What Is Salvation? A Simple Guide to Being Born Again and Finding Eternal Life in Jesus

The most important question you will ever answer, explained with honesty, warmth, and the full weight of Scripture.

Somewhere in the world right now, someone is sitting in a church for the first time and hearing a word they have never heard used quite this way before. Someone else is lying awake at three in the morning, feeling the weight of a life that has drifted far from God, and wondering whether it is too late to come home. And someone else is reading their Bible and stumbling on a passage that uses the phrase “born again” and wondering what on earth that could possibly mean in practical terms.

This article is for all three of those people. And for the person who has been a Christian for twenty years but has never sat down and thought carefully about what salvation actually is, where it comes from, and what it really changes. Because it turns out that salvation is not a simple topic at all, even though the path to it is beautifully simple. It is one of the most vast, layered, astonishing things the Bible talks about, and most of us have only ever seen the surface of it.

We are going to go deep here. We are going to look at what the Bible means when it uses the word salvation, why human beings need it in the first place, what Jesus actually did to make it available, what it means to be born again, and how you can know with real and settled confidence that you have received it. By the end of this article, my prayer is that salvation will not just be a church word for you. It will be the most personal and the most beautiful word you know.

What We Will Explore Together

What Does Salvation Actually Mean?
Why Do We Need to Be Saved?
What Jesus Did to Make Salvation Possible
What Does It Mean to Be Born Again?
Faith, Repentance, and the Moment of Salvation
Five Myths About Salvation That Hold People Back
How to Know You Are Saved
What Eternal Life Looks Like Now and Forever
How to Receive Salvation Today

What Does Salvation Actually Mean?

The English word salvation comes from the Latin salvatio, which carries the ideas of rescue, safety, healing, and preservation. When you save someone from drowning, you bring them out of a situation where death was certain into a situation where life is possible again. That physical image is exactly what the Bible has in mind when it speaks of spiritual salvation, although the reality it describes goes so much further.

The most common Hebrew word translated as salvation in the Old Testament is yeshuah. If that word sounds familiar, it should. It is the Hebrew name behind the Greek Iesous, which in English becomes Jesus. So when the angel told Joseph in Matthew 1:21 to name the child Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins,” the very name of Jesus is the word salvation. He did not just bring salvation. In some profound way, He is salvation. His name announces His mission.

In the New Testament, the Greek word most often translated as salvation is soteria, and the related verb sozo. These words carry a range of meaning that is richer than we often realize. They mean to rescue from danger, to heal from disease, to restore to wholeness, to deliver from the power of an enemy, and to preserve for eternity. When Jesus healed the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years in Mark 5:34, He told her that her faith had “saved” her (sozo). When Zacchaeus received Jesus into his home and repentance broke out in his life, Jesus declared that “salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9). The word stretches from forgiveness of sins all the way to the healing of the whole person, body and soul and relationship with God.

What Salvation Includes

Justification: Being declared righteous before God, having your sin record cleared through the work of Jesus on the cross
Regeneration: Being spiritually reborn, receiving a new nature and new desires, becoming a new creation from the inside out
Adoption: Being brought into the family of God as a beloved and permanent child, with all the rights and intimacy that involves
Sanctification: The ongoing process of being transformed to look more like Jesus throughout your whole life
Reconciliation: The restoration of your broken relationship with God, peace replacing the hostility that sin created
Redemption: Being bought back from slavery to sin and death at the price of Jesus’s own blood
Glorification: The final, future completion of salvation when you will be fully and permanently transformed to share in the glory of Christ

Most people, when they think about salvation, think primarily about forgiveness. And forgiveness is real and wonderful and absolutely central. But it is just the beginning. Salvation is not merely a legal transaction where a debt is cancelled. It is a complete relational and spiritual transformation. You were an enemy of God and you become His child. You were spiritually dead and you become alive. You were lost and you are found. Every one of those images is in the Bible because no single picture can hold everything that salvation is.

Why Do We Need to Be Saved?

This is the question modern culture is most uncomfortable with. Many people today have no difficulty believing in Jesus as a teacher, a moral example, or even a divine figure of some kind. What they resist is the idea that they need saving. The suggestion that human beings are in serious trouble apart from God feels offensive or outdated. Surely, the thinking goes, we are mostly good people who make some mistakes and are generally trying our best.

