“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.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

No, you’re not seeing double. It’s been a few weeks now, but we did indeed talk about Romans 10:9 recently, and we are going to do it again today. But as I thought about a verse that speaks right to the heart of something that happened this past week, there’s really not another that gets as close as this verse does. A public figure this week expressed his hope of salvation. That doesn’t happen very often generally. It especially doesn’t happen very often with a public figure of this nature. And because the media tends to react (some might say, “overreact”) to just about everything this particular public figure says, the whole country was talking about salvation for a couple of days this week. President Trump started it. Let’s add our thoughts on the matter today.

It is no secret that President Trump’s favorite news source is Fox News. Of the three major 24-hour news networks in the country, Fox is by far the most watched. It is also the most conservative and least likely to have hosts or guests criticize the President. Because of that Trump makes fairly regular appearances on the network, calling in for often wide-ranging conversation to one program or another. A great many of his appearances (usually by phone) seem to be on the morning show, Fox & Friends, including a more than 25-minute conversation this past Tuesday morning.

The conversation covered a whole range of topics, but coming on the heels of the Oval Office meeting with nearly all of the major European president or prime ministers and Ukrainian President Zelensky, the outcome of that gathering was the main topic. During the conversation, though, while reflecting on his efforts to bring the Russia-Ukraine war to an end, Trump said this: “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”

I didn’t see the interview live, and haven’t gone back to watch it since. I don’t know how the conversation led to his making this observation. I don’t know where the conversation went from here. It wasn’t until yesterday that I even heard about it. But to have someone with this high of a profile make a statement like this on the most watched cable news program means a whole lot of people are going to hear about it. That alone makes it worth talking about.

The other thing that makes this worthy of our attention here is the fact that the President of the United States just publicly expressed his hopes for salvation. The President’s words carry weight. He tends to be a barometer of where the culture is on a whole range of issues, especially this President who was a public celebrity before making a turn to politics. If he’s wondering about this, so, I suspect, are some other folks in our culture. Let’s see if we can’t provide some clarity on the matter. I doubt very seriously the President himself will ever read this, but perhaps you have been quietly wondering along with him.

Trump has never been known as a person of particularly robust faith. Now, you might not have known that if your only introduction to him was his campaign to be elected in 2016. Knowing the evangelical vote was going to be crucial to his having any chance of winning, Trump’s election team recruited the help of several high profile evangelical leaders to convince their constituents that Trump was a man of deep and abiding faith. Never mind his rather sordid past. He had recently had a turn to the right (in more ways than one), and he was good with God.

The tactic worked, and evangelicals voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2024 in large numbers. I’m not much interested in parsing out where Trump’s faith is except to say this. The public statements he has made revealing his personal theology don’t exactly reflect a committed, knowledgeable, evangelical faith commitment. He unquestioningly believes in God, and I think his narrowly surviving an assassination attempt on the campaign trail last year really did have a profound impact on his understanding of his relationship with God and the direction his presidency needed to go. But as far as an understanding of God that is deeply and accurately informed by the Scriptures, I’m less confident.

His statement this past Tuesday on Fox & Friends is a perfect example. Look at this again: “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.” As far as an understanding of salvation goes that is properly informed by the Scriptures, that’s not it. What Trump expresses here is an entirely works-based understanding of salvation. There is literally nothing in the New Testament to support such a notion and a great deal to insist on the opposite. As Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:8-9: “For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift – not from works, so that no one can boast.”

The salvation Trump seeks is not found in doing good deeds. That doesn’t make doing good deeds for someone like you and me, or seeking to bring an end to wars for someone like Trump, not still worth doing. A world filled with people who pursued good deeds in various forms is a better world to live in than one in which that doesn’t happen. But they don’t contribute materially to our standing before God or the likelihood of our going to Heaven when we die.

So then, why did Trump express himself like this? Because the culture mostly imagines that to be the case, and Trump is a reflection of the culture. The pop theology understanding of salvation – and the view of pretty much every human religion with the exception of Christianity – is that we are saved by our works. We do the work; we gain the prize. As long as we perform the right set of actions in the right ways and at the right times, we can secure ourselves a spot in the good place, however we happen to imagine that to look.

This line of thinking, however, begs a rather significant question: How good is good enough? If good people go to Heaven, then how is good to be defined, and how good do you have to be? I won’t go into a full criticism of this line of thought here, but suffice to say, when you start to press on this understanding of salvation it quickly proves to be a house of cards. An understanding of salvation rooted in good works is revealed to be capricious and ultimately empty. It is something that some people can achieve and others can’t for one reason or another, and that’s not at all fair.

The truth is that salvation – at least as the Christian worldview that Trump is likely speaking out of reveals it – is not rooted in works. It is rooted in grace. It is grace through faith. Trump could end all the wars in the world, and that wouldn’t accomplish anything in terms of moving him closer to salvation than he has ever been or will be. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t still strive for that, but that’s not the basis of salvation.

I don’t say any of this simply by means of criticizing him, though. Far from it. The fact that Trump is thinking in these terms at all is a good thing. This kind of thinking shows that someone is reaching and stretching for God. That’s always good. What Trump or anyone else in this position needs from the church is not criticism, but encouragement and teaching. He’s thinking in the generally right direction, but he’s doing so from a position of ignorance of the Gospel. What he needs is for one of the many theological sound spiritual advisors who have access to him to explain the real Gospel to him (once again, I suspect).

If salvation is genuinely Trump’s aim, stopping wars isn’t the way to do it. Confessing Christ as Lord is. Salvation is available freely and to all in Christ. As Paul wrote and we talked about just a few weeks ago, “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.” It’s that simple. Stopping wars and ending the wanton waste of lives that comes with it is a good thing. But it isn’t a saving thing. God may yet use Trump as one of the most effective global peacemakers in a very long time (which has to be a deeply ironic and galling fact for his critics), but the only way Trump is getting to Heaven is by entering through Jesus.

As the Babylon Bee put it in a recent headline that was actually not satire: “God Agrees To Let Trump Into Heaven If He Repents Of His Sin And Trusts In Jesus Christ Alone For Salvation.” Solomon warned in Proverbs 14:12 that “there is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way to death.” Doing good works seems right to us. And again, doing good works isn’t in itself a bad thing. But trying to make ourselves right with God by our good works “is the way to death.” The way to life is through Jesus. It is available to Trump, to you, and to everyone else in the world. You simply accept that Jesus really was raised from the dead and make the logically consistent confession that He is Lord. That’s it and you’re in. I hope he does, and I hope you do too.