You could join a church. You can go through a religious ceremony. You can say a prayer and not be changed. But if you really encounter Jesus, you will be changed. No one encounters Jesus and remains the same.
Salvation
Jack Frost
Though unconditional love is free, it is a costly business. Accepting God’s gracious gift and dwelling in intimacy will cost you everything, especially your pride. God’s nature is one of love and light; He will love you unconditionally, but because He is light, it will be very difficult for you to choose to walk in darkness and maintain intimacy in relationships with God and others.
Sadhu Sundar Singh
The life of the believer and that of the unbeliever show great similarity in their beginning, but when their end comes, they are as diverse as the snake and the silkworm. The snake, however many times he casts his skin, remains a snake and nothing else, but the silkworm, when it casts off its unsightly cocoon, becomes a new creature and as a dainty pretty moth flies about in the air. So the believer, casting aside this body, enters into a state of spiritual glory and flies about forever in heaven, while the sinner after death is but a sinner still.
Author Unknown
I know that His love is better than life! Is this true for you? Jesus changed my life in a single moment, an encounter, His love came rushing in. He took my brokenness and made something beautiful. He can do the same for you, all you have to do is ask Him.
Sally Lloyd-Jones
When you lose the story that’s running like a golden stream underneath all the other stories, you’re left with the idea that the Bible is a collection of random-seeming stories about various Bible characters that we’re supposed to learn lessons from – almost like an Aesop’s Fables. And a book of rules that God wants us to keep so he will love us. And we lose the glorious truth of the Bible that we were loved before even the beginning of time. That God had a plan. That no matter what, he would never stop loving us.
A.W. Tozer
God takes that which is nothing and makes something out of it. When you become a Christian, you cannot patch your Christianity onto your old life. You are to start over. Accept God’s call as a promotion. Burn the old bridges and fix it so you cannot go back; then serve God with all your heart.
Eugene Peterson
The gospel of Christ… is not something we can survey like the goods in a department store, picking and choosing articles from it we like. It is all one parcel—it is the breaking in of a kingdom of absolute rule and government. The only way we can receive it is by turning away from all that has previously been occupying us and taking it in entirely.
Arthur W. Pink
More than the Scriptures are needed to bring a sinner out of darkness into God’s marvelous light—namely, the Person and work of the Holy Spirit. It is only as He applies the Word—that the conscience is pierced, the heart searched, and the will moved. Perhaps someone retorts, “But did not Christ say in John 6:63 ‘the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life,’ and does not that prove the very words of Scripture are life-giving?” Ah, go back to the first part of that very verse, “It is the Spirit who gives life”! We must not separate the Spirit from the Word—He is the Divine.
H.A. Baker
Christ finished salvation. He died for the sins of the whole world. Eternal life is a gift… The gift is free; all we have to do is accept it or reject it, take it or ignore it. We must be like one or the other of the thieves on the cross: either believe that Jesus is God and can save a sinner who acknowledges his sinful condition, and spend eternity with Christ in paradise, or be like the other thief and disbelieve that Jesus is God, and die in our unrepented and unforgiven sins, away from God.
Billy Graham
Before the triumph, before the crown, before the kingdom, before the victory, there had to come the suffering. Before you can share in Christ’s victory, before you can have a new life here and now, before you can go to heaven, before you can claim the promise that we shall someday reign with Christ, you, too, must come to that same cross. You, too, must come in simple faith and stand at the foot of that cross and receive the Saviour who was willing to go to the cross.