The Bible has a different diagnosis. And it is important to understand that the Bible’s diagnosis is not meant to humiliate us. It is meant to be honest with us about a situation that is genuinely serious, so that we can receive a remedy that is genuinely real. A doctor who refuses to tell you the truth about a diagnosis because he does not want to upset you is not kind. He is failing you. God tells us the truth about our situation because He loves us and because He has the cure.

The Problem of Sin

The Bible’s word for the core human problem is sin, and it is a bigger word than most people think. At its most basic level, sin means missing the mark, failing to live up to the standard of what human beings were designed to be. But it goes deeper than occasional moral failure. Romans 5:12 tells us that sin entered the human race through Adam, and that death spread to all people because all have sinned. We are not sinners simply because we sin. We sin because we are sinners, born into a condition of spiritual disconnection from God that expresses itself in the full range of human brokenness.

The theologian John Piper describes sin as fundamentally a condition of the heart that prefers anything and everything above God. It is not just the dramatic failures. It is the quiet insistence that we know better than God, that we are the ultimate authority over our own lives, that our desires and our agenda matter more than His. Pride, in the biblical sense, is the engine of sin. And every human being is born with that engine running.

The consequence of sin, as Romans 6:23 states plainly, is death. Not just physical death, but spiritual death, which is separation from God, who is the source of all life and goodness. The prophet Isaiah described it this way: “Your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear” (Isaiah 59:2). The gap between human beings and God is not a gap of distance but a gap of nature. God is perfectly holy. We are not. And that gap cannot be closed by human effort, goodness, or religious performance.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.Romans 3:23-24 (NIV)

It is worth noticing that Paul does not stop at verse 23. He moves immediately to verse 24: all have sinned, and all are justified freely by grace. The diagnosis is followed immediately by the cure. This is the consistent pattern of the gospel. The bad news and the good news belong together, because the good news only makes sense in light of the bad news. And the good news is astonishing precisely because the bad news is serious.

The Human Attempt to Fix It

Throughout all of human history, people have attempted to bridge the gap between themselves and God by their own effort. Religion, in most of its forms, is essentially a human attempt to climb toward God through ritual, moral improvement, sacrifice, or spiritual discipline. And the Bible does not dismiss the sincerity of those attempts. But it does say, clearly and repeatedly, that they cannot work.

Isaiah 64:6 puts it starkly: “All our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” The image is extreme by design. Even our best moral performances, when placed on the scales of God’s perfect holiness, are hopelessly insufficient. This is not because God is cruel or impossible to please. It is because the standard of perfection is absolute, and none of us have met it, and none of us can. We need something from outside ourselves. We need rescue.

What Jesus Did to Make Salvation Possible

Here is where the Christian gospel becomes unlike anything else in the history of religion. Every other major religious tradition in the world places the responsibility for closing the gap between humanity and God on the human side. Perform enough good deeds. Meditate deeply enough. Follow the rules carefully enough. Earn your way upward.

The gospel of Jesus Christ says something completely different. It says that God looked at the unbridgeable gap between Himself and His broken creation, and instead of waiting for humanity to climb up to Him, He came down. He took on human flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He lived the perfectly obedient life that none of us have ever lived. And then He went to the cross.

The Cross: More Than a Symbol

The cross of Jesus Christ is the most important event in all of human history. Not because it is an inspiring example of courage or self-sacrifice, although it is certainly both of those things. But because of what was actually happening in the spiritual dimension while the physical event unfolded on a hill outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago.

The apostle Paul explains it in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” This is what theologians call the great exchange. Jesus, who was perfectly righteous, took upon Himself the sin of every person who would ever come to Him in faith. And His righteousness, His perfect standing before God, was credited to us. He got our debt. We get His inheritance. That is not a transaction. That is a miracle.

