Jesus Jargon: Salvation

Hello friends,
welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
We continue on with this series.
We are calling Jesus Jargon.
We are looking at some of those words of faith
that maybe you even think of or use often,
but words that are good to return to
and ask some of those fundamental questions
about what does that word mean?
When we talk about that thing,
what are we really talking about?
And I can’t think of a better example
of one of those sort of fundamentals in terms of words,
Clint, I can’t think of a word
that is maybe more commonly used in faith context
than the word salvation.
It gets transformed a little bit.
Maybe we talk about being saved.
We’ll talk a little bit about that in this conversation.
But this concept and idea of salvation
is of course one that is very important to people of faith.
And I think it’s good to return to it
and ask the question,
well, what do we mean when we say that? Yeah, I think that question really lives
at all various places in the church,
but particularly when we lived in the South
with the large ponderance of Southern Baptists
and a strong evangelical kind of conservative tradition
present in most churches,
it was not uncommon at all to have that question put out.
Are you saved?
I mean, to be confronted with that idea.
Are you saved?
Are you included in salvation?
And what does that mean?
I think in the church,
we have always utilized these words and these concepts.
They’ve been important to us.
But I don’t know that we’ve always known
what we mean when we use them,
or I don’t know that we’ve used them consistently
to mean particular things.
So it is an important word,
an essential word.
I would argue that it’s one of the fundamental words
of the Christian experience,
and yet there’s a lot of looseness to it. Yeah, very much.
And I think that some of that looseness
gets filled in for us by,
of course, our church family, but also a little bit of where we spend our most time in scripture, interestingly.
Students, especially our younger students,
some of the eighth grade students,
they tend to be surprised when they find out
that the idea of the afterlife
doesn’t really exist in the Old Testament.
I mean,
it’s not until the New Testament
that you start getting some of those
contentious conversations between the Sadducees and Pharisees
and the afterlife becomes a predominant theme.
And you see, of course, at the end of the pastoral letters,
some very direct sort of writing
in our New Testament scriptures about that afterlife.
But so often, I think we make this one-to-one connection
between the idea of salvation
and the stuff that comes after life.
We think of being saved from the power of sin and death,
death in all caps probably there.
And what’s interesting, I think, is if you read the New Testament in concert
with the Old Testament,
you see that the entire scriptures,
and I would argue this is including the New Testament,
when salvation is being talked about,
yes,
eternity is in view.
And yes,
individual is also in view,
the idea that human choices,
our individual choices, make an impact in that larger arc.
I think also, though, there is a strong theme
of communal salvation that God saves the people of God,
of course, in the Old Testament
from the power of Pharaoh.
God saves them by carrying them through the Red Sea.
God saves the people from their own ignorance
and foolishness in the wilderness,
brings them into the promised land.
There’s all of these symbols
of how God is faithful to the people.
And I think when you frame salvation in that way,
what we’re going to discover is there is way more
to this than what we generally account for.
What may appear to be a beautiful sort of room
is actually the North X to an amazing mansion.
I mean, salvation is so much bigger,
grander, and more beautiful than I think
we often give it credit for.
And I think that’s one of the reasons
I’m excited it made our list of words. Yeah, I think maybe as much or possibly more so
than any other word I can think of in Christian circles,
this is a word that if you look at it biblically,
is enormous.
But as we practice it in the church,
we often shrink that word down
to essentially mean going to heaven.
The idea that if we talk about being saved,
it means we get to go to heaven.
We get to have that afterlife.
And if we’re not saved, we don’t.
And the reality is,
and that is certainly a part
of the way that the Bible,
especially the New Testament, talks about salvation,
but it’s really only one part.
And the concept of being saved, biblically speaking,
certainly in the Gospels and the New Testament,
is much bigger than that question of heaven.
You know,
as most people become serious students of the scripture,
one of the things that surprises them
is how absolutely little the Bible really says about the afterlife.
There’s very little in the way of description
of heaven and hell,
and maybe we’ll circle around
to talk about those words later in this podcast.
But the Bible is, I think,
generally way more concerned
with what does it mean to be saved in this life
than the next life,
though there is a deep,
abiding promise for the next life.
