[If] you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation … for “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Romans 10:9-10, 13)

To confess Jesus as Lord in contemporary Christian thinking has come up for debate, particularly in the area of soteriology, the study of how one is saved. Must a person submit himself to Christ’s lordship or simply believe Him to be Savior? The debate is not new. As early as the fourth and fifth centuries, scholar/churchman Augustine, who was saved from a decadent life, emphatically taught that no amount of good works or promises of such could save a person; it was all of God’s grace. His theological foe Pelagius, raised in a Christian home, championed the view that one needs to turn from sin and obey Christ in order to be saved—grace is seen as giving humans free will, and they must then choose to submit that free will to God. Variations of this debate have emerged throughout the history of Christianity. Today, the issue can be seen in the Calvinism/Arminianism debates or in the “Lordship salvation” debates.

It is common in popular presentations of the Gospel to use Romans 10:9-10 as a succinct explanation of what is required to be saved: confess Jesus as Lord and believe in His resurrection (usually termed as His death and resurrection). Does this mean a person needs to submit and change his or her life? Does it mean human effort is partly responsible or merit-worthy of salvation? What does it mean to confess Jesus as Lord?

First of all, Jesus is Lord, whether we acknowledge it or not. Second, no Christian ever perfectly submits to Christ’s Lordship (1 John 1:10). It is true that Paul deals with Jewish issues in this section of Romans, and that for a Jew to be saved, He must acknowledge that Jesus is the Lord of the OT, the God of Israel. In fact, Romans 9:13, which says, “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” is a quote from Joel 2:32, where “Lord” translates Yahweh! But this does not mean these verses do not apply to all who would come to salvation. The book of Romans has to do with becoming right with God, first for the Jews, but also for the Gentiles (Rom 1:16). And it makes sense that all people must confess Jesus as God, which is the essence of the meaning. So salvation, based on this verse, does not mean a believer needs to take steps to change his life in order to be saved. But he must believe that Jesus, as God, died and was raised again for him, and call upon the name of the Lord.

Lord, I could do nothing to add to or help with my salvation. All I did was confess Your Son Jesus as God and believe in what He did for me on the cross.