Confess with your mouth and believe in your heart. That’s it! That’s the whole sum of requirements for going to heaven.

Now the simplicity of this is so mind-boggling that there are people from every walk of life that constantly come into the kingdom of God.

They come from everywhere and from all walks of life.

And here’s the most mind-boggling thing about this overly simple Gospel: People get saved and become Christians without knowing all the answers and having all of their issues worked out!

Now I hate to say it, but it’s unbelievable how many people look at this incredible simplicity and start having convulsions in their brain. They can’t believe that it is really possible to make God happy with you simply by confessing and believing.

And since they can’t believe it really is this easy to get right with God, they start adding things into the formula so they can fix God’s obvious mistake.

Except there is no mistake! God designed salvation to be so simple that even a simple child could understand everything necessary.

But those who think God’s plan is too simple will start adding additional requirements. Requirements that simply aren’t here.

The most common addition that I see added in is the requirement to repent and confess all your sins. But this isn’t part of Paul’s Gospel. He declared that a verbal confession of Jesus and a belief in your heart were sufficient to satisfy the requirements of God for salvation.

Now this statement is enough to make a whole lot of people’s blood boil. They really don’t think it’s supposed to be that easy. And so the additional requirements are added to “help God.”

Except God needs no help because God makes no mistakes!

It was no accident that salvation is so easy. God doesn’t take pleasure in sending people to hell. He isn’t making them jump through hoops to avoid it.

Heaven is intentionally easy! Confess and believe is no accident.

And once people confess and believe, they are then in a position to discover God’s goodness.

And if and when they discover God’s goodness, they’ll repent and move closer to Him.

But if the requirement of repentance is added into the requirements for salvation, something actually backfires in the process.

People try to change in their own power before God is able to supply them with the power that is necessary for them to change. And this is a recipe for disaster.

This is the most common reason why people come to Jesus but don’t remain. Someone told them that they were required to repent. And so they changed. But not by the power of God.

And when you aren’t changed by the power of God you will never be able to hold onto those changes.

The simplicity of the Gospel is critical to maintain. When things are added to it, it ends up inadvertently killing people.

And that’s not Good News at all.