Prayer for Salvation: A Catholic Salvation Prayer

For anyone who wants to turn to Christ: someone who has never been baptized, someone baptized as a baby who has never really prayed, or someone who has been away for years. It is addressed to Jesus, and asks for what he promised to give.

There is no magic form of words. What matters is what St. Paul describes: “if you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes resulting in righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made resulting in salvation” (Romans 10:9–10). A sincere prayer for salvation has four parts:

1. Honesty about sin. Not a general sense of imperfection, but the truth: I have done wrong and I need mercy. The tax collector in the Temple prayed only, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13), and Jesus said he went home justified.
2. Faith in Jesus. That he is the Son of God, that he died for us and rose again. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
3. Repentance. A real turning away from sin and toward God, which the Catechism calls the first work of grace: “Moved by grace, man turns toward God and away from sin” (CCC 1989).
4. Surrender. Giving him your life, not just your opinion.

And then the question the first Christians asked on the day of Pentecost, when they were “cut to the heart” by the preaching of Peter: “Brothers, what shall we do?” Peter’s answer was: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:37–38). That is the next step, and the one the Catholic Church still points to.

The “sinner’s prayer” is the name evangelical Christians give to a short prayer of repentance and faith, prayed often at the end of a sermon, a revival meeting or a tract, by which a person accepts Jesus as Lord and Savior. Its roots are in Protestant revivalism, and it was brought to prominence in the twentieth century by evangelists such as Billy Graham and organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ.

The words of the sinner’s prayer are not in the Bible as a fixed text. What the Bible does have are sinners who prayed and were heard: the tax collector’s “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13); the thief crucified beside Jesus, “Lord, remember me when you come into your Kingdom,” to whom Jesus said, “today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:42–43); and Paul’s promise, quoting the prophet Joel, “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13).

The best-known versions today, in summary:

• Billy Graham’s prayer admits being a sinner and asks forgiveness, professes that Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead, turns from sin, invites Jesus into one’s heart and life, and resolves to trust and follow him as Lord and Savior.
• Joyce Meyer’s prayer of salvation, as her ministry publishes it, begins by telling the Father of one’s love, professes faith in Jesus, and confesses being a sinner.
• Most church websites print a prayer with the same shape: I am a sinner; Jesus died and rose for me; I repent; I receive him as Lord and Savior.

Thoughtful evangelicals are the first to warn against treating it as a formula. The Southern Baptist Convention, reaffirming the prayer in 2012, added: “A ‘Sinner’s Prayer’ is not an incantation that results in salvation merely by its recitation and should never be manipulatively employed or utilized apart from a clear articulation of the gospel.”

Catholics and evangelicals agree on the heart of it: salvation is God’s free gift in Jesus Christ, received by faith, and no one can earn it. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). The Catechism says the same in its own words: grace is “the free and undeserved help that God gives us” (CCC 1996), and “no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion” (CCC 2010).

Where the Catholic understanding goes further is in how Christ gives that gift:

• Faith is necessary. “Believing in Jesus Christ and in the One who sent him for our salvation is necessary for obtaining that salvation” (CCC 161).
• Baptism is the sacrament of that faith. Jesus said, “unless one is born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he can’t enter into God’s Kingdom” (John 3:5), and “He who believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark 16:16). So the Catechism: “Justification is conferred in Baptism, the sacrament of faith” (CCC 1992), and “Baptism is necessary for salvation for those to whom the Gospel has been proclaimed and who have had the possibility of asking for this sacrament” (CCC 1257). St. Paul calls it “the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).
• Justification is a real change, not only a verdict. “Justification is not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man” (CCC 1989). God “makes us inwardly just by the power of his mercy” (CCC 1992).
• Grace and freedom work together. “Justification establishes cooperation between God’s grace and man’s freedom” (CCC 1993). That is why Paul can say both “by grace you have been saved” and “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you” (Philippians 2:12–13), and why James can say “by works a man is justified, and not only by faith” (James 2:24): not works that earn grace, but faith that lives.
• Christ saves through his Church. The Catechism puts the old saying “outside the Church there is no salvation” positively: “all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body” (CCC 846). It does not condemn those who, “through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church” but seek God sincerely (CCC 847).

Most people who search for a salvation prayer were baptized, as babies or later, in a Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant church. Baptism cannot be repeated: it “seals the Christian with the indelible spiritual mark (character) of his belonging to Christ” (CCC 1272). The Catholic Church recognizes the baptism of other Christians, and says of them: “All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church” (CCC 818; see also 1271).

So for a baptized person, a prayer of salvation is a prayer of return, and what the Church calls a “second conversion,” an ongoing task for every Christian (CCC 1428). For a Catholic who has fallen into grave sin, Christ gave a sacrament for exactly this: Confession, which the Church Fathers called “the second plank [of salvation] after the shipwreck which is the loss of grace” (CCC 1446).

If you have just prayed to give your life to Christ and you have never been baptized, the next step is simple: talk to a Catholic priest or call your local parish. Adults are received into the Church through a period of preparation called the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (formerly RCIA), which leads to Baptism, Confirmation and first Holy Communion, usually at the Easter Vigil. Baptism, the Catechism says, is “the basis of the whole Christian life, the gateway to life in the Spirit” (CCC 1213).

And if you were to die before you could be baptized? The Church teaches that for those preparing for Baptism, “their explicit desire to receive it, together with repentance for their sins, and charity, assures them the salvation that they were not able to receive through the sacrament” (CCC 1259). “God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments” (CCC 1257).

Many evangelical Christians are taught that a person who has sincerely prayed the sinner’s prayer can be certain of salvation. The Catholic answer is hope rather than a guarantee, and it is not a gloomy one. Grace, the Catechism says, “escapes our experience and cannot be known except by faith. We cannot therefore rely on our feelings or our works to conclude that we are justified and saved” (CCC 2005). But we can look at the fruits of grace in our lives, and trust the One who promised.

The Catechism’s example is St. Joan of Arc. Asked by her judges, as a trap, whether she knew she was in God’s grace, she answered: “If I am not, may it please God to put me in it; if I am, may it please God to keep me there” (CCC 2005). That is the Catholic prayer for salvation in one sentence.

Many people search for a salvation prayer not for themselves but for a husband, a parent, a child or a friend who does not believe. God “desires all people to be saved and come to full knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). You cannot pray on their behalf the prayer only they can pray, but you can pray for them every day, and love them in a way that makes the Gospel believable.