Acts 4:12

And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.

There are millions who know God is real but only those who have placed their faith in Jesus will be saved.

Romans 10:13

For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Is it enough to know we are saved?

I cannot answer that question for everyone, only myself. As a teenager God made Himself known but did that mean I was saved? That is a question that has haunted me for many years. I know without a doubt that I was changed through no will of my own, it was a thing that happened to me with no effort on my part. Seeing change, did that mean I was born again? I don’t know, all I have is what I experienced after that moment.

• Psalm 95:7
  For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you hear his voice,
  John 10:3
  To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.

I did not hear His voice for decades. Does that mean I wasn’t His until I heard His voice?

I don’t know.

• Psalm 7:10
  My shield is with God, who saves the upright in heart.
• 1 Peter 3:21
  Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,

Right after my encounter with God I was baptized but my appeal to God for a good conscience did not come until I heard His voice. Yet strangely enough I felt that my life was shielded from harm so that at the appointed time I heard His voice.

Was I saved as a teen? I don’t know but now that I understand what it means to be saved I have to say not from everything. Salvation is not just one thing. I did not know that then.

Jeremiah 42:5

Then they said to Jeremiah, “May the Lord be a true and faithful witness against us if we do not act according to all the word with which the Lord your God sends you to us.

The Lord is a true and faithful witness that God is real.

How that works is personal and no one can tell you it is not real if and when God reveals Himself to you.

As an angry teen I saw myself following the same path that my oldest brother took to find himself kicked out of our home and forced to live elsewhere at the age of sixteen. I did not want to fall to that same fate so one Sunday morning, in church, I prayed to God for the first time.

“I don’t want to be like this!”

I wasn’t sure it was a prayer, I didn’t even address my thoughts to God, or Jesus, or the Lord. It was more like self-talk, admitting how I felt. It did not feel like repentance, it was an acknowledgement of helplessness.

Psalm 10:17

O Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear

While my prayer was not classic, it was enough for God to hear me and in that very moment my anger left me and it could only have been done by God.

God is real. I knew it but that was all I knew in that moment. That was my moment and it is personal and I have not heard anyone tell me that their experience in discovering God being real was the same.

Is knowing that God is real enough?

Now, sixty years later, I have to answer no.