The word used in the New Testament for this is hilasterion, often translated as propitiation or atoning sacrifice. It means the full satisfaction of God’s righteous judgment against sin. God did not simply overlook sin, which would have been unjust. He dealt with it completely, absorbing its full penalty in the body of His own Son, so that the demand of justice and the desire of mercy could both be perfectly honored at the same moment. As the theologian R.C. Sproul wrote, the cross is where the love of God and the justice of God meet, and neither is compromised.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8 (NIV)

Notice the timing. Not after we cleaned up our lives. Not after we became religious or respectable or good enough. While we were still sinners. The love that sent Jesus to the cross was not responding to anything admirable in us. It was responding to something in God: an unconditional, pursuing, sacrificial love that decided the price of our salvation was worth paying even when we were the ones who had created the problem in the first place.

The Resurrection: The Seal of Everything

The cross is not the end of the story. Three days later, Jesus rose bodily from the dead. The resurrection is not an optional extra for Christians who like happy endings. It is the very foundation of the Christian faith. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:17, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” The resurrection is God’s declaration that the work of the cross was accepted, that the penalty was fully paid, that death had been defeated, and that the new creation had begun.

New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, who has spent decades examining the historical and theological dimensions of the resurrection, argues that no other explanation adequately accounts for the evidence: the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances to multiple witnesses, and the transformation of a frightened group of disciples into a community so certain of what they had seen that they built a movement that changed the world. The resurrection is the cornerstone of everything the gospel claims.

What Does It Mean to Be Born Again?

The phrase “born again” has had a complicated life in modern culture. It has been used as a political label, a social category, and sometimes as a punchline. But before it became any of those things, it was a conversation between Jesus and a man named Nicodemus recorded in John chapter 3, and it is one of the most illuminating exchanges in all of the New Testament.

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a member of the Jewish ruling council, and clearly a man who had been impressed by what he had heard about Jesus. He came to him at night (perhaps not wanting to be seen) and opened the conversation with a generous acknowledgment: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.” Jesus did not respond with a warm thank you. He went straight to the heart of what Nicodemus really needed to hear: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (John 3:3).

Nicodemus, being a very literal thinker, asked the obvious question: how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time? Jesus clarified that He was not talking about physical birth but about spiritual birth, being born of water and the Spirit. The idea is that there are two kinds of life: natural, physical life that every human being receives at birth, and spiritual life that only God can give. Being born again means receiving that second kind of life, a life that was not there before, that is not a renovation of the old life but an entirely new beginning.

Anothen

Born Again / Born From Above

The Greek word Jesus uses can mean both “again” and “from above.” It is deliberately layered. The new birth is a second birth, but it is also a birth that comes from above, from God Himself. It is not something you produce. It is something God does in you.

Paliggenesia

Regeneration / Renewal

The New Testament word for the new birth in its fullest sense. It means a complete renewal of nature, not a patch on the old life but a new creation. Paul uses similar language in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come.”

Theologians use the word regeneration to describe this experience. It means that God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, gives spiritual life to a person who was spiritually dead. It is not primarily a feeling, though it often produces profound feelings. It is a change of nature, a change of direction, a change of desire. People who have been born again find themselves wanting things they never wanted before, caring about things that previously left them cold, and finding the Bible coming alive in a way it never did when they read it as an outsider.

The theologian R.C. Sproul at Ligonier Ministries explains that regeneration is entirely the work of God, not something we manufacture through our own spiritual effort. It is God who awakens the dead soul. Our response of faith and repentance flows from that awakening, not the other way around. This is why Jesus said in John 6:44 that no one can come to Him unless the Father draws them. The new birth begins with God’s initiative. Our response is a real and necessary response, but it is a response to something God first does in us.

Testimony ✦ John Newton

Few lives illustrate the transforming power of the new birth more dramatically than that of John Newton. Born in 1725, Newton spent years as a slave trader, a man complicit in one of history’s most brutal industries. He was, by his own description, a man of “the most abandoned principles” who lived without conscience or regard for God.

In 1748, caught in a violent storm at sea that he was certain would kill him, Newton cried out to God for mercy. It was the beginning of a long and genuine conversion. Over the following years, under the influence of the evangelical revival, he came to genuine faith in Jesus Christ and eventually left the slave trade, was ordained as a minister, became a fierce abolitionist working alongside William Wilberforce, and wrote the hymn that remains one of the most beloved songs in the world: Amazing Grace.

