The Sinner's Prayer

What you may hear

A teacher closes the third-grade hour like this:

“Now, if you want Jesus to be your Savior, I want you to bow your head and pray this after me. Dear Jesus, I know I’m a sinner. I ask you to come into my heart and be my Savior. Amen. If you prayed that and you meant it, you’re saved, and you can write today’s date in the front of your Bible.”

Or, more quietly, in a hallway afterward: “I just wanted to make sure they’d all made a decision.”

Why it matters

The prayer is not wrong because it is a prayer, or because it asks something of Jesus. It is wrong because of where it puts the child’s confidence. Every clause of it locates salvation in something the child did in the last ninety seconds — the asking, the meaning it, the date in the front of the Bible. When the child is fifteen and cannot remember whether he meant it, he has nowhere to look but inward, and inward is exactly where assurance is not.

The teacher is almost never trying to teach a false doctrine. He is trying to make sure no child is left out. That instinct is good, and the correction should honor it rather than shame it. What he has not seen is that the children in front of him have already been given the thing he is trying to give them, and it was given from outside them, by name, with water and a promise.

What to do instead

Point them to their baptism.

Not as a topic. As a fact about each child in the room, spoken in the past tense and the passive voice: God put his name on you. The grammar is the correction. The sinner’s prayer is something the child does; baptism is something that was done to the child, and can be told back to him for the rest of his life.

Concretely, in the moment:

1. Do not correct the teacher in front of the class. Let the hour end.
2. Close the hour on the promise, not the decision. If you are the teacher: end with what is already true — Christ died for you, you were baptized into his death, you are his.
3. If a child asks how to be saved, answer with what God has done and where he has put it: the cross, the font, the Word he keeps hearing. Never send a child looking for a feeling to verify.
4. If children have already been led in the prayer, do not tell them the prayer was worthless. Tell them the better news: they did not have to get that right, because God had already claimed them, and he did not do it on the strength of how well they prayed.
5. Take it to the pastor or the deacon board, not to the parking lot. Use whoever your congregation has charged with oversight of teaching; in the congregation this guide was written from, the deacons carry Sunday school oversight as an extension of the pastoral office, so either route is right. A teacher using an evangelical formula usually learned it in a church that loved him. He needs that oversight, and it needs to know this happened.

One line you can actually use

“You don’t have to remember the day you chose Jesus. You get to remember the day he chose you — and that one is written down.”

If the student asks

This is the same error arriving from the other direction, and it is the form you will meet most often. A child or an adult asks:

“How do I know I’m really saved? What if I didn’t mean it when I prayed?”

Do not answer by helping them examine the sincerity of the prayer. That is the trap the question is already inside; a better-inspected feeling is still a feeling. Move the ground:

“That’s the wrong place to look, and I’m glad you asked, because you can stop looking there. You weren’t saved by meaning something hard enough. You were baptized. God said your name and put his promise on you, and he has not taken it back. When you doubt, don’t check your feelings — go back to that.”

Then, if it keeps coming up, hand it to the pastor. Persistent anxiety about assurance is not a curriculum problem, and it is not yours to resolve alone. This one goes to the pastor rather than the deacon board — a conscience in that condition needs the office, not oversight.

The confessional citation

AFLC congregations subscribe, in their constitutions, to the three ecumenical creeds, Luther’s Small Catechism, and the Unaltered Augsburg Confession. Entries cite those three first; anything beyond is marked supplementary. If your congregation subscribes to the whole Book of Concord, the supplementary texts are binding for you — see the introduction.

Binding:

• Augsburg Confession V — the ministry of teaching the gospel and administering the sacraments was instituted so that we may obtain this faith; through the Word and sacraments as instruments the Holy Spirit is given, who works faith where and when it pleases God. The article then rejects those who hold that the Spirit comes to people without the external Word, through their own preparations and works. This is the decisive article. The sinner’s prayer is a preparation and a work; AC V says the Spirit does not come that way.
• Augsburg Confession IX — baptism is necessary to salvation; by baptism the grace of God is offered; children are to be baptized.
• Small Catechism, Holy Baptism, Second Part — what benefits baptism gives: forgiveness of sins, rescue from death and the devil, and eternal salvation to all who believe this, as the words and promises of God declare.

Supplementary, not binding under the AFLC standard: Apology IV and Formula of Concord II treat conversion and the bound will at length and are useful to the teacher who wants to go deeper. Do not cite them as the congregation’s standard.

Edition: Kolb-Wengert. Confessional summaries here are paraphrase, not quotation, cited by article and part; see the Kolb-Wengert note in the Entries 2–5 file.

Scripture: Ephesians 2:8–9; Titus 3:5; John 15:16.

What not to do

The overcorrection is real and does its own damage. Do not:

• Tell a child his baptism means he is fine regardless of whether he believes. Baptism is not a charm. The Catechism ties the benefit to faith in the promise, and the answer to a child who does not believe is to keep preaching the promise, not to reassure him that the water did it mechanically.
• Treat every mention of a decision as heresy. A teacher saying “I want you to trust Jesus” is not teaching decision theology. Reserve the correction for where confidence is actually being relocated.
• Make baptism into a new work. “Remember your baptism harder” is the sinner’s prayer wearing a Lutheran coat.
• Correct in front of children. They will remember the conflict and forget the doctrine.