There Is No Such Thing as the Sinner’s Prayer

Salvation

Luke 18 contains no formula. It contains a guilty man pleading the blood, and a verdict from Jesus Christ.

The phrase “the sinner’s prayer” appears nowhere in Scripture. The idea behind it, that a man is saved by repeating a set of approved words, appears nowhere either. What Scripture contains is a parable about two men who prayed, and a verdict from Jesus Christ about which of them went home right with God.

Two Men, One Temple, One Day

Luke tells us who the parable is aimed at before he tells us the parable.

Two things are named there. The first is self-trust. The second is contempt for other men, which grows out of it. Then comes the setting.

Same building, same hour, same God. Everything else about them is different, and the difference is not what a first-century listener would have expected. The Pharisee was the respected man. The publican collected taxes for Rome from his own people and was despised for it.

The Pharisee Prayed With Himself

The King James gives us a detail worth stopping on. He “prayed thus with himself.” The words went up, and they came back down to the man who said them.

Look at the content. Five first-person statements, and not one request. He asks God for nothing, because he has concluded that he needs nothing. His righteousness rests on two footings. The first is comparison, a list of men he is better than, ending with the man standing at the back of the room. The second is performance, two works he can count and produce on demand.

Both footings are the man’s own. Neither of them is mercy.

The Publican Stood Afar Off

Three physical details, and each one says the same thing about how this man saw himself. He kept his distance. He kept his eyes down. He struck his own chest, which in that culture was the gesture of grief and self-accusation.

Then eleven words. He brought God no defence, no comparison, and no list of works. He acknowledged what he was and asked for mercy.

The Word Behind “Be Merciful”

The Greek behind “be merciful” is hilastheti, and it carries more than the English shows. The noun from the same root is hilasterion, which is the word for the mercy seat, the golden lid over the ark of the covenant.

It was a place with a function, and the function was blood.

It was also the place God named as the place of meeting.

Paul takes that same word family and applies it to Jesus Christ.

So the publican’s prayer reaches further than a request for leniency. He was standing in the temple, within sight of the place where blood was applied, asking God to deal with him on the ground of that blood. That is a plea for atonement.

The Verdict

Justified is a legal word. It means declared righteous, and it is God who does the declaring.

Notice the timing. He went down to his house justified. It was settled while he was still in the temple, before he had performed a single work of restitution, before he had cleaned up his occupation, before he had proved anything to anyone. The verdict came at the moment of the plea.

And notice who is left standing outside the verdict. The man who did everything right by his own measure went home exactly as he came.

Why There Is No Formula

Paul states how a man is saved in the clearest words in Scripture.

A gift is not earned, and a recited formula would be a work like any other. Saying the right sentence in the right order is something a man can perform, and anything a man can perform he can boast in. That is the door Paul closes.

The publican had no idea he was producing a model prayer. He was in trouble and he said so. If the specific words were the mechanism, Scripture would have preserved them as a required text and commanded their use. What Scripture preserves is the posture.

What God Looks At

The Old Testament had already said what God responds to.

The publican matches that description exactly. The Pharisee matches none of it.

But There Is a Prayer of a Sinner

Setting aside the formula settles one question and leaves the greater one standing. Scripture is full of men calling on God and being heard.

Calling is an act. It is done by a real person, at a real moment, with real words. Paul describes it further in the verses just above.

There is the heart and there is the mouth. Scripture commands the calling and leaves the wording to the man who calls.

The Line the Parable Draws

The parable closes with the principle that governs the whole scene. Every one that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. That is the line between the two men, and it runs through every generation since.

A man walks into the presence of God carrying one of two things, his own record or his own need. The man carrying his need goes home justified.

So the words themselves save nobody. When a lost man cries out to God in honest repentance, looking to Jesus Christ and to the blood He shed, God hears him, because Jesus Christ said He does.

There may be no biblical formula called the sinner’s prayer, but there is certainly a biblical prayer of a sinner, and Jesus said God honored it.

Amen.

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