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Declare

             If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. (Romans 10:9-10 NIV)

This is a case where I am not satisfied with the NIV translation. Anyone can declare anything. We lie through our teeth in our declarations. Supposedly, declarations are given in a solemn and emphatic manner. The NASB uses “confess” instead. And again, a person can make a false confession, but it in terms of the words, I prefer “confess.” What is truly significant is the combination of the declaration/confession and the belief. This is because “belief” that does not produce declarations, proclamations, or confessions and other actions or behaviors is not belief.

The other thing that needs to be noted, however, is the tense of the verb in the last phrase of the first paragraph: “You will be saved.” Not, “You are saved.” In other words, if you declare, confession or profess that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, even if your belief less than able-bodied, it’s enough for God to build on.

There is a story that I don’t remember well enough to tell well, but it is about a man who was thoroughly bad, but chose to wear a mask of goodness to woo a woman. I think they are eventually wed, and still later, he decides to remove his mask and confess to her what a rotter he was. But the mask would not come off, or when it came off, the face beneath it matched the mask. He had become what he’d pretended to be. I suspect that one of the most dangerous things you can do is to pretend to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Declaring with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord” and pretending to believe that He rose from the dead is a step toward truly doing so. I suspect we all pretend more often than we would like to believe we do. But God can work a spiritual alchemy with the lead of pretense and transmute it into the gold of truth.

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