That’s not where the New Testament spends most of its time.
And it’s actually where the Old Testament spends
none of its time instead focusing on what we do
in the here and now because of being saved. Yeah, that’s one of the amazing things
about Jesus’ teaching when you survey the four Gospels.
You see him proclaiming over and over and over again.
And I would point out of all four Gospels,
with all of their differences of perspective
that they offer on Jesus,
they consistently point out
that Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God is at hand,
the kingdom of heaven,
this idea that God was doing
something that was radically transforming the world
and our lives as we understood them.
And in fact,
all of the Gospel writers in concert
point out how that was consistently misunderstood
by even the ones closest to Jesus.
And so I think that provides a warning
as you enter into a conversation about salvation
right from the get-go that we’re going to be tempted
as humans to grasp a thing that is by definition
greater and grander,
more mysterious and beautiful
than can be held in human hands,
that can be summed up in the human mind
or written down in a book.
I think what’s beautiful about salvation
is that we see the Son of God who comes and proclaims
a entirely different way of being in the world,
a reality that could not have been seen
apart from his life, death and resurrection.
And we’re invited to enter into it.
That’s the master stroke of the Gospels
is they all end with some form of invitation,
so what for you,
right?
So you’ve read this account of Jesus Christ,
then none of them read like a history book.
They all read like a primer that ends with the question,
how will this change your life?
Will you participate in salvation?
And therefore it’s from that vantage
that I don’t personally find the version
of the word salvation saved.
Salvation in the past tense when we ask, are you saved?
I find that a difficult question.
I mean,
as I seek to answer it,
I can’t think of a moment in my life
where I would ever be able to say
that my salvation had been fully known,
that I would reach the end of some salvific road
and I would know that I had reached perfection or fullness.
I’ve got to believe that ultimately
I was saved in Jesus Christ.
The action and purpose of that
comes with the one who not only proclaims
but finishes the work of the kingdom of God.
But yet as that salvation has worked out in us,
I think it’s more helpful Clint to go with the Gospels
to ask the question,
so what for me
will this new life live in me
in a more present perfect kind of sense,
today and every day sort of force?
That’s the kind of salvation I think
that we bear with us as we grow in our faith. I think that if we conceive of salvation
as something that belongs in the past,
either in the work of Jesus or at the moment we accept it
or put our trust in that work,
or we think of salvation as something
that is a reality of the future,
when we die or after we die at the point
that we are admitted into the kingdom,
that we join God in his kingdom,
then we miss that middle band of what it means
to be saved in the present.
And I find it instructional that often in the New Testament
when there is salvation language,
rather than being in the past tense or the future tense,
it’s in the present tense.
So they refer to those who are being saved
as in salvation is an ongoing reality.
It’s not a reality of the past
and it’s not something that waits for us in the future.
It is an experience that we live out,
that we have and that we enact in the here and now.
We are today at this moment,
both saved and being saved,
and one day will be saved again in the final sense.
But salvation is a thing that we experience now,
we experience in the present.
And I think that that seems to me the aspect
that has often been under emphasized in the church.
We have generally used salvation language
as either are you saved or will you be saved?
And less so this idea of what does it mean
that we are being saved right now?
What is it?
In what ways does that salvation work into
and out of our lives in the current moment?
The word saved in the New Testament in Greek
is this rich word.
It doesn’t simply mean delivered.
It almost harkens back to that Old Testament concept
of shalom.
It has the sense of fulfilled,
of wholeness, of being put back together,
that idea of redeemed.
It is not just about one aspect of the faith.
It is really about becoming the person Christ invites us to
as we live into salvation.
And as we live out of the knowledge of being saved,
and I think that is more helpful.
I think it’s more challenging.
I think it avoids the temptation to make salvation
this binary yes or no,
which is not unimportant,
but ultimately salvation is not intended to be a checklist.
It’s not a box you fill out with a check mark.
It’s a way of life,
and therefore, we can always be moving deeper
into what it means to be saved.
We can have always the opportunity to pursue
a deeper experience of our salvation. I think for some,
the reliance upon this idea
of being saved in the past tense
gives a certain kind of confidence,
a belief that once that work has been done,
we don’t need to live in fear or an anxiety
of what will happen in our lives.
