13. Romans 10:13 says that whosoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. This is how everyone in my church was saved and it’s good enough for me.
It may be popular now, but it’s not good enough. First of all, there are many, many passages of Scripture that prove there is more to salvation than just believing, more than just thinking a thought. And trusting in your heart is nothing more than thinking a thought. When you stand before God in judgment, the record of your life will be judged against the Word of God, the Bible. It won’t make any difference how anyone else believed, not your church, not your friends, and not your family. Each person will give account of himself.
Secondly, the book of Romans was written to the saints (Romans 1:6). It was written to people already saved by the preaching of the apostles and others in the book of Acts. This letter absolutely WAS NOT written to lost people. All of the epistles were written to the church. There are no instructions to the lost in them. If you are going to Romans for your salvation without the experience of Acts, you are just reading someone else’s mail; Romans is not written to you.
Moreover, if you look at the very first verse of Romans 10, you will see that Paul is telling his Christian friends how much he would like to see his Jewish brethren saved. Then we move on to the main issue…
13 For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Actually, if we go back to verse 8, we see that Paul is telling us that it is the “word of faith which we preach.” And the “word of faith” the apostles preached was Acts 2:38. As previously stated, believers shalt be saved. Certainly non-believers will not be. That’s what Jesus said: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.” It wouldn’t matter whether a non-believer were baptized or not.
But, there is this calling on the name of the Lord. When we get to Romans 10:13, he says those famous words, “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
There is a written record of Paul’s salvation experience. Where in the record of Paul’s conversion was there a calling upon the name of the Lord? Acts 22:16 – “And now why tarriest thou? arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.” To call on the name means to invoke the name.
Further, in the second chapter of Acts, Peter tied speaking in tongues to the same quote from the Old Testament book of Joel: “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” So, Paul didn’t come up with some new plan of believe-only salvation when he wrote Romans 10:13; he just reaffirmed the gospel that began in the second chapter of Acts.