“This is the message of faith that we proclaim: 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. One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

How does salvation work? Every single worldview has an answer to that question. That’s one of those fundamental questions people have always asked that worldviews are designed (albeit not necessarily intentionally so) to address. And most worldviews answer the question in roughly the same way. Yes, the details are different, but in the big picture, they’re all the same. There’s one exception to this. Let’s talk about why all the others are the same and why Christianity is different.

Pay much attention to books and TV shows and movies with a bit of a supernatural theme to them, and a consistent trope begins to rise to the surface. In almost every single one of them we save ourselves. Whatever gods or goddesses or generically divine beings are written into the script help in some form or fashion, but the final outcome depends on us.

The reason we can’t ultimately depend on them varies. Sometimes they’re not powerful enough. Their magic needs to be paired with the special something that makes us us in order to get the job done. Other times they just don’t care enough. They throw us a bone, but if we want an outcome that is truly beneficial to us, we’re on our own. Sometimes they even go so far as to betray us. They give us a boost, but then they go and join the other side or otherwise help the other side against us.

Now, if you think about it, that all of our stories go like this makes sense. On the one hand, who wants to hear a story in which the characters who are like you are the villains or otherwise the losers of the plot? On the other hand, this is how nearly all of our stories involving some sort of divine element have always gone. We always think in terms of saving ourselves.

Accordingly, nearly all of our religious stories have played out in about the same way. They all feature a set of rules or practices, and if we keep those laws and practices with a sufficient level of faithfulness and rigor, achieve the object of our aim: salvation.

Of course, there are all sorts of ways that salvation is defined in the various religions worldview options out there. There are all sorts of ways salvation is defined in the various non-religious and secular worldview options out there. And, yes, even non-religious and secular worldviews have some sort of an explanation for what’s wrong with people and how it can be made right. Again, there’s a fair bit of variety depending on the particular flavor of the secularism (environmental, militaristic, scientific, political, and etc.), but the existence of an explanation is a point of commonality they all share.

But in spite of all of this variety, all of these different understandings and explanations of salvation all have one very consistent thing in common: they run on human effort. They are all different forms of self-righteousness. We do the work, we gain the prize. If there are gods, they may be helpful. They may even play a critical role. But at the end of the day, our works plays a deciding factor. We make ourselves fit for salvation and then we have it.

Across the history of humanity there has only ever been one major religion that has deviated significantly from this pattern: Christianity. In Christianity salvation is explicitly not based on human effort. We have a role to play, but that role is not to do this or that or keep some set of rules. There are commands to be kept (a command, really), but these are kept as a function of having received salvation, not as a means of gaining it in the first place.

No, the thing that makes Christianity so profoundly different is the place of priority it gives to faith. This is something other religious worldviews don’t grasp in the same way we do. It’s something secular worldviews can’t even begin to understand using their own, built-in worldview resources. But it is absolutely central to the Gospel understanding of salvation, of entering into a right relationship with God in Christ.

Okay, but still, how does salvation actually work in the Christian worldview? Yes, it is built on a foundation of faith, but what are the mechanics of it? That might be a challenging question to answer except that Paul tells us right here in the next part of Romans 10. At the end of v. 8 he gives us our headline: “This is the message of faith that we proclaim.” In other words, this is how faith works. When we say that salvation is based on faith, this is what that actually looks like.

“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.” That’s it. It’s that simple. There are no hoops to jump through. There’s no quest to complete. There is not some complex set of rules and regulations to keep. Jesus already did all of that for us.

That’s the difference between Christianity and everything else. Everything else makes the work depend on us. The trouble here is that we mostly don’t or can’t do the work. A few seem to be able to get there, but they don’t really. Not consistently. Christianity solves that conundrum. God understood quite well that we weren’t capable of keeping the Law. So, He did it for us in Jesus. Jesus kept the Law. Jesus fulfilled the covenant. Jesus earned God’s righteousness by His perfect effort. Now then, He offers it to us. All we have to do is to be willing to accept that He did what He did, and that He is Lord because of it.

Paul actually presents things in reverse order here, but it’s to make the point that the first thing is rooted in the second. We confess with our mouths Jesus’ lordship. This means that we give public notice of our commitment to Christ. The very idea of confession necessarily involves other people; someone to confess to. Yes, you can be saved and do this in the privacy of your bedroom between you and God, but once that has been done, the telling somebody part really does matter.

We publicly commit ourselves to the idea that Jesus is the Lord of our lives; that He is in charge. Making such a confession necessarily involves a change in lifestyle. If Jesus is Lord, then we do what He said. We keep His commands. Thankfully, though, His “commands” are really just one command and its application. We are to love one another after the pattern of His own love for us. That’s it. If Jesus is Lord, then we are to commit ourselves entirely to taking that one command and working out its application in every part of our lives and in the world around us to the extent of our ability.

Without this piece there’s no real reason to buy our confession. There’s no evidence to back it up. This is what James was talking about when he said that faith without works is dead. The works don’t make the faith, and they don’t play a role in our being saved. Paul tells us right here how that works. The works are the evidence that the salvation has been received. Our confession, then, is the public indicator that we are committing ourselves to this path and not another one.

That brings us to the second part. We make this confession because of our committed belief “that God raised him from the dead.” As Paul would make abundantly and powerful clear in his first letter to the Corinthian believers, the whole of Christianity hangs on the point of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. If that indeed happened, it’s all true and no sane person would reject it. If it didn’t, no sane person would accept it and we are all fools who have.

Now, there are two things that are simultaneously true here which together make faith both necessary and reasonable. The first is that we cannot prove the resurrection like we could prove some geometric theorem. We weren’t there. No one in fact was. It was just Jesus walking out of His tomb in the quiet of a Sunday morning. The way we know it is because of the testimony of others who saw Him alive again after having seen Him dead. They knew He was crucified which meant He was dead. They knew He was buried. Then they ate breakfast with Him on a beach. And so they told the world, demonstrating by their love the truthfulness of their claim.

The second thing that is true here is that the case supporting the proposition that Jesus rose from the dead is incredibly strong. The testimony and changed lives of those original followers of Jesus is simply too powerful to overlook or reject. That Jesus rose from the dead is the only reasonable explanation for their complete transformation and the movement that exploded into existence following this transformation.

So, we accept that God raised Jesus from the dead and that He is accordingly Lord on faith, but it is a reasonable faith. We believe on faith, we publicly commit ourselves to this faith, and we demonstrate that we have received the salvation of God available to us in Christ and by the Spirit. That’s v. 10: “One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation.”

If you want to experience salvation, this is how you do it. More than that, this is the only way to know you have achieved it – or rather, received it. Every other approach to salvation, however it is defined, comes with a bit of uncertainty. You do all the things, but did you do them consistently enough? Is there one thing you forgot that could prove to be crucial? Is the god having a bad day, and so all your work is for naught anyway? You don’t know. In Christianity, you can. Confess your belief; believe and then confess it. Place your faith in Jesus, and the rest falls into place. Simple. The only real question is: What is keeping you from doing it?