And I wanna make it very clear that I believe
the Christian life should be lived
as one without fear and anxiety.
I believe very strongly that Jesus Christ,
when he came to gave himself for us,
when he spoke of the grace that he would have on sinners,
when he demonstrated that
with the very places and people
with whom he lived his life,
that we should take confidence in the promise
that when he gave himself for us,
it was enough,
that when he says all who believe in me,
that our belief is what has been required of us.
And so I wanna make it very clear
that when we talk about salvation
as being an ever-present reality of the Christian life,
what that is, it is not a denial
of how important Christ’s act on our behalf has been,
but rather I think in emphasizing
of the present power of the Holy Spirit
working in the people of God
and the reality that there is no moment in the human life
in which the salvation and perfect work of Christ
has not continued to be worked out.
There are far too many times,
we need to confess,
I think, honestly, there are far too many times
when Christians who believe themselves to be saved
say and do things that no person,
no creature of God should do or say,
that they live into the sinfulness that yet remains.
And to those moments of our lives,
we should confess that we still need that work to redeem,
to renew, to transform us, that ultimately we as Christians on a day-by-day basis
rely upon that transformative work of the Holy Spirit
that we might continue to be more and more
in the image of the one who died for us.
I think there’s a certain kind of empowerment
and Christian enablement, almost a Jamesian, if you read the book of James,
a kind of action required of those
who are working out their faith and their works,
which James puts in this beautiful sort of partnership.
It’s not that we do things to earn that gift,
absolutely not, but as those who have received the gift,
we could not stop ourselves from continuing
to work out the gift that we’ve received,
and that is this beautiful ongoing cycle
in every Christian life. I think there has been a tendency in parts of the church,
whether it be worship or an event or a youth rally,
whatever a retreat,
a prison ministry,
the idea is we need to,
quote unquote, get people saved.
Now, that’s absolutely true.
Part of the mission of the church,
we talked about it last time,
is to evangelize, to share the good news.
The danger though in thinking about that as transactional,
as something we have to go do,
is that we treat salvation as an end to itself
instead of a byproduct of a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Our goal ultimately is not to save people.
That is God’s goal,
that is God’s work.
Our goal is to represent Jesus Christ
and to share the truth of Jesus Christ with others,
to invite ourself and others into relationship with him.
And salvation is a byproduct,
a benefit of that relationship,
but it is not the point.
The point is not to get everybody saved,
though that would be beautiful.
The point and the goal is to get everybody to know Jesus
and therefore be saved.
And I think it’s a different
and I think a better biblical strategy
to think in terms not of are people saved or not,
but are people being brought to a knowledge of Jesus Christ?
I think that’s a better way for us to understand it. You’ll often know when you’re having a conversation
with someone who is thinking about salvation
in that very past-focused kind of sense,
because often those conversations
include some kind of question about the rubric.
You use the word transactional.
I think of those moments where people have asked,
pastor,
what things do I need to do?
And the idea, the image I’ve always had,
and that is sort of like the pre-flight checklist
that pilots take with them into the cockpit.
What are the things required of me
to be able to qualify for this thing called salvation?
There’s some would talk about a speaking with your mouth,
believing in your heart,
that idea of the sinner’s prayer,
the idea of confessing your sin,
the idea of being baptized in some Christian communities
is linked to this.
And I wanna make it very clear,
I’m not trying to be critical.
I hope it doesn’t sound that way.
I think what I am suspect of is when you make the list
more important than the salvific work of Christ
lived out in the life.
Because what ends up happening inevitably
is we give into the temptation
that it was one of those things that we did
that resulted in salvation.
And that is always bad news.
It is always bad news to try to end up
with our faithfulness somehow affecting God’s grace upon us.
Because friends,
we are never going to be faithful enough.
There’s never a moment in the human life
where we are perfectly gracious,
where we are perfectly faith-filled.
That is not a reality of our experience.
It is rather God’s faithfulness to us.
That I would argue is that overarching theme of scripture,
that ultimately it is God’s faithfulness that we can trust.
