Accept Jesus Christ…
Whoever accepts you also accepts me, and whoever accepts me also accepts the One who sent me. (Matthew 10:40, NCV)
But to all who did accept him and believe in him he gave the right to become children of God. (John 1:12, NCV)
And now, just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow him. (Colossians 2:6, NLT)
Confess him as Lord…
That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Romans 10:9, NIV)
And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. (Acts 2:21, NIV)
Ask him into your heart…
On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. (John 14:20, NIV)
I pray…that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. (Ephesians 3:16-17, NIV)
“Accept Jesus Christ, confess him as Lord, and ask him into your heart.”
Some pretentious and ignorant religionists complain that this is not the gospel, but this is exactly the gospel. The message is correct both as an introduction to the Christian life and as a continuation of the Christian life. The shallow evangelism that they claim to oppose, where it is wrong, is not wrong on this point.
Their incompetent diagnosis disqualifies them as those who could lead the church back to biblical evangelism. They themselves don’t know what it is. They just know they want to correct people who are getting more converts than they are.
They seize on the false converts and declare that the whole thing is worthless! But they are getting almost no converts, real or false. They want to preach “the gospel according to the apostles,” but the apostles wrote the above verses, didn’t they? The apostles also wanted us to accept Jesus Christ and ask him into our hearts.
They want biblical evangelism, but biblical evangelism often came with signs following and resulted in instant conversions. They deny evangelism with healing, prophecy, and miracles, and they either deny instant conversions or they rarely get them.
For all their talk about wanting everything to be “biblical,” it seems that they don’t read the Bible, don’t know the Bible, and definitely don’t believe the Bible. Yet they think they are the gold standard of biblical orthodoxy and biblical evangelism.