In planning my upcoming live Bible-teaching lessons and the material for Bible805, I felt the Lord was telling me to go back to the basics of the Christian faith, to the most important messages of our faith.
As I prayed I realized this means #1 to clarify the meaning of salvation in Jesus. If we aren’t clear about that in our own hearts first of all, if we don’t have a saving, eternal, personal relationship with Jesus, nothing else ultimately matters. I was reminded that Jesus said, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”
Again, first we must make certain of our relationship to Jesus. We need to KNOW we are saved through faith alone in Christ alone by grace alone. Our salvation is not dependent on what we do for the Lord.
Yet having said that, once we are the recipient of God’s grace, He gives us work to do and regarding the Bible805 ministry the Lord gave me, He reminded me that even if I help you understand the content of every book in the Bible from the lessons, if you can have the Prophet and Kings timelines understood and in order and if my books help you read the Bible chronologically, if you learn all that, but if I haven’t clarified the meaning of salvation in Jesus and helped you find it, I’ve failed at the most important issue in your Christian life and in my calling.
I decided to do something about it and in researching how I should respond to this conviction, I decided to see what other churches were doing to explain the basics of salvation to their congregations and visitors, so I asked CoPilot to pick out 20 local churches and link to their content on these topics, or even close approximations to the wording on these topics:
“How to Become a Christian”
“What is Christian Salvation?”
If the site did not explain these topics, I asked it to give me the reply: “No content found.”
The Results of a survey of churches on their information on how to become a Christian
For 17 out of 20 I got the reply, “No content found.”
CoPilot was quite generous in that for the three that it did show contained some content on the topic of salvation, the links were to the word in a “What we believe” section with no clear explanation of what to do to make the gift of salvation personal to an individual.
I thought perhaps CoPilot simply didn’t understand the question. What could be more basic, more core, more essential to the identity of any church than how to present the gospel? Than how to tell people what it meant to become a Christian? To be saved.
So, I went to the websites of all the churches. Not one had any sort of link or topic or header that pertained to personal salvation. Only two had a search function to even ask and when I typed in “How do I become a Christian?” nothing came up on either one.
CoPilot was correct—any seeker coming to these websites would not find out how to become a believer in Jesus if they were able to ask.
What would they find at your church?
Check your church website. NOW.
Or ministry website. NOW.
People, what are we doing? Or not doing?
I could continue with all sorts of guilt-inducing Bible verses and associated rants on how we are not making clear the foundation of our faith, but that would be unproductive and disobedient as I was praying about what to do next in the context of my Bible805 ministry, not about the negligence of other churches.
Obviously, the Lord wanted me to focus on clarifying the message of Salvation and providing tools for the church to share it. So that is what I’ve done.
I had done a lot of study and teaching on this topic in the past and so I reorganized and reformatted the material into the following material that is all available for you on www.Bible805.com and www.Bible805Academy.com websites. The materials include:
- A short book—The Good News of Salvation in Jesus, why you need it and how to get it. The book contains a detailed and clear explanation of salvation, has explanatory infographics, and a final concluding, challenging article calling readers to a salvation decision. The link is to a free PDF of it; it is also available on amazon in print.
- A video—that is essentially an overview of the book, and a clear explanation of salvation
- A podcast that is the audio version of this video and the book
- 3 infographics that illustrate how to become a Christian with a page of text containing a sinner’s prayer. **THESE are really neat and very useful–do check them out!
- A short challenge for those who have been around the church, but simply never made a decision to trust Jesus—“Have you closed with Jesus?”
- And then I broke down all the parts used to create these things and loaded them upon the Bible805Academy.com site for anyone to modify and use as is or use them for inspiration and create your own materials.
If you want to create your own materials, you don’t have to start from scratch on what to do to put materials about salvation on your church website—
You can take the basics of what I’ve put together and modify them for YOUR church. All of the source files for the materials are available on the www.Bible805Academy.com site. Here is the link to it: The Good News of Salvation in Jesus, why you need it; how to get it
For example—
- You can take the raw PowerPoint presentation, modify as you’d like, record it in your own voice and post it.
- You can take the infographics on salvation and again, do your commentary on them and post them on your website or give them out.
- You can take excerpts of the book on salvation that is in PDF format and post them on your website or newsletter.
- You can buy copies of the book and use it for seeker studies or for your people to give to friends who have questions about the Christian faith. (Yvon’s note as of 10-29-2026–don’t do that for a few weeks as I have to correct some errors and am going to create an edition of the book with a DISCUSSION GUIDE in it. It will be loaded up on amazon in a day or so, but they seem to take a couple of weeks to correct the print copies they send out.
Whatever you can use, in whatever way possible, you are welcome to it—let’s all simply make sure we share on our websites and in our lives, the most important thing—how to find salvation in Jesus.
One more thing….
Yeah, I had to go to my website, www.Bible805.com and and clarify the message of salvation. It amazing at how blind we can all be to what is most important. May the Lord have mercy on us all and bless our efforts to be clear with the people he has called us to reach about the words of eternal life and the reality of salvation in Jesus.
Go to www.Bible805.com for links to all the materials listed and my clarification of how to become a Christian, there is a graphic on the home page and the direct link to it is: https://wp.me/pazrJD-1zw
We’ve been given the Words of eternal life–let’s share them!