(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.)

Hello, everybody. This is Tall23 back in our video. In this video, I want to focus on a particular passage in the Bible which gives a summary of the Gospel and what we need to believe in order to be saved. All throughout the New Testament, it is made clear that the only requirement for salvation is our faith. When somebody believes, they are born again. But what exactly are we supposed to believe? What do we need to put our faith in? Well, the Scripture makes it clear that it's Jesus Christ who we're supposed to put our trust in. However, that does not mean that everybody who claims to be a Christian is saved. Believing that Jesus exists is not what saves you. Believing He is God is not what saves you. And so on. There are specific requirements of what to have faith in, to what to believe about Jesus Christ, and that's the Gospel. And one of the amazing passages in the Bible which summarizes the Gospel is found in 1st John, chapter 5. I'm gonna start at verse 6 and read until verse 13. It says, So let's break this passage down. The first part of this passage deals with the witness. It tells us that the Spirit is that which beareth witness. According to verse 7, it's the Holy Ghost which bears record in heaven. And in verse 8, it says the Spirit bears witness in earth. Then in verse 9, it tells us that the witness of God is greater than the witness of men. Now we come to verse 10, which is a very key verse. It says, he that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness himself in the first part of the verse. Now remember, according to the preceding verses, the Spirit is the witness. So according to other passages of Scripture as well, those who are saved and born again have the Spirit of God living inside of them, such as 1st Corinthians 3, 16, which says, know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? And then of course it even says, he that believeth on the Son of God. So this of course is talking about saved people because the Bible says, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, in Acts chapter 16, or he that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, in John 3, 36. So the first part of 1st John 5, 10 is talking about people who are saved and how that they have the Spirit of God inside of them, which is also the witness. But it goes further on to say, later in the verse, it says, he that believeth not God hath made him a liar because he believeth not the record that God gave of his son. So contrasted to those who are saved, contrasted to those who are believers are those who are unsaved. Instead of talking about somebody who believeth on the Son of God, it's now focusing on somebody who believes not God, who it says also believeth not the record that God gave of his son. So somebody who does not believe God is also said to be someone who does not believe that the record that God gave of his son, and that would be the gospel, the record that is born by the three in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, as it says back in verse 7. Thankfully in the very next verse, what the record is, is shown clearly. It says in verse 11, and this is the record that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. This shows us what we need to believe in order to be saved, the aspects of God's record which is witnessed to us when we hear the gospel. There are three components here which I want to talk about, which can all be broken down and explained by further examination of the Bible. And these three things are, one, God has given us a gift, two, the gift is eternal life, and three, this life is in God's Son. So if you or anybody else rejects this record and does not believe it, according to verse 10, you are making God a liar, and you do not believe God. So the person who does not believe these three things is not saved. So I'll quickly go through these three aspects of the record. First, that God has given us a gift. That means that salvation is free. It's not earned or accomplished through any of our own good works. Rather, God gives it to us as a gift. The Bible says in Ephesians chapter 2 verse 8 to 9, "...for by grace are you saved through faith and the not of yourselves. It is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast." By definition, a gift is something which you do not pay for. So if it were based on works or based on some price which you had to pay, it would not be a gift. But the Bible promises us that all we have to do is accept the gift through our faith. It's not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, as it says in Titus chapter 3 verse 5. Our righteousnesses are as filthy rags before God according to Isaiah 64. We can't justify ourselves by our own righteousness. We can't pay for it ourselves, so God paid for it for us. You cannot justify yourself through your own works, but rather it's through the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. And the giver of the gift is always the one who pays for it. The Bible says in Romans 5-8, "...but God commendeth his love toward us in that while yet sinners Christ died for us." So He died that we don't have to. That's God's gift to mankind, our salvation, His blood atoning for our sins, that He came down in the flesh and suffered on the cross to atone for our sins. Now because His blood cleansed from all sin, we simply need to place our faith in Christ and we shall be saved. So that's the first thing, that salvation is a gift. Now moving on to the second point, that the gift of salvation is equated with eternal life. This means that we need to believe that it is eternal and this is where a lot of so-called Christians, people who call themselves Christians, but who really aren't, choke. They don't believe in eternal security. They don't believe in eternal life. They may give lip service to faith alone or grace alone. They may claim to to believe that they trust in Christ alone for salvation, but at the same time they assume that a mistake, a sin, a