And so it is for that very reason then
that when we come to the idea of the checklist or criteria
or some of that preceding requirements of salvation,
while I don’t think that they’re necessarily a-biblical
or necessarily even unhelpful,
I just think they’re tempting in pointing us
in the direction that somehow we’re affecting the thing
that God is doing by God’s own power
through God’s Spirit in us.
So let us keep God at the center.
It is God’s salvific work.
And how we participate in that,
to whatever extent that is,
to God be the glory. Yeah, maybe it helps to spend some time
with the question from the other end,
what are we saved from?
When we use this word saved,
what do we mean by that?
And the classic theological answer is that
we’re saved from hell or we’re saved from death.
The Bible would use those words somewhat interchangeably.
But the idea that we’re saved from an experience
of the absence of God in the life after this one.
Now,
that is a beautiful fundamental proclamation of the faith,
but we should not then assume
that that’s all we’re saved from
because the gospel is so much bigger than that.
What else are we saved from?
We’re saved from selfishness.
We’re saved from destroying relationships
with pettiness and judgment.
We’re saved from being callous to human need
and human suffering.
We’re saved from ourselves.
We are saved not only from hell,
but we are saved from all of the things
that seek to keep us from being the people
Jesus Christ invites us to be.
And this is what we mean when we say
that our salvation is being lived out.
Day in and day out,
Jesus is seeking to save me
from the things I do that aren’t in keeping
with who I’m called to be in him.
I’m being saved from my selfish desires.
I’m being saved from my sinfulness.
I’m being saved from variety of things.
And yes, ultimately that culminates in being delivered
from eternal punishment or death
or however you want to talk about that experience.
But it’s not just that,
it is so much more than that.
And I think if we understand that,
it doesn’t detract from the word salvation,
Michael.
I would argue that it expands it,
that it deepens it,
and that it makes it far richer. Yeah, I think that’s really helpful,
Clint.
And to illustrate your point even further,
I think I just turned to scripture
and I’ve got a question for you.
If you were to put in two columns,
on one column you put the number of people that Jesus healed,
cast out demons, fed or proclaimed their sins forgiven.
And then you put in another column,
the number of people that Jesus resurrected.
There’s not even,
it’s not even close.
Jesus spent his entire ministry as told by the gospels,
doing this work,
healing bodies,
healing souls,
moving people into new relationships
in their families and community.
And by the way,
it is fascinating the number of times
that the gospels record Jesus doing a miracle.
And the religious leaders,
they’re not upset about the miracle.
They don’t care that the guy just got healed.
They’re upset that Jesus did it on the Sabbath,
that Jesus broke the checklist.
He didn’t do it the right way.
And so therefore, it couldn’t have possibly been right.
That’s the danger and temptation of the human spirit
is that we end up telling God,
here’s the criteria,
God.
We know it, you told it to us.
And then God says,
well, I understand how you got there.
But you’re saying that to my son.
You’re saying that to the one who’s come to redeem you.
That is the kind of human foolishness
that just so easily seeps in
when we start making it about a one simple
preconceived notion of what we’re saved from.
When we make it just the power of death,
which it is.
And we miss the power of sin,
the power of sickness,
the power of racism,
the power of relational destruction,
the power of addiction.
When we miss all of that,
I think we’re really foreclosing on where God is intending
to work in our present life.
And we become fixated on very narrow human categories. Yeah, I think maybe a way that I could say that would be
that we so often,
when we say that we are saved from our sin,
so often what we think we mean
is we’re saved from the consequences of our sin.
We’re saved from the judgment of our sin.
But biblically,
when Jesus encounters people and he says,
“Go, you’ve been made well,” when he heals them,
when he declares forgiveness over them,
when he restores them,
when he casts demons out of them,
this is the same language.
When he says, “You are made well,”
this in the language is you are saved.
You are restored to wholeness.
And so salvation is not just about escaping
the consequences of our sin,
it is about being delivered from the sin itself.
As Jesus’s grace works into our life,
and we find ourselves challenged,
confronted,
convicted,
and called to a life that increasingly seeks
to leave those things behind and to fill that hole
in our heart instead with the presence of Christ.
And so it’s not simply about the consequence of our sin.
Salvation is about the things that harm us
in the here and now as well.
