In Romans 2: 11-13, Paul states, “For there is no partiality with God. For as many as have sinned without law will also perish without the law. As many as have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it isn't the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law will be justified.”

Romans is probably the second most doctrinal letter that Paul wrote. What I mean by that is that in it he stressed very greatly the importance of knowing what you believe and why you believe it.

Our faith cannot be composed simply of, “I believe this because it was told to me,” “I believe it because my pastor told me it was so,” “my parents told me it was so,” or even “because this is the way I was raised.” Frankly, if I believed the way I was raised, I would still be on the road to Hell!

I was raised up in a dead church. There was no truth there.

There was not even a reflection of the true Gospel. Only Spiritual darkness.

I was not told the truth of who Yeshua ha Maschiach, or Jesus the Christ, is. I was not told how to be saved.

I was given a list of good works that I could do and told that if I did them all faithfully, I could go to Heaven. That, however, is not what the Bible says.

If you get anything at all out of this book, I pray that you will understand that the true faith is not about religion. It is about having a personal relationship with the Creator, YHWH, through His Son the Savior, Yeshua.

It is not about whether you call yourself a Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran or any other denomination. It is not about attending an independent, Messianic congregation such as the one that I pastor.

It is about you, personally and individually, having a one on one relationship with Yeshua. So often when I say that, people respond with things like, “Well, that's a neat analogy.”

It is not an analogy. It is the most important truth contained in Scripture.

As well as you know your parents, your siblings, your best friend and your spouse is exactly the type of relationship you need to have with Yeshua if you are going to make it into Heaven. This means more than being able to say, “Well, I know about Yeshua.”

It means knowing Him in a way in which you actually sit down and pray and ask Him a question and you know that He is going to answer. It also means being obedient to that answer, whether you like it or not.

When we talk about being “in covenant,” we are talking about having that very type of saving relationship. This is also referred to as being saved.

One of the steps to that saving relationship is submission to His authority in your life. The Bible calls it receiving Him as Lord, which means taking off our desires, putting them aside and putting on His will for our lives.

Paul sums it up later in Romans, when he talks about the religion in which he was raised. He was an Israelite by birth and before he realized who Yesuha is he hated the Messianic Jews who later came to be called Christians.

He was the greatest persecutor of the Church at that time. But later in His life, looking back at his former religion, he wrote concerning those of the nominal “Jews” who had not received Yeshua and had therefore forfeited the promise given to Abraham.

In Romans 10: 1-4 we read, “Brothers, my heart's desire and my prayer to God is for Israel, that they may be saved. For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For being ignorant of God's righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they didn't subject themselves to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the fulfillment of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”

What he was saying is, “They are on fire for what they think God is, but they do not know who God is.” Unfortunately, the situation in the modern church is that many people who proclaim, “Yes, I am a Christian,” do not really even know what that means.

To understand this, we need to look back at Romans 2: 11, “For there is no partiality with God. ” What Paul is telling us there is that the people who are so on fire for rules and regulations and saying “Well this is what you have to do to be a part of our church and to go to Heaven,” but are just referring back to manmade doctrines, do not get it.

There are people who will tell you, “If you want to be saved you have to be baptized.” The Bible does not say that.

It says that if you are saved you will desire to be baptized. This is because it is something that Yeshua commanded all believers to do and a saved person will desire to please Him.

It does not matter how many times you get “baptized,” if your heart is not right, you will not be in covenant and you will not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. If you have not submitted to His authority in your life, the door to eternal life remains shut to you and there is no other way to open it.

So there is no partiality with God and verses 12-13 go on to say “For as many as have sinned without law will also perish without the law. As many as have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it isn't the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law will be justified.” Now I want to take a moment and ask you to take the challenge which I present on a regular basis to professing Christians whom I meet. I call this challenge the “Three Questions Everyone Must Answer.”

Throughout the pages which follow I will be answering a series of questions commonly asked by professing Christians and I will be doing so using a combination of Bible text and historical documentation. As we go along, I will strive to lay out for you the exact Scriptures you can go to in order to find support for each of these answers and, as I do this, there are three questions I am going to want you to be thinking about.