The line “that saved a wretch like me” was not false modesty. Newton knew exactly what he had been and exactly what grace had done. His life is a testimony to the fact that no one is too far gone, no history too dark, no sin too deeply rooted for the new birth to break through. You can read more of his story at the Olney Hymns Archive.

Faith, Repentance, and the Moment of Salvation

If salvation is a gift freely given by God, and if the new birth is something God does in us rather than something we produce ourselves, then the natural question is: what is our part? What does a human being actually do in order to receive salvation?

The New Testament uses two primary words to describe the human response to the gospel: faith and repentance. These are not two separate things that need to be done in sequence. They are two dimensions of the same turning of the whole self toward God. You cannot truly repent without faith in the God you are turning toward. And you cannot truly believe without the turning away from sin and self that repentance involves.

What Faith Actually Means

The Greek word for faith in the New Testament is pistis, and it is considerably more robust than the English word faith often implies. Faith in the biblical sense is not wishful thinking. It is not believing something without evidence. It is not a feeling of religious warmth. Pistis involves knowledge, assent, and trust. Knowledge of what Jesus did and who He is. Assent to the truth that these things apply to you personally. And trust, the decisive act of placing the whole weight of your life on the person of Jesus Christ, the way you place your weight on a bridge when you trust it will hold you.

The Reformers described saving faith using the Latin terms notitia (knowledge), assensus (agreement), and fiducia (personal trust). It is that third element, fiducia, that is the heart of it. You can know the facts about Jesus and agree they are true and still not be saved, because you have never personally trusted Him. Saving faith is the moment when you move from knowing about Jesus to entrusting your eternal soul to Him. You can explore this further in the Gospel Coalition’s essay on justification by faith.

What Repentance Actually Means

The Greek word is metanoia, which literally means a change of mind. But this is not a merely intellectual change of opinion. It is a whole-life reorientation. Repentance means recognizing that you have been living with yourself at the center of your life rather than God, and genuinely turning to place God at the center instead. It involves sorrow for sin, but it is much more than sorrow. The New Testament distinguishes between “worldly sorrow” (which is really just regret at getting caught or at suffering consequences) and “godly sorrow” which “brings repentance that leads to salvation” (2 Corinthians 7:10).

True repentance is not a feeling of being sufficiently miserable about your sin before God will accept you. That would make repentance itself a kind of payment, and salvation is by grace, not by achieving a minimum level of distress. True repentance is a change of direction. A decision. A willingness to have God reorder your life and your priorities. It is the open hand that receives the gift of salvation rather than the clenched fist that insists on running things your own way.

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.Romans 10:9-10 (NIV)

This is one of the clearest and most beautiful summaries of what salvation looks like from the human side. Believe in your heart. Declare with your mouth. Heart belief is not surface-level intellectual agreement. It is the deep, committed trust that Jesus is who He said He is and that His resurrection is a real historical event with real implications for your life. The declaration with the mouth is the external, relational expression of that internal reality, the moment you align yourself publicly with the name of Jesus.

Five Myths About Salvation That Hold People Back

One of the saddest things I encounter in Christian ministry is people who genuinely want to know God but who are being held back by false ideas about what salvation requires. The enemy of our souls is patient and creative, and the lies he tells about salvation tend to be believable precisely because they have a grain of something reasonable in them. Let us name five of the most common ones and hold them up to the light of Scripture.

✗ Myth 1: I Need to Clean Up My Life First

✓ The Truth

Salvation is not a reward for reaching a minimum standard of respectability. Romans 5:8 says Christ died for us “while we were still sinners.” You do not clean up before you come to Jesus. You come to Jesus because you cannot clean up on your own. He is not waiting for you to be better. He is the one who makes you better, and that process begins at salvation, not before it. Come as you are. That is not just a song. It is the whole shape of the gospel.

✗ Myth 2: I Have Done Something Too Bad to Be Forgiven

✓ The Truth

The apostle Paul described himself as the chief of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15), a man who had violently persecuted Christians and participated in the murder of Stephen. If grace could reach Paul, it can reach you. The thief on the cross next to Jesus had presumably spent a lifetime in crime and was hours from death when he turned to Jesus and received the promise of paradise that very day (Luke 23:43). The only sin the Bible names as unforgivable is the permanent, hardened rejection of the Holy Spirit, and the very fact that you are reading this article and wondering whether you can be forgiven is evidence that you have not committed it.