And again, I think as we understand it that way,
I think that makes salvation,
no, it doesn’t make salvation a deeper concept.
It helps us see the depth of salvation
in a more careful way and in a way that helps us
use the language effectively,
I think. And in a very important way,
salvation,
as Christians have historically understood it,
is not only a theology,
but it is a conviction
that we are called out of ourselves.
And we are sometimes tempted,
sorry, to engage the converse salvation wholly within ourselves.
We ask,
am I saved?
What must I do to be saved?
What must I do to continue to be saved?
There are some who I know do live with a kind of anxiety
that they might lose their salvation.
And to those who are concerned with those very self-contained,
I think I might say, sort of questions,
I would suggest that the gospel is liberating
and that it calls us to look beyond
our own individual place,
that we are actually
in the gift of salvation and able to move into
fuller and deeper communion with ourselves
and then ultimately with God.
And that is the real sustaining gift of salvation,
is that ultimately it’s not just about
shedding habits that we had before,
that is the real present temptation, I think.
We sometimes hear a testimony of someone
who lived a life of what most of us
would call clear sinfulness,
whatever that might be,
destructive life choices or maybe they were in places of great self-harm,
maybe they did harm to others.
Sometimes we think of prison ministry
where someone was convicted of that crime
and we see someone whose life is transformed
in an immediate and visible way
and then we compare that image of salvation,
another’s experience to ourselves.
And if you’ve been Christian for your entire life,
if you grew up in a family that celebrated the faith,
you may not have that experience of salvation
and there can be a sense in which we feel a lack
or a feeling of want for that kind of conversion.
Well,
the good news is that conversion in Christ
for both the one with that radical visible transformation
and that one who doesn’t
is still a present work with real realities.
Every single one of us,
if we are honest and humble enough
to confront them, must deal with the original condition
of human restlessness, sinfulness, the thing that drives us from our God
and from our neighbor.
If we’re willing to confess that,
we have far enough,
every one of us,
to encounter the transformative work
of salvation in this day.
And we can do so, by the way,
with the confidence,
the nourishing,
sustaining faith
that God goes with us on this journey,
that we don’t need to fear losing a thing
that was granted graciously by God,
but we are held in the hands of the one
who will finish the work that he began. Right,
that’s been a question through the years.
Can you lose salvation?
What about people who seemed to be faithful
and then they backslid or they denounced their faith?
What about those martyrs who didn’t
and those who were afraid and so they gave up
on their faith in order to avoid punishment?
And I think largely the scripture invites us
to confidence far more than worry.
And so if you are a person seeking to be faithful
to Jesus Christ, if you can say to yourself,
I put my trust in Jesus Christ,
if you have worked that out, then scripturally speaking,
you have no fear,
you have no reason for worry.
This is not,
because it is not a transaction,
because it is not earned,
it is a gift you’ve been given.
And that gift can be trusted
because the one who gives it can be trusted.
Having said that,
salvation in scripture is clearly something that is to influence our life.
So if I call myself saved
and I make none of the progress of the saved,
if I call myself saved and I live a life
that doesn’t make room for the experience of Christ,
but instead chases the things of earth,
chases the things of my sinful nature,
if I am making no effort to grow in Christ,
then the reality is I may or may not be quote unquote saved,
but I’m not experiencing salvation.
I am not embodying wholeness.
I’m not growing in grace and peace and joy and love
and the gifts of the spirit.
So the question of whether I’m saved or not
is largely irrelevant because the experience of Christ
is to change lives.
And if I don’t care about changing my life,
then at the very least,
I have not understood what it means to be saved.
Now, whether I am or am not saved,
that’s a God question.
That’s not something that I get to say,
but I can say,
and I think scripture clearly says,
that if I claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ
and have nothing to show for it in my life,
I’ve misunderstood completely what it means to be saved. Yeah, we sometimes talk about the effects
and work of salvation as if it’s a new problem.
And it’s interesting, if you turn to the New Testament,
Paul anticipated that problem and writes on it directly
to the earliest Christians.
He asks,
if we have received salvation by grace,
then can we just go fair game and do whatever we want?
