Part of a CT article is posted below.  Kent's comments follow.  The whole article was found at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/march/29.72.html

Christianity Today, March, 2007
Jesus and the Sinner’s Prayer
What Jesus says doesn’t match what we usually say.

David P. Gushee | posted 3/06/2007 08:31AM

Is it permissible to reopen the question of salvation? If we do, how will Jesus' teachings stand up to our inherited traditions?

These questions came to me acutely not long ago. I was getting ready to preach. As the worship leader was finishing the music set, he offered some unscripted theological reflections. He said something like: "The only thing required of us is to believe that Jesus' blood saves us. Nothing more. It's nothing but the blood of Jesus."

In my Baptist context, we've heard these thoughts a thousand times. The problem was that I had in my pocket a message in which Jesus himself had a very different answer to the question of salvation.

The Big Question

In reading through Luke, I had discovered that twice (10:25, 18:18) Jesus is asked, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"

In the first passage, Jesus turns the question back on the lawyer who asks it. The lawyer replies with the Old Testament commands to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself (cf. Mt. 22:34-40). Jesus affirms his answer: "You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live." The lawyer then tries to narrow the meaning of neighbor. So Jesus tells the unforgettable parable of the compassionate Samaritan, who proved to be a neighbor to a bleeding roadside victim.

In Luke 18, Jesus responds to the same question, this time from the man we know as the rich young ruler, by quoting the second table of the Decalogue, forbidding adultery, murder, theft, and false witness, and mandating honor towards parents. His questioner says that he has kept these commandments, and Jesus proceeds to call on him to "sell all … and distribute to the poor." Jesus assures him, "You will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." The "extremely rich" ruler won't do this, and Jesus goes on to teach his disciples about how hard it is for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God.

Trying to be an honest expositor of the texts in front of me, I told the chapel students that morning that on the two occasions in Luke when Jesus was asked about the criteria for admission to eternity, he offered a fourfold answer: love God with all that you are, love your neighbor (like the Samaritan loved his neighbor), do God's will by obeying his moral commands, and be willing, if he asks, to drop everything and leave it behind in order to follow him.

I concluded by suggesting that the contrast between how Jesus answers this question and how we usually do is stark and awfully inconvenient.

Kent comments:

The author makes a good point, but falls short of a great point because of a persistent and pervasive fallacy that continues to rear its ugly head.  That is the red letter fallacy, that is, the tendency to see the words of Jesus as limited to those "red letter" sections of some Bibles.

Serious mistakes of Biblical understanding often occur because people forget that the teaching of Jesus did not end with the words He spoke during His ministry.  One of the things He said (John 16) was that He had more to say, and that He would say it through the Apostles.

Why does the author of the piece above never make it to, say, the Book of Acts?  There is plenty of Apostolic instruction there about entering the kingdom of God.  How about the letters of Peter and Paul?  According to what Jesus said in John 16, these are also teaching from Jesus.

We rather expect some our Baptist friends to ignore Acts 2:38, and that would be bad enough.  What is worse is the now common attempt to access the mind of Christ without reference to all the words of Christ, including those spoken through the Apostles and the New Testament prophets.

Sermons that focus on John 16 and its many implications are very important for thinking about Biblical teaching.  We need more such sermons.  I think I am going to start working on one soon.