Jesus has made the way for us to be saved, but we still have a response to make. We can know who Jesus is, understand why He came, and even believe that He died and rose again, but knowing these things is not the same as personally putting our faith in Him. God does not force us to receive the salvation Jesus made possible. He invites us to come to Him, believe, turn away from our sin, and place our trust in Jesus Christ.
Receiving Jesus Begins With Faith
Romans 10:9 (NLT) says, “If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Notice that this Scripture doesn’t simply tell us to believe that Jesus lived. Believing in Jesus means more than accepting that He was a real person who walked this earth. It means putting our trust in Him.
We are trusting that Jesus is who He says He is. We are trusting that He really did die for our sins, that He really did rise from the dead, and that what He did for us is enough to make us right with God. And this is where we have to let go of something many of us have spent our lives trying to do: trying to make ourselves good enough for God.
We cannot save ourselves by being good. We cannot earn salvation through good deeds. Going to church, serving others, giving money, knowing Scripture, or doing religious things cannot erase our sin and make us right with God. Salvation begins when we stop depending on ourselves and start depending on Jesus.
It isn’t about what we can do for God. It’s about trusting what God has already done for us through Jesus Christ.
Faith also means recognizing that we need to be saved. That can be difficult because most of us would rather think of ourselves as pretty good people. We may compare ourselves to people who have done things we consider the absolute worse and decide that we aren’t so bad. But salvation isn’t based on how we compare with other people. Romans 3:23 (NLT) tells us, “For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.” Every one of us needs the Savior, and receiving Jesus begins with admitting that we cannot save ourselves.
We Turn From Sin and Turn Toward God
The Bible also talks about repentance. That word can sound religious or complicated, but the basic meaning really isn’t difficult to understand. To repent means that something changes in the way we see our sin. We stop making excuses for it. We stop trying to convince ourselves that what God calls wrong isn’t really that bad. We stop defending what He tells us is wrong. Instead, we agree with Him about our sin and turn toward Him.
That’s what repentance is. It’s a change of heart and mind that leads to a change in direction.
Repentance doesn’t mean we suddenly become perfect. It means we stop running from God and start turning toward Him. We acknowledge that we have sinned, we agree with what God says about it, and we become willing to let Him change us.
Acts 3:19 (NLT) says, “Now repent of your sins and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped away.”
Notice those words: “repent…and turn to God.”
God isn’t asking us to clean ourselves up before we come to Him. He is asking us to turn toward Him—to acknowledge our sin, trust Him to forgive us through Jesus Christ, and allow Him to begin changing us from the inside out.
So we can be confident about something important: repentance does not mean we have to fix everything about ourselves before we can come to Jesus. That’s not what God is asking us to do. Think about it. If we could make ourselves right with God before coming to Him, we wouldn’t need a Savior in the first place.
We come to Jesus as we are. We come with our sin, our struggles, our failures, and all the things in our lives that still need to change. But we come with a heart that is willing to turn away from living life our own way and begin learning to live God’s way.
That doesn’t mean we will never struggle again. We will. It doesn’t mean we will get everything right. We won’t. We will still need God’s grace, God’s Word, and the Holy Spirit to help us change and grow.
But something has changed inside of us.
We no longer want a life that leaves God out of it.
We Receive Jesus Christ
John 1:12 (NLT) says, “But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God.”
Notice those words: “believed him and accepted him.”
Receiving Jesus is personal. Salvation is not something we inherit from our family. We aren’t saved because our parents believed in Jesus. We aren’t saved simply because we grew up going to church, learned Bible stories as children, attended Sunday school, or were baptized when we were young. And we aren’t saved simply because we call ourselves Christians. Those things may be part of our lives. They may have introduced us to Jesus and helped us learn about Him. But there comes a point when we have to personally respond to what we have heard and learned about Jesus.
Your mother can’t make that decision for you. Your father can’t make it for you. Your pastor can’t make it for you. Your church membership can’t make it for you.
You have to receive Jesus for yourself.
This doesn’t mean that salvation is something we accomplish on our own. Quite the opposite. Jesus has already done what we could never do for ourselves. He died for our sins, rose from the dead, and made a way for us to be reconciled to God. But we must personally respond to Him by believing in Him, trusting Him, and receiving what He has done for us.
You can grow up surrounded by faith and still need to make your own decision about Jesus.
You can know the Scriptures and still need to surrender your life to Him.
You can sit in church every Sunday and still need to personally answer the question: “What am I going to do with Jesus?”
Being around Christianity is not the same thing as belonging to Christ. At some point, faith has to become your faith. Your relationship with Jesus has to become your relationship with Him. And that is where receiving Jesus becomes personal. He has made the way. Now we have to respond.
When we receive Jesus, we are receiving Him not only as the One who saves us from our sins, but as Lord of our lives. That means we are no longer saying, This is my life and I’ll decide how I want to live it. We are placing our lives into His hands and beginning to learn what it means to trust Him, obey Him, and follow Him. We won’t understand everything about following Jesus on the day we receive Him. We don’t have to. This is the beginning of a new life with Him.
God Makes Us His Own
Something wonderful happens when we put our faith in Jesus Christ. God forgives our sins and gives us new life. We are no longer separated from Him. We belong to Him. 2 Corinthians 5:17 (NLT) says, “This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!”
That doesn’t mean we wake up the next morning with every problem gone, every bad habit broken, and every part of us completely changed. Receiving Jesus is the beginning, not the end, of what God wants to do in our lives. We begin learning His Word. We learn to pray. We learn to recognize what needs to change in us. And through the Holy Spirit, God begins helping us become more like Jesus.
You do not have to become good enough before you come to Christ. You come because you recognize that you need Him. Jesus has already done what was necessary to make salvation possible. We receive that gift by placing our faith in Him, turning to God, and surrendering our lives to Jesus Christ. And once we have received Him, another part of the journey begins: learning what it means to follow Jesus every day.
Continue Learning About Jesus Christ
What Did Jesus Accomplish? | What Does It Mean to Receive Jesus Christ? | What Does It Mean to Follow Jesus?
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“What Does It Mean to Receive Jesus Christ?”, written by Sokie for https://findchristianman.com Copyright©2026. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord!
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