If everything’s covered,
why can’t we live whatever lifestyle we want?
Paul,
the greatest theologian of the church,
names that question explicitly in response to it.
And of course, we’re not surprised to say,
no.
Of course we don’t live lascivious lifestyles
because we have grace.
How could you receive that perfect gift and soil your life?
How can you be reunited and reconciled
to a God who loves you and destroy your neighbor?
It’s impossible.
You can’t receive the gift and then work that out.
And yet,
friends,
this is one of the most troubling aspects
of this salvation conversation for me personally,
is over and over and over again,
the image that the gospel writers give
of the ones who should have been first
to celebrate the salvation,
the practicing religious leaders who Jesus encountered,
they should have been the first to hear it
and to celebrate it and to preach it from the mountaintops.
Those are the ones who chose their rigid understanding
of what was required instead of the grace and mercy
that was on offer in the one who was God in front of them.
They chose their own interpretation and idea
over the reality of the one who knew them by name.
That should, I think, for all of us,
cause us a moment of question.
When we ask ourselves,
what must I do?
Have we now turned salvation once again inward
instead of reflecting that larger question,
Lord Jesus Christ,
what have you called me to?
And though that may lead us in similar places, friends,
the thought from which it flows is fundamentally different
and I think it points to the difference
when we speak about salvation,
finding ourselves rooted in Christ,
this phrase that Paul uses over and over,
that is the place where salvation is found and lived out.
When we find ourselves outside of Christ,
now we are experiencing a life that does not live
within that font of grace that we have an offer in him. Yeah, and the New Testament does an interesting thing.
We’ve told you that it doesn’t say a great deal about heaven
or what it most often calls the kingdom of God,
but what it does say, it’s all good.
Paradise, golden streets, et cetera.
It goes to the very limits of language
to describe something that is beautiful.
And we can easily imagine that and not heaven itself,
but we take stock,
we take hope in the idea
that the afterlife for those who are saved in Christ
is a place of joy,
is a place of peace,
is a place of love,
is a place of wholeness and fulfillment.
And what the gospel does is suggest
that Jesus spans time,
spans experience.
And so one not need wait until then to experience,
to embody and to enact some of those realities
or some of that reality.
We are invited to live into that in the here and now.
And so the church,
for instance, is to be a place of love and joy and peace and wholeness.
And we are to offer that to others
in the name of Jesus Christ as a kind of foretaste,
as a kind of sampling,
as a kind of demonstration
of what isn’t fully true yet,
but we already have partially at least access to in Jesus
because we are saved.
It is not something that waits far off for us
when they put us in the ground.
It is an invitation to live out to some extent
that saved-ness right now,
today,
in our homes, in our churches, in our offices, in our relationships.
And this is the part we shouldn’t miss.
When we only talk about saved
as the thing that happens after we die,
we just miss this beautiful invitation to say,
yeah,
and you can taste some of that right now,
and you can offer some of that to others right now.
And that’s the good news as the gospel understands it. I think one of the best symbols of that,
Clint, is that image of the great cloud of witnesses.
You get this idea of a runner finishing a marathon,
a long race, they make it into the stadium,
and that great cloud of witnesses erupts
with joy and celebration and shouting.
And what’s beautiful in that image is
you have the one who’s presently running the race.
And the race is not just their race.
It is that much larger idea of the way,
the path, the one who is on that storied communal journey.
And they are surrounded in this moment
by those of all moments who have finished their race,
who are celebrating and rejoicing.
And that image itself reveals,
I think, a powerful and important reminder
that the eternal bliss that we think of as heaven
was never to be thought of as just great expensive streets
that are gold and perfectly manicured golf clubs,
or however we might imagine heaven.
It’s always including a relational understanding
of being united with the God who loves us
and being reunited in all times and places
with those who have been faithful
and brought into that fellowship.
And that is a very subtle but unbelievably important fact
because we must remember that we today
function,
worship,
learn,
fellowship,
and let’s admit it,
sometimes even fight or have disagreements with the very people
with us on that race, right?
What we do today is just a small mortal human foretaste
of what we will do forever,
not the fighting and disagreement part.
That gets wrapped up in this beautiful vision
of our oneness in Christ.