In John 11: 26, after declaring to Martha that He is the Resurrection and the Life, Yeshua asked her, “Do you believe this?” Until she had the faith to Believe this and therefore to command that the stone over the tomb should be rolled back, her brother Lazarus remained dead.

Once she had the faith, Christ commanded the dead man to come out of the tomb and he did. After having read each section and studied the adjoining Scriptures in context, I challenge the reader to ask yourself, “Do I believe this?” In John 6: 61, Yeshua asked a question of those who were questioning His teaching that the only way to Heaven is through Him. He asked them “ "Does this cause you to stumble?”

In fact it did cause many of them to stumble, and the same ceased to follow him because they were so caught up in their manmade rules and legalism that they totally missed Grace when it stood right in front of them. Again, I would challenge the reader after answering question one for each chapter, if the answer you found is “No, I do not believe this,” then ask yourself the question, “Do I not believe this because the truth of Scripture has caused me to stumble?”

The third and final question I would challenge the reader to ask, regardless of the answers to the first two questions, was posed by Pontius Pilate in the Gospel of Matthew. He was charged with deciding the fate of Yeshua ben David and under so much pressure to side with three variant factions that he was beside himself.

His wife sent him word that she had suffered greatly in a dream because of Yeshua and urged him to have nothing to do with the Son of God. On the other hand, the man who was for all practical purposes his boss, the roman authority over him, said basically, “Do not let this rebellion keep going, put it down right now.”

Then he also had the “Jewish” priests, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, none of which were truly Jews, claiming that Yeshua had declared Himself “King of the Jews” and was therefore an enemy of Caesar. So under the pressure, Pilate allowed Yeshua to be put to death.

He washed his hands of the matter and he allowed them to make their own decision, when he had the authority and the power to say, “No, this man does not deserve to die.” We even know that he did not believe Yeshua was guilty, because at one point he declared it directly.

But in the middle of all of his pondering over his predicament, in Matthew 27:22, he asked a question which every living person, both saved and unsaved has to ask. The question is, “What then shall I do to Jesus, who is called Christ?" If you are not saved, if you do not yet have that one on one relationship with Yeshua, this is the question that should be weighing most heavily upon your mind. What are you going to do to this Yeshua ha Maschiach, this Jesus who is called Christ?

Are you going to fall down at the foot of His cross and give all glory to Him? Are you going to ask Him to be your personal Savior?

If you are saved, then you must ask, “What am I going to do today to this Jesus who is the Christ?” Are you going to serve Him in a whole new way, as never before, making Him truly the Master of your existence?

I am going to tell you right now everything you have to do to be in covenant with YHWH. I am going to urge you, even if you call yourself a Christian, to ask yourself, “Have I done this?”

The first thing the Bible says you have to do to be in covenant with YHWH is to believe with all of your heart that Yeshua is the only begotten Son of God, that He died on a cross for your sins and that said sacrifice is enough in and of itself. You do not have to work it off.

There is nothing to work off, because your debt is paid. Romans 10: 8-11 says, that “But what does it say? "The word is near you, in your mouth, and in your heart;" that is, the word of faith, which we preach: that if you will confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart, one believes unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, "Whoever believes in him will not be disappointed”

Most people who call themselves Christians stop there and say, “Well, I believe in Jesus, so I must be saved.” But James 2: 19 says, “You believe that God is one. You do well. The demons also believe, and shudder.”

They tremble in fear, because they know that they are going to a place which in the Greek is called Tartarus. It is a lake of fire, which in English is called Hell.

When they go there they are going to suffer eternally, as will any soul which does not enter into YHWH’s Covenant before they leave this life.

So it is not enough to just believe. Do you believe what the Word of God says about Yeshua whole-heartedly?

To make the challenge more impacting and to do away with any misconceptions, I want to point out that many people tell me things such as, “I am a Christian, but I do not believe in a literal, six day creation.” The Bible says of Yeshua in John 1: 3 “ All things were made through him. Without him was not anything made that has been made. ”

That means if you doubt the six day creation, if you think that it took millions or even billions of years to form the universe, then you are doubting Yeshua. So I ask you again, “Do you believe what the Word of God says about Yeshua ha Maschiach whole-heartedly - all of it?