bad work that they do, or a lack of works, will cause them to lose their salvation. Now the problem with that assumption is that salvation is eternal. It's called eternal life for a reason because it's eternal. The word eternal means not ending. The word everlasting, which is another word that's used in Scripture, means lasting forever. As somebody supposedly got saved and received eternal life and 12 years from now they did something, they back-sleeved, they committed some horrible sin and they supposedly lost their salvation, then the eternal life was never eternal because it ended. Eternal means not ending. How could it end if it's eternal? And eternal life is not a state which we achieve in the future either. Rather when somebody believes on Christ, when they make that decision to put their trust in him, they receive eternal life immediately. They're born again. Jesus says in John chapter 6 verse 47, Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me hath everlasting life. And John 11 25 to 26 says, I am the resurrection of the life, he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. So here Jesus promises that whosoever believes in him shall never die. Now the person who rejects eternal security assumes that is in fact possible for a person who has believed at one point in Jesus to face the second death. But that would be making Jesus a liar because he said in John 11, I whosoever liveth and believeth in him shall never die. That means if a person trusts in Christ as their Savior today, they will never face the second death. They will never die. Why? Because God has given us eternal life. Eternal, again, not ending, which means they'll never die. God promises us I will never leave thee nor forsake thee in Hebrews chapter 13 verse 5. Eternal security is part of the gospel. When we are born again, that is what happens. We are literally born again in the Spirit. You can't be unborn. That's what salvation is. That's what the gospel, the good news, teaches, that we are eternally saved. That's why it's so great. That's why it's called good news. Remember, the eternal life is the gift of God. That's another thing that we need to understand. A gift cannot simply be taken away. If I give a gift to you, you can't just say, or I can't just come back later and just take it from you. It belongs to you now. The eternal life belongs to us. God has given it to us. It belongs to us now. If we are born again, we will always be born again. So anybody who rejects this critical doctrine, the critical doctrine of eternal security, is not saved. Now to the third aspect given in 1st John 511, and that is that the life is in God's Son. So we know that God has given us a free gift. He paid for it. He offers it, and all we have to do is accept it through our faith. And when we accept it, we are given eternal life, meaning that can never end. But we also have to believe that this is through God's Son, Jesus Christ. Our faith should be directed toward Jesus Christ. We have eternal life for a reason. It's not just there. It's because of Jesus. Jesus said, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. And then the Bible also says, if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. So it's all about putting your faith, your trust, in Christ. We have the gift of eternal life because of Jesus, because of what he did on the cross. The Bible explains the gospel this way in 1st Corinthians 15. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. And that the Bible says there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved in Acts 4-12. So we must be saved by the name of Jesus Christ. You can't just call upon any supreme deity. You can't just call upon God without knowing who God is. You need Jesus Christ in order to be saved. It's not in your own power. It's not in any false God, in any idol, any church, in any man, woman, child, or whatever. It's only through Jesus Christ the Son of God. So in summary, what is the record of God's Son that the Bible mentions in 1st John 5? What is it that we need to believe in order to be saved? Well, we need to believe that Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God, died for our sins on the cross, was buried, and rose again three days later, and that he paid for all our debts, that we don't need to work for salvation. We need to trust in him alone to get us to heaven, to accept his gift of eternal life, and believe that in doing so we receive eternal life, meaning that no matter what we do, we cannot lose it. We are saved, we are sealed, and we are on our way to heaven. So that's a summary of what the Bible teaches, and this is something that I struggled with for quite some time in my own personal life before I got saved, especially the doctrine of eternal security, when I was trying to understand the gospel, when I was still trusting in my own works to get me to heaven, but through hearing the preaching of God's word, I was convicted by powerful verses like John 11 26, and John 5 24, and Ephesians 4 30, etc., among others, which which talk about eternal security and salvation by faith alone. All that showed me that it's all by Jesus Christ. It's all by putting my trust in Christ, and I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior, and I called upon the name of the Lord in June 2018. However, there are a lot of people out there who unfortunately are not saved and think they are for a variety of reasons, either because they're baptized or because they go to church. They are trusting in something else. They're not believing the record that God gave his son. They have their own twisted record, which they either conjured up themselves or which they heard from somebody else that's not preaching from the Bible, and it could be somebody who believes that they're saved because they're baptism, somebody who believes that they're saved because they take communion or because they go to church or because they keep commandments or because they're trusting in a false version of Christ or they believe that