But ultimately, what we get just a small taste of
in this human experience,
the years that we have here in this world,
is just a prelude,
if even that, a speck in moment that represents that larger chorus,
this larger thing that lives beyond the time
that we exist in,
and they’re not separate realities,
they’re connected together by the majesty, power, grace of Christ. Which then turns our minds
to the idea of offering this gift that we have received,
of sharing this wonderful, beautiful promise
that we have inherited,
that has been given to us in Christ.
And rather than conceive simply of the job of the church
to go out and keep people from going to hell,
the idea becomes to share this idea of wholeness,
to, as one person said,
a beggar telling another beggar where they found bread,
to say,
“I’ve had this experience of feeling lost,
“I have been on my own,
I have wrestled with sin,
“and I find in Christ a new, literally,
a new life, “a new way to live,
and I want to share that with you.”
Not so you can sign the checklist
on the four spiritual laws,
but so that you can inherit with us
that sense of wholeness,
so that you can hear the grace of God speak to your life,
because it has mattered so much in mine.
And because I know,
as one who is unworthy
and yet given grace,
how much it means,
I want to be a witness to that.
And witness is, I think,
a very appropriate word for the way
in which we understand being saved.
Once we understand ourselves to have been claimed by God,
we then become part of the strategy
that God continues to use
to share that good news with the world.
And we don’t have to,
as we said in our conversation about mission,
that doesn’t mean going to China
and serving as a missionary.
It means being a missionary wherever you are
and serving however you can.
And as we do that,
we’re living out our salvation.
That is an extension of being saved.
And so Christians understand that we’re saved
never over other people.
We are saved to then be used as servants.
We are claimed in order to be sent.
And salvation is not some status we attain
and pat ourselves on the back.
It is the mission we inherit
in the good news of being redeemed. Yeah, and I do think some occasionally communicate
the fear that salvation is trivialized
if you don’t make a very strong case
for exactly what the reality of heaven and hell
will look like.
Some people invest a lot of energy and time and thought
in exactly what those realities should be.
And my counselor,
or I think what I might point to
is that human temptation to sort of try to own
and claim things that it seems to be, to me,
the Scriptures don’t generally spend
a lot of time teasing out.
In other words, the Bible doesn’t seem to believe
that an exact clear understanding of heaven and hell,
what they look like and what they’ll feel like
and what the entrance and non-entrance practices will be.
Scripture’s less interested in that
than it is about the kind of people
that we’re called to be in Christ.
And I think the force and reality of that
should cause us to see that salvation is effectual.
It matters.
It literally changes lives.
This is not a conversation about
whether salvation is important or not.
This is a conversation about how salvation is so important.
It reaches into our life this day,
tomorrow,
and every day into eternity that follows it,
that salvation is much grander than we often make it to be.
And that is in some ways intimidating,
but I wanna make it clear it is not in any way
lessening the power or the importance of it.
It is central to the Christian gospel.
Jesus Christ came so that we might be saved,
but let us not condense salvation
into a thing that’s too small. Yeah, the church has sometimes paid more attention.
It has used salvation as a threat
rather than an invitation.
And I think while the church should make use
of all the tools in the toolbox,
I think far more people have been loved into the kingdom
than have been scared into the kingdom.
And so when Christians want to talk about
the idea of separation,
of saved and not saved,
of heaven and hell,
I think we need to do that carefully.
And I think we need to be cautious
that we try not to use salvation as a club
that we wield over the heads of others.
Salvation is a responsibility.
It is an invitation.
It is a blessing,
but it is also then a call to service.
And far more often,
I think sharing the good news
of Jesus Christ looks like seeking to convince people
that they are loved rather than that they will be judged.
We’ve landed hard on judged at times
in the church’s history,
and there may be a place for it.
But I think far more effective we will find
is to just live out what Christ called us to do,
which is not to judge others,
but to love them
as we have been loved in Christ.
And I think ultimately that is,
as Jesus himself proves,
the most effective tool that we’ve been given. Yeah, as we think about salvation,
I do hope that we’re all encouraged,
that we don’t need to focus on the fears and anxieties
of who’s in and who isn’t in,
that we can leave that to God.
