Revealing the Great Modern Heresy about Christian Salvation
Salvation is made possible through Jesus' sacrifice on the cross and our confession of Him as Lord. If we think that the fact of our free will means that we have to prove He's the Lord apart from the emphatic biblical declaration that salvation comes by verbal confession of Lord Jesus, then aren't we living in unrepentant sin, and extreme sin at that? Aren't we close to denying that salvation does indeed come from the mouth's confession that Jesus is Lord? Our biblical understanding about Jesus' death for our sins, burial, resurrection on the third day, and subsequent witness by many leads us to call on Him for our salvation by verbally confessing "Master Jesus", because we cannot call on Him Whom we have not believed, and those four beliefs are the necessary and sufficient set of beliefs for our salvation (1 Corinthians 15:2; Romans 10:9-14a).
Jesus' sacrifice is not merely a prerequisite for us to prove ourselves worthy as His servants. It's the saving power, itself, along with our *mere* verbal confession to ask our Master and God's Christ Jesus to perform the act of saving us. That's what the Bible says even more than Calvin said it. We have to believe "in accordance with the Scriptures" to be saved. The procedure is simple, but the necessity to adhere to all of it is adamantly intoned through God's words (see the previous passages).
The work of faith is verbal confession - not confession of sins, which lie some people have been trapped by, but confession of Lord Jesus, which is the very opposite - by which we are saved, so the Bible emphasizes 3 times in that one passage, and the beliefs we need to perform it are explicitly and completely catalogued in that other passage.
The reductionist inflection point which sneakily diverges from the Bible is that salvation IS MADE POSSIBLE through Jesus' sacrifice on the cross: it's sin to trust, think, and require that more than His actual work on our behalf is necessary, such as Roman Catholic Transubstantiation where a play-act of it is also necessary, for instance, or that we must prove we are His servants through maintaining a life of repentance as part of the cause of our salvation, which is actually an effect of our salvation!