they've turned from all their sins and that that's what saves them. All that's not biblical. So for the second part of this video, I want to quickly go through some denominations, groups, people, etc., preachers, etc., who reject these critical doctrines, who reject these three, at least one of these three aspects and thus are not saved. And most of the time it's eternal security because that's the thing which distinguishes a biblical Christian from the nominal Christians who refuse to get rid of their pride and lay all of their trust on Christ. There are people who say that, well, I trust in Christ, but then they mess up and they say, well, now I'm not going to heaven because of something I did. They're not really putting all their trust in Christ, all their faith in Christ to get to heaven because they think that they still have to do something, that they still have to do good in order to get to heaven. They're not saved. It's all eternal security. So there is no one type of Christian, no one denomination or a group of people which constitutes saved Christians. However, there are not many types of Christians who believe in eternal security. When it comes to soteriology, the position which fits with the Bible is known as free grace theology as opposed to both Arminianism and Calvinism. Now I hold to the belief that all Arminians, because of their rejection of eternal security, which is one of the main doctrines of Arminianism, are unsaved. And that includes Methodists, a subset of Baptists known as Free Will Baptists, those in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, those in the Church of the Nazarene, the Amish, the Mennonites, the Pentecostals, those in the so-called Churches of Christ, and many non-denominational Christians who hold to the view that they can lose their salvation. And that includes hundreds of millions of so-called Christians. They reject the record that God gave of their son, or God gave of his son, so they are not saved. Now concerning the other popular soteriological view, which is Calvinism, I would say it's mixed. Most Calvinists only proclaim faith alone, but they often twist it by teaching that those who do no works are never really saved in the first place, or who do not believe that salvation is really by faith. They just believe that God gives faith to you. There are some Calvinists who even call faith a work, etc. They always twist the gospel. For example, the Puritans in the 17th century fought against believers like John Cotton, who himself was a Calvinist, meaning he believed in predestination, but he entirely rejected the idea that good works had something to do with salvation, and they persecuted him for that. How there are some Calvinists who have truly accepted Christ as their Savior and hold to a view of the perseverance of the saints, which fits with the biblical doctrine of eternal security, and not the idea that they're saved because they have good works, given to them by God. So there are some Calvinists, but I would say the majority are not saved. And then, of course, there's the hardcore work salvationists like the Roman Catholics, the Orthodox Christians, who believe that you can lose your salvation as well. There's also the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, Iglesia Ni Cristo, which is like a denomination of the Philippines, which has a few million people, and other smaller cults and restorationist churches, which hold to a view that obeying the commandments is what saves you. And then, of course, there's a lot of people in the Hebrew Roots movement as well. So for the most part, the only people who hold to these three aspects, which it's, which it lists out in First John 511, who actually have put their full trust in Christ and believe the record that God giveth his Son, includes several groups. And that would include, again, some Calvinists, such as some Reformed Baptists, some Presbyterians, some of those in the Calvary Chapel denomination. Most Baptists, as well, hold to these doctrines, although recently there have been many who have crept into Baptist churches and denied both eternal security and faith alone. However, for the most part, independent Baptists and Baptist denominations out there hold to the record of the Gospel. And then there are other Christians, maybe a minority of Lutherans and a minority of other Protestants, who may hold to the record that God gave his Son. And, of course, as many Evangelical and non-denominational Christians whose beliefs align with the Gospel. So what am I saying? I'm saying that being a Christian is about your belief in the Gospel and your trust in Jesus Christ and the record that God gave of his Son. Without that, one is not saved. Anybody who rejects God's record has made him a liar and does not have the witness, the Spirit of God, inside of them. And sadly, that's most people who call themselves a Christian. There are like 2.5 or something like that billion Christians out there, or so-called Christians, and I would say, I mean, I don't know the exact numbers, but I would say probably no more than a, like, this might be a stretch even, a couple hundred million at the most are saved. I would say the majority, the vast majority of them, are not saved because they reject the record that God gave of his Son. Jesus said in Matthew, chapter 7, verse 22 to 23, So these people are trying to get into heaven because of their works, but Jesus tells them, I never knew you. That means they were never a Christian. They were never saved. They didn't lose it. They weren't saved in the first place. They did not believe the record that God gave of his Son and were thus not born again. So if you, the person watching this video, have not accepted Christ as your Savior, if you do not believe the gospel, if you have not put your trust in Jesus Christ and turned away from your other beliefs about salvation, I recommend that you do so. Today is the day of salvation, accept it before it's too late. So thank you, everybody, for watching and goodbye.