It's one of the most important questions that can ever be asked. What must I believe to be saved? It was asked of Pastor John a few years back in a Q&A setting. Here's how Pastor John answered the question. Well, Paul says, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved." He says, "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord, and in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved." So I take text like that, and I would say, "You begin at this core of the death of Jesus.

He died for our sins, which means I must believe I'm a sinner." A person that doesn't believe he's a sinner can't be saved. If there's nothing to forgive, He didn't do anything for me. If He didn't do anything for me, I'm not believing Him for salvation. If I'm not believing Him for salvation, I'm not saved.

So you must believe that you are a sinner. You must believe that there's a God who has created the possibility for sin. That is, sin only has meaning as the falling short of the expectations of your Creator. So there has to be a Creator God out there who has expectations of humans that they trust Him, love Him, live for Him, and we fail, and therefore we're under His-- that'd be the third thing now--we're under His holy--call it different things--judgment, wrath.

You've got to believe that. If you're a sinner, and there's a holy God, and you're defining sin as a falling short of that God, then in order to understand what He's doing to solve that, you've got to understand that He's angry about that. He's just. He's a good judge.

So what has He now done to solve the problem of our alienation from Him? He has sent His Son into the world. You've got to believe in the deity of Jesus. It says in Psalm 49 that no man can pay a ransom for another man. And then a few verses later, I think it's verse 15, it says God will pay the ransom.

So He couldn't have used John or Peter or Paul to die for us. He had to have the God-man die for us. So the deity of Jesus is essential. And then what did He do? What did He do? Well, He lived a perfect life. You can't believe that Jesus sinned and be saved, I don't think, because then the sacrifice made for you was not what was required, and you're not believing in what God did for you.

So He's a sinless Son of God, and now He gives Himself up to die in my place. So the substitutional dimension of the death of Christ for my sins, and there's lots of ways to talk about that in the Bible, and I think you can be very confused about some of those and be saved.

I don't want to start listing off all the ways the Bible talks about that and how confused a person can be about them and still be saved. Let's just say at the core of the gospel of how this is all remedied is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who never sinned, got in my place and took the wrath of God for me and died in my place.

If He had stayed dead, we would still be in our sins, so we must believe He rose from the dead. So now He's risen from the dead, and I would say that's the cluster. I'm willing to kind of stop there. You might be able to bring to my mind some things that would be so theologically closely attached to those that I would say, "Okay, yeah, that's got to be included as well." But if somebody asked me, "What do I have to believe?" I'd say, "There's the cluster of things that you've got to know about yourself, know about God, know about the cross." I guess maybe one other thing.

I'm sort of assuming faith here because they said, "What do I have to believe?" But you have to believe something about belief, meaning that it's required. If you say, "Oh, I get all that. I get all that. Now I'm going to work so that God will let all that count for me.

I'm going to keep the law 85% so that all this redemptive work will count for me." You've missed it. You're not saved. What salvation requires that you believe is that you must believe instead of working for this salvation, that He has done what needs to be done. We receive it.

As many as received Him who believed in His name, He gave them the right to become the children of God. So I think sin, God, cross, faith. To summarize the core, it would be truths around those four things. Pastor John was then asked a follow-up question. "In order to be saved, must someone understand the Trinity?" Here's what he said.

They surely wouldn't have to know that word. They wouldn't have to be able to articulate it very well. But what they need to do is not deny essential things about it. So a person may never have heard of such things as the Trinity and be saved. But if you said to them, "Now, the Jesus you're believing in, is He divine or just a man?" If they said, "He's not divine," I think that's a major problem.

So I'm saying the implications and pieces of the Trinity. Now, I don't think a person has to have ever heard of the Holy Spirit to be saved. Is that radical? I don't think so. If you get taught about the Holy Spirit and what He's done for you and say, "Oh, no, no, no, no.

I don't believe any of that. I don't believe it took the Holy Spirit to save me," then I'm going to question your salvation. But goodness, I just spent five minutes unpacking the gospel, and I didn't mention Him. And that's not because He's not essential. We would never believe without Him.

But because I think knowing the details of how God got you to believe is not essential. But denying it once you know it would undermine essential things. That was Pastor John answering questions a few years ago. And as a follow-up to this very important discussion, see episode number 60, "Is Jesus the Only Way to be Saved?" You can find that episode and over 300 others in the free Ask Pastor John apps for the iPhone and Android.

And be sure you update your app to get all the new features that make it really easy to search and browse all those episodes. We return tomorrow to hear Pastor John's concerns for this movement we call New Calvinism. I'm your host Tony Reike. We'll see you tomorrow.