With your heart… and with your mouth
Romans 10:10 - We must devote and give up to God our souls and our bodies: our souls in believing with the heart, and our bodies in confessing with the mouth.
“For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.”
Romans 10:10 NIV
Today we’re looking at Romans 10:10. This verse is a bookend to Romans 10:9 — “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
The verse goes into more detail explaining the need to internally believe in Christ’s resurrection in order to be justified and to also declare your belief in Jesus externally to be saved.
What does it mean to believe with your heart, the prerequisite for justification? A good explanation is found in the commentary of 17th-century minister Matthew Henry (from BibleHub):
The self-condemned sinner need not perplex himself how this righteousness may be found. When we speak of looking upon Christ, and receiving, and feeding upon him, it is not Christ in heaven, nor Christ in the deep, that we mean; but Christ in the promise, Christ offered in the word. Justification by faith in Christ is a plain doctrine. It is brought before the mind and heart of every one, thus leaving him without excuse for unbelief. If a man confessed faith in Jesus, as the Lord and Saviour of lost sinners, and really believed in his heart that God had raised him from the dead, thus showing that he had accepted the atonement, he should be saved by the righteousness of Christ, imputed to him through faith. But no faith is justifying which is not powerful in sanctifying the heart, and regulating all its affections by the love of Christ. We must devote and give up to God our souls and our bodies: our souls in believing with the heart, and our bodies in confessing with the mouth. The believer shall never have cause to repent his confident trust in the Lord Jesus. Of such faith no sinner shall be ashamed before God; and he ought to glory in it before men.
The Expositor’s Greek Testament (also cited in BibleHub) then shows that the heart believing and the mouth confessing are really the same for the person of faith:
To separate the two clauses, and look for an independent meaning in each, is a mistake; a heart believing unto righteousness, and a mouth making confession unto salvation, are not really two things, but two sides of the same thing.
Romans 10:9-10 are similar in content, and are of a style known as Hebrew parallelism. In this style, what has been said in the first part of a saying is repeated again, but with the words varied. Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer (there’s a name for you!), in his New Testament commentary (once again from BibleHub) wrapped up these two verses rather neatly:
“With the faith of the heart is united the confession of the mouth to the result that one obtains righteousness and salvation.”
Repeating that one phrase from Matthew Henry again, “We must devote and give up to God our souls and our bodies: our souls in believing with the heart, and our bodies in confessing with the mouth.”
Heaven On Wheels Daily Prayer:
Today’s prayer comes from Knowing Jesus:
Heavenly Father, there is much that I do not understand about the Word of God and much that I need to be taught, but I pray that the Holy Spirit would guide me into all truth. Keep me from being swayed away from the truth of the glorious gospel of grace into a distorted gospel by those that show religious zeal, religious ignorance, religious intolerance, or religious arrogance. Help me to study to show myself approved unto God and give me the wisdom and the humility to seek You when I do not understand. Open my eyes, I pray, so that I may see wonderful things in Your written Word. This I ask in Jesus' name, AMEN.