✗ Myth 3: I Need to Feel Something Dramatic

✓ The Truth

Some people come to faith in a dramatic, Damascus Road moment like Paul’s. Others come gradually, through years of reading and questioning and slowly softening. Some feel overwhelming emotion when they receive Christ. Others feel a quiet, settled peace. Some feel nothing at all in the moment and only later see the evidence of change in their lives. Salvation is not grounded in a feeling. It is grounded in the word of God and in the finished work of Jesus. 1 John 5:13 says these things were written “so that you may know that you have eternal life.” Not feel. Know.

✗ Myth 4: I Tried Christianity Before and It Didn’t Work

✓ The Truth

Many people have had a religious experience that did not last, or went to church for a season and drifted away, and have concluded that salvation is therefore not real. But it is worth asking honestly: was what you experienced genuine saving faith, or was it something more superficial? Cultural Christianity, religious habit, emotional experience at a camp or event, these things are real but they are not the same as the deeply rooted, personally owned faith that the New Testament describes. The invitation is open again right now. The God who pursued you the first time is pursuing you still.

✗ Myth 5: Good People Go to Heaven

✓ The Truth

This is probably the most widespread religious belief in the world and it is not the gospel. It is moralism. The gospel does not say good people go to heaven. It says forgiven people go to heaven. The basis of salvation is not your moral record but the work of Jesus on the cross credited to your account. This is why Jesus said in John 14:6 that He is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through Him. Not through being good enough. Through Him. This is not a narrow or exclusive claim designed to leave people out. It is the specific, named, available, sufficient Savior reaching His arms open wide to receive anyone who comes.

How to Know You Are Saved

One of the most pastoral and important questions in all of Christianity is this: can a believer know with genuine certainty that they are saved? The answer the Bible gives is an emphatic yes. 1 John was written, as John says explicitly in 1 John 5:13, “so that you may know that you have eternal life.” Not wonder. Not hope on good days and despair on bad days. Know.

The Puritan pastor Thomas Brooks wrote that assurance of salvation is not a luxury reserved for the spiritually elite. It is the birthright of every true believer, something God desires His children to have and has provided multiple means of receiving. The Ligonier Ministries guide to assurance of salvation outlines these means beautifully. Let us look at the three main foundations.

The Foundation of God’s Word

The most objective and reliable ground of assurance is the promise of God in Scripture. John 3:16 says that whoever believes in Jesus will have eternal life. Romans 10:13 says that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. These are not conditional promises that expire if you have a bad week. They are the settled, covenant promises of a God who does not lie and does not change His mind. If you have genuinely believed and called upon the name of the Lord, the word of God says you are saved. Full stop.

The Witness of the Holy Spirit

Romans 8:16 says that the Holy Spirit “testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” There is an internal witness, a settled awareness of belonging to God, that the Spirit gives to the people who have been born again. This is not the same as an emotion, though it may sometimes feel like one. It is deeper than emotion. It is the Spirit of God Himself bearing witness to the reality of your new relationship with your Father. The Puritan theologians called this the testimonium Spiritus Sancti internum, the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit.

The Evidence of a Changed Life

The third ground of assurance is what theologians call the evidence of regeneration, the fruit of the new birth visible in the pattern of your life. 1 John 3:14 says “we know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other.” Not that we feel religious sometimes, or that we go to church regularly, but that love is being produced in us as a fruit of the Spirit’s work. This includes love for other believers, a growing desire to know God through Scripture and prayer, a genuine grief over sin, and a persevering faith that holds even through difficulty. None of these things are perfect in any believer, but they are present and they are growing. You can read more about the marks of genuine faith in J.I. Packer’s classic work Knowing God, which has guided millions of believers into deeper assurance and intimacy with their Father.

“Assurance is not arrogance. It is the humble confidence of a child who knows their Father and trusts His word over their own feelings.”

What Eternal Life Looks Like Now and Forever

When most people hear the phrase “eternal life,” they think of what happens after death, the heaven that begins when this life ends. And eternal life certainly includes that future dimension. But Jesus defines eternal life in a way that begins right now. In John 17:3 He says: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” Eternal life is knowing God. And knowing God starts the moment you come to Him in faith.

