One of my greatest concerns as a Christian is watching people eagerly make professions of faith only to fizzle out with time. The sad thing about this is that these people think they are truly saved when Jesus made it explicitly clear that true believers, true disciples continue in His Word.
Joh 8:31 Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed;
One pastor has written that our “Churches are filled with people who are baptized pagans, vaccinated with a mild form of Christianity, [but] never having caught “the real thing.” The church may be full at times, but the people are often empty. They go through the motions, trying to live a good life outwardly, but they’ve never been converted.”
Friends, something is going wrong in our evangelism when most “professing believers,” who are not radically changed in belief & behavior after their supposed conversion, can go through the rest of their life smugly thinking they’re saved because they’ve simply said some prayer, recited some creed, been baptized, or written some date of an emotional experience down in a Bible they don’t read, despite their lack of loyalty to the Lord Jesus, & love for the church, & inward longing for holiness of life.
In our text today from Mark 10:17-27, Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler is to evangelize him. The disciples understood that Jesus was dealing with the matter of salvation for they ask after this, “Who can be saved?”
In this message, we revisit Jesus’ evangelism of this man and see the important aspects of it which we need to ensure is a part of our evangelism lest we be guilty of offering some synthetic gospel which offers no real salvation.