Does the Bible say anything about a “sinner’s prayer”?

     ANSWER:  The “sinner’s prayer” is often used in conservative Protestantism as the means of bringing a sinner to salvation.  The problem is that the folks who use this method of evangelism are “faith-only” in the sense that they reject the Bible’s teaching that water baptism is the time when God has promised to bestow that salvation.  Paul specifies in Colossians 2:12 that baptism is the time when salvation is given.  Here he says that we Christians were buried with Christ “in baptism, in which” we were also raised up with Him.  This burial and resurrection constitute the spiritual event of dying to sin and being raised to new spiritual life (see verse 13), also known as regeneration.  It is the same salvation experience to which Paul refers in Romans 6:1-4.  So whatever else may be involved in the sinner’s transition from being lost to being saved, it happens in baptism.  (This cannot be some other event also called “baptism,” since Paul specifically says in Ephesians 4:5 that there is only “one baptism” in the Christian’s experience.)

      This was the practically universal and continuous belief of Christendom until the Protestant Reformer, Huldreich Zwingli, introduced a totally new and anti-biblical view of the meaning of baptism in A.D. 1523-1525.  (See my summary of this in chapter two of the book, Baptism and the Remission of Sins, 2^nd edition, 2009, edited by David W. Fletcher and currently published by Hester Publications of Henderson, TN.  This chapter is called “Baptism According to the Reformed Tradition” and is on pp. 39-81.)  Zwingli declared that all teachers since the apostles, up until him, had been wrong to teach that baptism is the event in which sinners receive salvation.  He is the one who rejected this view, and originated the teaching that baptism is just the external sign that a person has already been saved, i.e., that in baptism he is merely demonstrating that fact to other Christians.  Sadly, most Protestants after Zwingli were persuaded to accept some form of his new view, and continue to do so today.

      Thus most (but not all) of Protestant Christendom today believes that a sinner becomes saved at the moment when he or she begins to believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior.  The goal of evangelism is to lead the sinner to that moment of faith; once this has happened, the individual is considered to be fully forgiven and born again.  Sometime in the early part of the twentieth century, it became fairly common in these circles to lead the evangelized individual to repeat “the sinner’s prayer” as the climactic moment of arriving at faith.  Once the prayer has been said, the person is considered to be saved. 

      The details of how this practice originated are somewhat fuzzy.  The Wikipedia article on “The Sinner’s Prayer” says that strong evidence shows that it began to be used as mentioned above, under the influence of Billy Graham and especially as promoted by the Campus Crusade for Christ, led by Bill Bright.  A very helpful source for this data is a doctoral dissertation by Paul Harrison Chitwood, “The Sinner’s Prayer: A Historical and Theological Analysis” (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2001).  A download is available at https://faithsaves.net/the-sinners-prayer/ .

      There is no one “official” version of the sinner’s prayer.  It simply must include the confession that the one praying is a sinner, that he or she is now accepting by faith the salvation provided by the death and resurrection of Jesus, and a prayer that Jesus will now enter his or her heart and bring salvation.  Wikipedia says this was Billy Graham’s version: “Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for your forgiveness.  I believe you died for my sins and rose from the dead.  I turn from my sins.  I want to trust and follow You as my Lord and Savior.  In Your Name.  Amen.”  The Campus Crusade’s version, as included in their “Four Spiritual Laws” tract, was this:  “Lord Jesus, I need You. Thank You for dying on the cross for my sins. I open the door of my life and receive You as my Savior and Lord. Thank You for forgiving my sins and giving me eternal life. Take control of the throne of my life. Make me the kind of person You want me to be.”

      Not all Evangelicals use or even approve of the use of this evangelistic tactic.  They observe that many sinners are led to say this prayer as some kind of one-time magical formula and assume that this all they ever have to do to be saved, often without actually coming to a sincere and lasting faith in their hearts, thus giving a false assurance.  Many also note that there seems to be an absence of any teaching of such a prayer in the New Testament.  Some do think, though, that Romans 10:13 affirms the sinner’s prayer.  Here Paul cites the salvation prayer given first by Joel 2:32, i.e., “Whoever will call on the name of the LORD will be saved.”  I will say more about this verse below.

      In fact, I will now directly address the question of whether there is such a thing as the “sinner’s prayer” in the New Testament.  The answer is:  yes and no.  If one is thinking about such a sinner’s prayer in the above sense, i.e., of an evangelistic technique that omits baptism as the time when a sinner receives salvation (Colossians 2:12), then the answer is NO.  It is perfectly legitimate to lead the sinner to sincerely SAY such a prayer, but it is a demonic falsehood (1 Timothy 4:1) to teach that this is somehow the moment when salvation is given.  However, the answer is YES if one is thinking about leading the sinner to call upon the name of the Lord for salvation in the moments just prior to his or her being immersed into Christ for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.  In fact, there is an instructive and binding Biblical example of this very thing in Acts 22:16.

      What we are doing here, in a sense, is redeeming the concept of the sinner’s prayer by showing how that practice is supposed to take place according to Biblical teaching.  The key example is Paul’s testimony concerning his own conversion as recorded in Acts 22.  Here he recites how the risen Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus while he was still a non-Christian, and how he was sent on into that town and told to wait for a messenger sent by God, who would tell him what to do next.  After three days of fasting and praying (Acts 9:9), the messenger—Ananias—finally came and gave him this instruction about his salvation: “Now why do you delay?  Get up and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on His name” (Acts 22:16).

