Why is it that a prayer or a moral change is not enough to save a person? Why is it that the soul must be really and truly converted in order to have eternal life now and then after physical death? It is indeed far easier to tell a person to pray a prayer, walk an aisle, sign a card or do something that has the appearance of a commitment or decision. But we must always remember that Jesus never taught us that a person is saved by a prayer, a commitment, or a decision. He taught that sinners were saved through faith and faith alone. One is not saved because they come up with faith, but because they have Christ who is united to the soul. It would appear that there are numerous people in the professing Church today that have jumped through a low or high hoop in some way and think they are saved because that is what they have been told to do.
Jesus taught that a soul must be converted or it would perish. He did not say that a soul must say a prayer or walk an aisle; He said that souls must be truly converted or that they would perish. Jesus did not say that a person could be a good person and do good things to be saved; He said that a soul must be converted. Jesus did not say that a person could make a moral transformation and attend church a good percentage of the time to be saved; He said that the soul must be converted in order for the person to be truly saved. Why is this being stressed over and over again? It is because we have heard the opposite of this so often and rarely if ever hear what Jesus really said. Souls must truly be converted from being the children of the devil to being a child of the living God. Souls must be taken from the bondage and dominion of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of the Beloved. Souls must be turned from those that love sin to those that love holiness. Nothing less than the hand of an Almighty God through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit can change a sinner to a saint (holy one, set apart by God for God).
The soul of the unbeliever is a soul that is full of pride. Proverbs 21:4 tells us that “Haughty eyes and a proud heart, The lamp of the wicked, is sin.” Proverbs 16:5 says that “Everyone who is proud in heart is an abomination to the LORD; Assuredly, he will not be unpunished.” In multiple places in Scripture, and in various ways, we are told that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (James 4:6; I Peter 5:5). God loves the humble and yet we are told that the proud will be brought down. God will not dwell in the proud soul regardless of what kind of decisions that soul has made and no matter how much intellectual belief that soul has. God is opposed to the proud and certainly will not give Himself to that proud soul.
Isaiah 66:2 tells us with certainty the kind of soul that God looks upon with favor: “For My hand made all these things, Thus all these things came into being,” declares the LORD. “But to this one I will look, To him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at My word.” The Jewish people wanted to build God a temple so that He could live in and rest. But God told them that the whole earth was nothing but a foot stool. Where was the house they could build Him? Then He tells them what does please Him. It is the humble, the contrite, and the one that trembles at His Word. The humble one is the humility of the creature. The contrite one is the humility of the sinner. The one that trembles at His word is the humility of the saved sinner. In other words, God is opposed to the proud in any and all stages. God will never look upon the proud with any pleasure at all no matter what they do. The verses from Isaiah below show His opposition to pride at all points.
Isaiah 2:11 The proud look of man will be abased And the loftiness of man will be humbled, And the LORD alone will be exalted in that day. 12 For the LORD of hosts will have a day of reckoning against everyone who is proud and lofty And against everyone who is lifted up, That he may be abased.
Isaiah 2:17 The pride of man will be humbled And the loftiness of men will be abased; And the LORD alone will be exalted in that day,
Isaiah 3:16 Moreover, the LORD said, “Because the daughters of Zion are proud And walk with heads held high and seductive eyes, And go along with mincing steps And tinkle the bangles on their feet, 17 Therefore the Lord will afflict the scalp of the daughters of Zion with scabs, And the LORD will make their foreheads bare.”
Isaiah 5:15 So the common man will be humbled and the man of importance abased, The eyes of the proud also will be abased.
Isaiah 13:11 Thus I will punish the world for its evil And the wicked for their iniquity; I will also put an end to the arrogance of the proud And abase the haughtiness of the ruthless.
Isaiah 25:11 And he will spread out his hands in the middle of it As a swimmer spreads out his hands to swim, But the Lord will lay low his pride together with the trickery of his hands.
Isaiah 57:15 tells us the only kind of soul that God will dwell in. “For thus says the high and exalted One Who lives forever, whose name is Holy, “I dwell on a high and holy place, And also with the contrite and lowly of spirit In order to revive the spirit of the lowly And to revive the heart of the contrite.”” We might look at Isaiah 57:15 in a few ways, but one obvious way is that God will only dwell with the humble and He will not dwell with the proud. He dwells with the humble and the contrite in order to revive them or to give them life. As we have seen in the verses in Isaiah above, God is opposed to the proud in all ways. But how He looks with favor on the humble and indeed dwells with them. God did not just dwell in a temple because people did the things He said, but He dwelt among a people that were humble. Perhaps there were only a few, but Moses was the most humble on earth.
The great mystery of the Old and the New Testament is given to us in Colossians 1:26-27: “the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations, but has now been manifested to His saints, 27 to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” In our day we speak as if the great mystery was of salvation by faith, but that is not correct. Abraham was justified by faith apart from works as well. The Old Testament believers did walk by faith and trusted in Christ as they looked ahead (Hebrews 11:23-27). He looked ahead to Christ. Christ said that He came to fulfill the Law (Matthew 5:17-20) and so the Law pointed to Him. But the great mystery that was revealed through Paul and has been forgotten in the modern day is that Jesus Christ now lives in His people. The very temple of God now is in His people. He lives in them by faith. The reason for faith is this is how Christ dwells in His people.
We can then go to Habakkuk 2:4 which tells us very plainly that one that is proud cannot have true faith: “Behold, as for the proud one, His soul is not right within him; But the righteous will live by his faith.” The righteous that lives by faith is opposite of the proud one whose soul is not right within him. What we must see is that faith and pride are opposites. The soul that is proud will not have faith. The one that has faith is the one that is humble. Psalm 25:9 tells us that God “leads the humble in justice, And He teaches the humble His way.” The proud do not want justice, they want self asserted and defended. The proud do not truly want the ways of God, they only want themselves. Clearly, then, only the humble truly want true justice and to be taught the way of God. The believer walks by faith and not by sight while the proud walk by the sight of their pride. Pride and faith are opposites so the humble soul looks to God through and by Christ alone. One cannot follow Christ and pride at the same time.
What must happen to a proud soul in order for it to be saved? Psalm 34:18 gives the obvious answer: “The LORD is near to the brokenhearted And saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Isaiah, the book of the verses above that show how God opposes the proud, says this in 61:1: “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me To bring good news to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted.” This is the verse Jesus declared about Himself in Luke 4:18. Jesus was not here to save the proud in their pride, but to save people from their pride. There is no faith where pride reigns so the faith of the proud is from pride. God will not save people in their pride and He does not hear the prayer of the proud. Proverbs 15:8: “The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the LORD, But the prayer of the upright is His delight.” Do we really think that God will save a proud sinner because s/he says a prayer when even their prayers are an abomination to God? But, one says, God saves because of faith. Yet we have seen how faith cannot be in the soul of a proud person. Matthew 18:3 tells us that unless we are converted and become as a little child we will not enter the kingdom. We do not become true believers just because we believe the facts of a few verses of Scripture, but only by Christ alone who dwells with those who are humbled and broken. One is not saved by humility, but one will not have faith in Christ apart from humility either. A prayer that comes from a proud heart is a proud prayer and is verbalized pride. A faith that comes from a proud heart is pride expressed as faith in self rather than faith in Christ. We must be broken from our pride or we will never have true faith and so will never have Christ dwelling in us. A converted soul is one that has been broken from pride as that which rules it and now has Christ as its very life. We know that Scripture teaches us repeatedly to repent and to turn. We must repent of our pride to repent at all. Can pride move itself to repent of pride? Only divine power can do this.
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