Ten of us who serve as elders at my Presbyterian church were stationed around the sanctuary after today’s sermon to pray with anyone who wanted to accept or renew a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.

What a sacred privilege that was for me, a onetime Christian Scientist arrogantly uninterested in any such relationship. Here is the simple prayer I prepared for individuals to say aloud with me:

Jesus Son of God, my selfishness and sin have separated me far from God your Father, and I am powerless to save myself.

Please bring me near him again through your death and resurrection.

I give myself to you as Savior and Lord. I put you on the throne of my life from now on.

The sermon text was the Apostle’s succinct proclamation of the Gospel in I Peter 3:18, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.”

Our sin problem and its solution through the Cross, as presented in this verse and in my prayer at church this morning, are so distorted gnostically and metaphysically by Christian Science that all of it would have meant nothing to me before the Lord Jesus crashed into my life forty years ago.

Now it means everything to me–as it does to the new and old believers who came forward to bow with us today. No more self-salvation. Jesus on the throne. New birth and a whole new life to live. What a joy!