32 “So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, 33 but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 10:32–33 (ESV)
As a child and teenager, I attended a Lutheran Church as did the rest of my family. Sunday worship services were liturgical in format and style. A lone organist, Mrs. Lieditch, provided musical accompaniment to the congregational singing of hymns from the Lutheran Hymnal; a copy of which I received as a Christmas present in 1965. I still have that hymnal in my office library. However, throughout those years I remained unconverted.
It was not until my conversion to the Gospel, and subsequently attending a Baptist church, that I encountered a more extemporaneous and spontaneous worship service format. The pastor did not wear religious vestments or robes. The preaching was Gospel centered. While we at that time still used hymnals, they contained mostly Southern Gospel songs rather than classical hymns.
One feature of the service was the public invitation, or altar call, the pastor gave near the conclusion of each Sunday morning and evening service. It was the opportunity to receive Jesus Christ as one’s personal Savior and Lord by asking Him to come into your heart. The pastor asked for anyone to come forward to the front of the auditorium in order to do so.
The biblical credence and justification for this act was taken from today’s text. If you did not come forward you were not only failing to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, you were also denying Him. No mention was made of repentance. I came away with the impression that the single act of walking the aisle to the front of the sanctuary was crucial for your salvation in Christ. If you did not do so, you were not a believer in Christ.
This was a significant issue for me because I repented of my sin and received Christ as my Savior and Lord in my upstairs bedroom of my parent’s house. I never walked an aisle to the front of the auditorium in order to do so. Thereafter, I wondered if I was truly converted and whether I failed to acknowledge Christ but had instead denied Him. The counsel I received dismissed my concerns with the simple imperative to walk the aisle.
This troubled me. Was walking the sanctuary aisle indispensable to one’s conversion. If so, what about those who never did so? The response that, “If they could have, they would have” did not ring with biblical truth for me.
I later came to understand that the public invitation to receive Christ is not explicitly found in Scripture but rather was developed by revivalist Charles Finney (1792-1875). He called it the Anxious Bench. It was one of his New Measures that supported the idea that conversion to Christ was not God sovereignly ordained but rather was/is solely a man-centered decision.
“Finney instituted the altar call, pleading during that prolonged service for sinners to come forward, kneel at the bench before the platform, confess their sins, and be saved. The New Measures were necessarily bound to Finney’s theology, which was also not only new but an intentional and decided departure from the Calvinism and from the doctrine of the sovereignty of God that dominated the First Great Awakening. Perhaps Benjamin B. Warfield best summed up Finney’s deficient theology when he observed that you could remove God from it and it would not change much of anything,” explains Dr. Stephen J. Nichols.
To acknowledge (ὁμολογέω; homologeo) means to profess, admit and declare Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. How is this to be done by someone walking an aisle and as an unconverted sinner who is then taken to a counseling room to become a converted saint?
The answer lies in the context of Jesus’ instructions to His apostles. Those who truly received the Gospel message of repentance of sin and faith in Christ would acknowledge and declare this reality before others. Those who remained unconverted would instead deny Christ. This acknowledgment would indicate if someone was a true believer or not. Rather than an invitation for the unbeliever to receive Christ, today’s text concerns the believer’s declaration of Christ.
Those who acknowledge Jesus Christ here on earth. Jesus Christ will acknowledge in heaven before God the Father. The opposite is true for those who deny Christ. This became the case with Judas Iscariot. While the other eleven apostles publically affirmed Christ as Savior and Lord, Judas, by his behavior, did not.
True conversion is by grace alone, through faith alone in the person and work of Jesus Christ alone; plus nothing. It is solely a work of the sovereign God. Even faith is a gracious gift (Eph. 2:1-9; Phil. 1:29; 2 Peter 1:1-2). Salvation is a sovereign act by God.
Soli deo Gloria!
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