This means that salvation does not simply affect your destination. It transforms your present existence. The person who has received salvation has a new identity, a new relationship, a new purpose, new desires, new power over sin, a new community, and a new hope that extends beyond the horizon of this life. The apostle Peter calls it “an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade, kept in heaven for you” (1 Peter 1:4). The biblical picture of the new creation that God is preparing is not a ghostly, disembodied existence on clouds but a redeemed, renewed, physical, relational, worshipful life in the presence of God that makes the best moments of this life look like faint shadows of the real thing.

The early church father Augustine captured the arc of salvation in a sentence that has echoed through sixteen centuries: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” Salvation is the beginning of that rest. Not the absence of all struggle, but the arrival at the relationship you were designed for, with the God who made you, through the Son who rescued you, by the Spirit who lives in you. That relationship has no end.

How to Receive Salvation Today

Everything in this article has been building toward this point. Because the most important thing about salvation is not understanding it as a theological concept. The most important thing is receiving it as a personal gift. And you can do that right now, wherever you are reading these words.

Salvation comes to those who, with genuine faith and repentance, call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Here is what that looks like in practice:

Acknowledge Your Need

Be honest with God about where you stand. You do not need to dress it up or minimize it. You are a sinner who needs saving. So is every other human being who has ever lived. The posture is honesty, not performance. God already knows everything about you and He is not shocked by any of it.

Believe in Jesus and What He Did

Accept the historical, personal truth that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that He died on the cross bearing your sin, and that God raised Him from the dead three days later. This is not mythology. It is the most well-attested event in the ancient world, investigated by skeptics and scholars across centuries, and it is the foundation of everything you are placing your trust in.

Repent and Turn to God

This is the turning point, literally. Turn away from living with yourself at the center and turn toward living with God at the center. This is not a vow to be perfect from this moment forward. It is a genuine change of direction, a decision that you want God to have first place in your life. The Holy Spirit will help you with the rest.

Call on the Name of Jesus

Pray. Out loud if you can, in your heart if that is all you have right now. Tell Jesus that you receive Him as your Lord and Savior. You are not saying magic words. You are entering into a real conversation with a real Person who is listening and who, according to His own word, will not turn anyone away who comes to Him (John 6:37).

Tell Someone and Find a Church

Jesus said in Matthew 10:32 that whoever acknowledges Him before others, He will acknowledge before the Father. Telling someone you have given your life to Christ is not optional extra credit. It is part of the fabric of genuine faith. Find a Bible-believing, Christ-centered church near you using the Gospel Coalition Church Finder. Get baptized as a public declaration of your new life. Begin reading the Bible daily, starting with the Gospel of John. You have started the greatest adventure of your life.

A Prayer of Salvation

If you are ready to receive Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, the following prayer expresses the heart of what it means to come to God in faith. The words themselves are not what saves you. The faith and the relationship are. But if these words express what is in your heart, pray them honestly to God right now.

Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner and that I need You. I believe that You are the Son of God, that You died on the cross for my sins, and that God raised You from the dead. I repent of my sins and I turn to You now. I receive You as my Lord and my Savior. Come and live in me by Your Holy Spirit. Make me new. I am Yours now and forever. In Jesus’s name, Amen.A Prayer of Salvation

If you prayed that prayer sincerely, the Bible says you are now a child of God. John 1:12 says: “Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” Welcome to the family. The angels in heaven are celebrating right now (Luke 15:10). And the God who made you and pursued you and sent His Son to rescue you is holding you, right this moment, in hands that will never let you go.

Your New Life Starts Here

Begin reading the Bible today with a plan designed for new and growing believers. The Gospel of John is the perfect starting place.Start Reading the Gospel of John

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Written by a Follower of Jesus Christ

This article is written by someone who believes with their whole heart that Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of the world, that the Bible is the living and authoritative Word of God, and that salvation through Christ alone is the greatest news ever announced to the human race. All Scripture quotations are from the New International Version (NIV) unless otherwise noted.

What Is Salvation? A Simple Guide to Being Born Again and Finding Eternal Life in Jesus

What Does Salvation Actually Mean?