We have seen in the past few evenings that the way for a person to be saved is not through law-keeping, good works, or repentance. I must make one point clear; that is, we are only discussing the way of salvation and not the condition for salvation. This is due to the fact that there simply are no conditions required of man for him to be saved. God has fulfilled all the requirements. The question before us tonight is this: What is the way for us to be saved? We are not dealing with the matter of condition, for that implies that one has to work for his salvation.
Tonight we are going to consider the fourth "not being." We thank God that in recent years He has moved in many places to make many people realize in their conscience what sin is, and thus their need of the Lord Jesus to be their Savior. However, without an understanding of the Bible, they often add their own words to those of the Scriptures. In so doing, they invent different ways to salvation, such as the keeping of the law, good works, repentance, and so forth. A popular method happens to be the confession of one's sins. There are those who advocate that salvation is by confession, that it is necessary for man not only to repent, but to confess his sins. I once heard one who was quite used by the Lord say that when Jesus died, He plastered onto the cross pieces of paper on which one of our sins was inscribed. He said that when we receive the Lord Jesus as Savior, we must confess our sins either before God or before men. Once a confession is made regarding a certain sin, the record of that sin would be removed from the cross. Each additional confession would remove another piece of paper. You would finally be saved when you had finished confessing all of your sins and all the sheets of paper had been torn away. What this man preached was not the gospel of God nor that of the New Testament; he had brought in a human gospel which asserts that unless a person makes confession to man and to God, his sins have yet to be removed from the cross. He utterly failed to realize what the Lord Jesus has accomplished.
I can still remember the case of a rather uneducated brother from Kuling who happened to be in Shanghai a few weeks ago. He is an electrician who installs light fixtures. He was hardly literate until recent days. Some time ago he could identify only the character "I" and not "We." He was unable to recognize most of the words in a Bible verse and needed to ask for help seven or eight times in reading a single verse. Once he said to me, "I went to listen to a sermon by a very famous person. This man maintained that we must confess our sins in public so that each sin we confess will be nailed to the cross. If we do not confess our sins openly to crucify them, we cannot be saved. He said that we must believe in the word of the cross, and that if we did not nail our sins to the cross by way of confession, there would be no way for us to be saved, for that would mean that we do not trust the cross. After his sermon, the speaker sought questions from the audience to see if there were things we were unclear about."
"Mr. Nee," the brother continued, "I am uneducated. If I were to stand up in that meeting to read a verse from the Scriptures, the people would probably have to adjust me seven or eight times. But the more I listened to the man speak, the more I felt something pounding in me. I felt that the Holy Spirit would not let me go unless I stood up. But I really did not know what to say. Eventually, I rose up. The speaker was on the platform, and I was standing on my chair! I asked, 'Sir, according to your speech, are we saved by our own cross or by the cross of Christ?' Then I sat down. Mr. Nee, can you tell me if I asked the right question?"
I told the brother that neither a doctor of divinity nor an overseer of a parish had that kind of clarity. This is the key question: Are we saved by our own cross or the cross of Christ? Does Christ's cross or my own cross save me? That sermon was undoubtedly a word of the cross, but whose cross was it? When Paul said, "For I did not determine to know anything among you except Jesus Christ, and this One crucified" (1 Cor. 2:2), he did not allude to Christ and a cross but to Christ and His cross. Dear friends, we are not saved by our own works but by the cross of Christ. Yet man equates confession of sins with works and attempts to be saved through such confession. This is the reason we must see what the Bible says regarding confession. We shall look into the Scriptures thoroughly to find out the proper position we should take in this matter.