      In this brief instruction are four verb forms:  get up, get baptized, wash away your sins, and call on His name.  The Greek grammar tells us that only the middle two—“be baptized,” and “wash away your sins”—are in the imperative form, i.e., are in the grammatical form of commands.  It is important to observe the chronological order in which these commands were given. Ananias (God’s spokesman, Acts 9:10-16) obviously did not agree with Zwingli here, nor with any modern Zwinglians, who falsely proclaim the gospel as if Ananias had said, “Wash away your sins, and then be baptized.”  Indeed not!  According to God’s spokesman, the logical (if not chronological) order is first, “be baptized”; and then, “wash away your sins.”  What is important is that in his obedience to these gospel commands, Paul (who was then still Saul) was truly saved by first being baptized, and then (as a consequence) by having his sins “washed away” (i.e., forgiven).  It is important to see that, according to Ananias’s instruction, this salvation was not given until the gospel command to “be baptized” was obeyed.

      The other two verb forms in this verse—“get up,” and “calling on His name”—in Greek grammar are actually aorist participles.  The usual significance of aorist participles is that they indicate actions that take place before the action of the main verbs (here, the two commands).  That means that both of these actions were meant to take place before the baptism in which sins were washed away.  Thus Paul first got up (from his kneeling in prayer), and then was baptized (“he got up and was baptized,” Acts 9:18).  But since the last action (“calling on His name”) is also an aorist participle, this prayer would also have been said just prior to Paul’s baptism.  A literal translation of the entire instruction would be this: “Having arisen, be baptized and wash away your sins, having called on his name.”

      The point is this: “calling on His name” is a prayer to God for salvation, and here Paul the sinner is told to pray this prayer—this sinner’s prayer—just before his baptism, in which he would receive that salvation.

      How do we know that “calling on His name” is a sinner’s prayer for salvation?  Because of the origin of this phrase in the Old Testament, and also because of the way it is used in other places in the New Testament.  This phrase comes from Joel 2:32, which says, “And it will come about that whoever calls on the name of the LORD will be delivered.”  This is the NASB translation; many versions translate it as “saved” instead of “delivered.”  E.g., the ESV says, “And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”  In the New Testament, this is how the Apostle Peter quotes this text in his Pentecost sermon (Acts 2:21):  “And it shall be that everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved.”  The original Greek for “will be saved” is sōthēsetai, future tense of sōzō, the usual Greek word for “to save.”  Paul quotes it exactly the same way in Romans 10:13. There is no doubt that “calling on His name” is a prayer for salvation.

      In Joel’s version of the prayer, the deliverance or salvation is sought from “the LORD.”  As the all-capitals form of “LORD” tells us, the Hebrew says, “whoever calls on the name of Yahweh.”  In the Old Testament this divine name referred to any one person or to all three persons of the Trinity, depending on the context.  The New Testament quotations of this text (Acts 2:21; Romans 10:13) translate “Yahweh” as “Kurios” (“Lord”), i.e., “the name of the Lord.”  Also, especially in Paul’s writings, the word or title “Kurios” is almost always used for Jesus Christ.  Thus this prayer which the sinner Saul is instructed to pray just before his baptism is a prayer to Jesus for salvation.

      Further confirmation of this fact is seen by examining the context of Paul’s quotation of this Joel text in Romans 10:13.  Paul has just affirmed the necessity of faith and confession for salvation in verses 9 & 10:  “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.”  Then in verse 13 he quotes Joel 2:32 as confirmation and explanation of what he means by this confession.  It specifically includes an acknowledgment of Jesus as Kurios.

      This, then, is what the New Testament tells us about the “sinner’s prayer.”  First, it tells us that there is such a thing as the sinner’s prayer, and that it is a prayer for salvation.  The common idea that God does not hear a sinner’s prayer is thus false, at least when it is a prayer for salvation.  Second, this prayer for salvation is brought before God in connection with Christian baptism, with the clear implication that the sinner is praying his or her prayer of faith that God will keep His promise and give that salvation as the sinner is immediately immersed in the waters of baptism (Colossians 2:12).  The common idea that such a prayer is effective as long as it is accompanied by “faith only,” totally apart from baptism, is thus false. 

      Third, this study suggests that our common Restoration practice of soliciting a convert’s “good confession” just before baptism seems to be incomplete.  For one thing, limiting it to the words of the Apostle Peter in Matthew 16:16 ignores the content of the confession specified by Paul in Romans 10:9-10.  Also, considering the way we usually solicit this confession, it hardly qualifies as “calling on the name of the Lord” (as Acts 22:16 puts it).  I am not suggesting that we cease asking a convert to publicly confess faith in Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  I would ask, though, that we consider leading the convert in a private prayer just before baptism, in which he or she confesses to being a sinner and prays that God will, in this coming moment of baptism, pour out the blessings of salvation made possible by Jesus through His death and resurrection.  This would follow the pattern of Acts 22:16, and would be a real sinner’s prayer.