Confessing or Professing?

Language can be an odd way of communicating what we really believe.

In fact, we regularly use language to communicate what we agree to be true but do not really want to apply to our lives.

In other words, we like to look righteous on the outside, but we want to live according to our own standards of right, we want wiggle room, we want...what we want.

Our language often allows us to do that, but God's language does not.

"If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.
Romans 10:9,10 (NASB)

A lot of people take this to mean that all we have to do is say that Jesus is Lord in order to be saved. In this way we can profess Jesus is Lord but not really confess Him as Lord.

The word "confession" means literally "Saying the same thing as another". So what is it that we are agreeing to and who is it that we are agreeing with?

Furthermore, what is implied by believing that God has raised Jesus out from among the dead?

The simple answer:
We are agreeing with God that Jesus Christ is Jehovah.

Who else can we point to that is raised from the dead with  confirmation from over 500 eyewitnesses? The caveat is that what we truly believe in our heart can only be known by God.

In other words, we can fool ourselves and others about we what we believe, but we cannot fool God Himself.

Next, we need to look at what it means to profess Christ as compared to what it means to confess Christ.

smc