Why Do We Pray for Salvation?
Our prayer to believe in Jesus as our Saviour and start a relationship with him is an act of acknowledgement, and putting him on the throne of our lives. There are several Biblical references to the concept of God’s invitation and pursuit of us and our response to receive him.
In Mark, we read the parable of the sower, about the four seeds and our individual need to be like the good soil, receptive and responsive to the Gospel message in our life. “Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown.” (Mark 4:20)
An open person is receptive to the gospel. The four soils represent four different ways people respond to God’s message. Usually we think that Jesus was talking about four different kinds of people. But he may also have been talking about different times or phases in a person’s life, or how we willingly receive God’s message in some areas of our life and resist it in others. For example, you may be open to God about your future, but closed to him concerning how you spend your money. You may respond like good soil to God’s demand for worship, but like rocky soil to his demand to give to people in need. We must strive to be like good soil in every area of our life at all times.
Of course, there is the verse John 1:10 which links our acceptance (and belief or reception) of Jesus to salvation itself. “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”
Acceptance of Jesus must be personal. It is not enough to know what others say about Jesus: we must know, understand, and accept for ourselves that he is the Messiah. We must move from curiosity to commitment, from admiration to adoration. Praying to receive Jesus shows our belief in him and our commitment to a relationship with him.