Ultimately,
we can take great hope in the fact
that Jesus loved and served those by the account
of those who lived around Jesus,
inexplicably he did so.
And so the great good news is that we can put our faith,
hope, and trust in that same work,
a live network in us today.
I think the temptation,
as you alluded to earlier,
Clint, is the temptation then to make salvation into a thing
that we can wield to our own power.
And of course,
the threat of judgment is one way
the church has done that,
of course, but there are other more subtle ways
that we use salvation as well.
We sometimes talk to our kids about that
in ways that are maybe less than helpful,
about,
well, you did that thing,
you better get God to forgive you or else.
And I do think it’s worth asking questions.
Is that the right way to address that with our children?
Or is that an opportunity to talk about the sinfulness
of our shared human condition and the gratefulness
that Jesus Christ has forgiveness for us,
even when we sin,
if we’re able to confess it.
How we think of salvation not only transforms
how we live in relation to our neighbor
and to our church family,
it also has a way of transforming
how we speak of our faith in general,
of what we hope for others,
of what we expect for others.
I sincerely hope that we are the kind of people
whose faith is salted with love and grace and generosity
that we might look like Jesus looked
to whatever extent we humanly can.
That is the kinds of salvation
I think the church should strive for.
And ultimately that salvation will never be used
as a tool to some end of our own.
It won’t sell books.
It won’t make you big on the radio.
It won’t even make you the most popular person at work.
That’s not the point.
The point is to serve others,
to be called out of yourself,
to run this race with perseverance and to do that
in the midst of a great cloud of witnesses,
those who celebrate you in this life
and those who have run that race before us
that we’re united with by this mysterious gift.
It’s a beautiful thing.
And maybe just simply returning to that fundamental
over and over again will help us keep from simplifying it
into something that is far shallower than its actual depths. Generally speaking,
the church has understood
that salvation is one’s coming to understand
the depth of God’s love for them in Christ.
That that reception of the gift,
that receiving of the grace instills in one
this sense of wholeness, this redemption,
this salvation
that is both true in the present moment and effective,
in other words, changes how we live
and also awaits its final consummation in our afterlife,
what happens when we leave the earth.
But the thing that we should remember
is that that love is for all people.
God loves each and every person with that same depth.
However,
not everyone knows that.
And so salvation then becomes an invitation
for those of us who are being saved
to live in such a way that communicates that love
not only and certainly not as something we possess,
but as something that God offers to all.
And I think if we understand that salvation
is both a reality and a calling,
that we are much closer to the New Testament
to the biblical understanding
of what it means to call ourselves saved. You know, as we near the end of a conversation
on salvation, I think it’s fitting to turn
to the young rich man who came to Jesus
and ask that very question,
what must I do to be saved?
The young man asks and Jesus replies,
go sell everything that you have
and give it away and follow me.
And this young man can’t do it.
He can’t do the thing.
The cost of salvation is too great
when he asks what must I do.
I’ve always wondered in that text
if instead of asking what must I do,
but rather where might I find salvation
could have transformed that encounter for that young man
if he could have seen the one
who would give his life on his behalf
if the outcome may have been different.
Because ultimately we do live in the temptation
that we can somehow make this thing happen or not happen.
And yet, Clint, if we’re gonna take seriously
what you just shared,
that boundless love that God has for us,
and then we figure
how big this God is,
how could you or I
resist that work within us as God seeks
to draw us closer.
Friends,
you can have faith that the God
who calls you and loves you and knows you by name
will be faithful to you.
And if we can hold that in our hearts,
it will transform our lives.
It will transform what we think about what we should do
and how we should treat our neighbor
and what we do when we make mistakes.
There’s no area of your life that can stand unchanged
in the face of that unbridled love, undeserved love,
and to God be the glory. Yeah, so there’s some thoughts on this word
that we use being saved or what it means
that we talk about salvation.
Hope there’s something in this that’s been helpful.
If there’s been something that’s confusing or challenging,
we are glad to continue the conversation.
Give us a call,
shoot us an email,
and we will be glad to continue on the topic with you.
But thanks for listening,
and we hope you’ll be able
to join us again as we continue through this series. See you later.