“that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” Romans 10:9 NKJV
If you’ve come to Living Word Church for a while (or maybe even just once), you may have recognized that we do a LOT of confessions of the Word of God. We confess at the beginning of service. We confess over our tithes and offerings. We make confessions before Pastor begins ministering. And when someone responds to the invitation, we confess at the end of service. So, needless to say, confession is a big part of what we believe as a ministry. You may have wondered why we confess so much. No, we are not a religious cult :-). Confession is a Biblical principle that is introduced into the life of the believer from the moment of salvation. The Bible tells us in Romans 10:9,
“that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
As we learned in last week’s Lifeline, part of the process of faith is speaking. If you believe something, you demonstrate your faith by speaking and acting out on what you believe. But have you ever felt like your confessions are meaningless or unfruitful? Do you feel like you confess, and confess, and confess, and nothing ever happens? If this describes you, you are missing a KEY component in the faith process and in understanding the confession of God’s Word. If you look at the principle outlined in Romans 10:9, it clearly tells us
IF you confess with your mouth . . . AND BELIEVE IN YOUR HEART
. . . . Believing what you confess is CRITICAL! If you do not believe what you are saying, it is just words, or wishful or hopeful thinking. Hope is very important, and Faith and Hope are powerful when they work together, but they are NOT the same thing. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith gives substance to and is the confidence of what we hope for. But hope, by itself is not enough. You must believe your confession in order for it to manifest in your life.
Now, if you are not yet in faith (in other words, you don’t yet believe what you are saying), DON’T STOP CONFESSING! Romans 10:17 KJV says “So then faith [cometh] by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. When you confess the Word of God, you are hearing the Word of God. The more you hear, the more you will believe. And when you believe AND speak, you will activate the supernatural power of God in your life. So, KEEP CONFESSING God’s Word – EVERYDAY!
Meriam L. Franklin