The second thing which the Word of God says that you have to do to be in covenant, is repent. Most people do not even understand what that is anymore. The modern church, that portion of it which actually mentions repentance, has watered it down until people believe that all it is to repent is to apologize to YHWH. If you ask most professing Christians if they have fully repented the typical response is something like “Yeah, I told God I was sorry for my sins.”

So? Have you repented?

To repent has two literal meanings in the Greek. First, it is to change your mind concerning something and, second it is to turn away from it.

Have you changed your mind about what the Word of God says sin is? Have you taken the things that you thought were good but the Word of God says they are bad, realized that they offend YHWH and therefore become offended by them?

Have you ceased to do them? If not, then you have not really repented!

Some people tell me, “Well, I keep the Ten Commandments.” That’s nice.

Have you allowed Him to set you free from bondage to the law of sin and death, which mandates that if you have sinned then you must die? Have you allowed Him to remove all doubt from your heart?

Let us look for just a moment at Romans 14: 23, “But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because it isn't of faith; and whatever is not of faith is sin.”

That means if you are not sure whether something is a sin and you go ahead and do it, without searching the Word of God to find out, then to you it is sin.

Going a bit deeper, you can sin in your mind. Read I John 3: 15 and tell me how long it has been since you committed murder: “Whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life remaining in him.”

I want you to ask yourself if you have ever been angry with someone. Yes, that is right.

You are guilty, but the beautiful thing about the Gospel message is this: Yeshua says that you can be forgiven. Do you repent?

Do you change your mind concerning your sin? Do you decide that there is a better way than having anger?

The third thing which the Bible says you must do to be saved, is to call on the name of Yeshua in prayer. Romans 10: 13 says, “For, "Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

You may be thinking, as I once did, ”Well every time I pray I end it with ‘In Jesus’ name’.” That is not what the Bible is talking about.

What Paul is telling us here is that to be in covenant with YHWH, we must personally ask Yeshua to be our Savior. This does not mean telling your pastor or your elders, “I want Jesus to be my Savior,” but personally asking Him to be your Savior?

I have a friend named Chad. We are pretty close and we talk on a regular basis.

I had the honor of leading him into just the sort of relationship with Yeshua that I have been discussing. We have taken mission trips together and he has been active in several of the churches which I planted.

For the two of us to be friends though, in order for us to have the relationship that we have, there had to be a point where we met face to face and we talked and decided that we were going to be friends. The very first time we met, I decided, “I like that guy.”

We started spending more and more time together and now we are the closest of friends, but it had to start with that first contact. We had to, each of us, make a choice to have a personal relationship.

I can tell you all about Yeshua. I can tell you exactly how to get to know Him.

However, no one can get to know Him for you. You have to choose to begin that relationship, by bowing your head and saying with the fullness of your heart, “Yeshua, I know I am a sinner and I need You to be my Savior.”

The fourth and final thing the Bible says you have to do to be saved is given in John 1: 12-13, “But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become God's children, to those who believe in his name: who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” We must receive Him as Lord and Savior.

That means submitting to His authority, opening up the Word of God, seeking His will for how He would have you to live your life and praying, asking Him, “Lord, how do You desire for me to be a vessel for Your ministry?” If you ask with your whole heart, He will show you in His Word and if you continuously strive to follow that vision, then you have received Him as Lord.

Now, as we close this chapter, I ask you, "Do you believe this?" and further more, "Does this cause you to stumble?" Finally, regardless of how you answered those two questions, “What are you going to do to this Jesus who is called Christ?” Maybe you began reading this book thinking, “I am a Christian” but now you are thinking, “There is some of that I have not done.” If that is the case, then I would challenge you to ask Him right now to help you to make that right.

If you have received Yeshua as your Savior after reading this book please let me know. It is my heartfelt desire to be in faithful prayer for you as you begin your new life as my Brother or Sister in Him. You may contact me at:
pastorphil@holymountainmissioncorps.cjb.net,
pastor@seedofabraham.cjb.net

or by snail mail at:
Brother Philip A. Payne, Pastor
% Seed of Abraham Teaching Ministry
1317 Columbia Street
Lafayette, Indiana 47901

For more information, please feel free to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you.