I accidentally wrote “peak”…and I’m reading more than ever…guess I need to study my daughter’s spelling bee list with her.
In other news, I’ve been thinking a lot about salvation. I’m often thinking about salvation because I find that there’s a close relationship between our views on salvation and other things like our picture of God (beautiful, mediocre, horrific…) and our ideas about what to do to “prepare for the end times.” I don’t like that phrase, but here we are.
Here are the main points I’m exploring:
- Salvation is a gift
- Discipleship begins when we accept the gift.
- Gifts are, by nature, free.
- Say “thank you” and keep following our Savior.
- None of our following ensures our salvation.
- Our following is our relationship with our Savior.
- Why is this so difficult?
Feel free to share your two or ten cents on any of these thoughts as they come.
Let’s begin with point number 1.
What if God’s act of saving us isn’t so that we can do penance or strive for perfection? What if salvation is God’s way of making it possible for us to be in communion with God both now and for eternity because communion has always been the goal?
In terms of the cross, something pretty drastic had to be done in order for us to even vaguley fathom God’s love for us and in order for us to realize that only God can heal the relationship. Only God. So Jesus (God in the flesh) took some time on earth to show us who God is. By seeing through Jesus that God is love (through Jesus’ life not just his death), we get to make a clear decision to accept God’s healing.
Only a creator can fix its creations. Only the Creator can heal the relationship between Creator and created. And our Creator wants to spend all of time with us.
This is why salvation exists……not just to stop tears, not just to stop death, not just to stop the many ways we hurt ourselves and others. Salvation, this gift, exists because God wants to commune with us forever. That’s all God has ever wanted.
So…salvation isn’t something we can work for or be good enough for. It’s not our work to improve upon or perfect. It’s God’s completed work that we get to accept or reject. We can choose to accept it and then, at some point, choose to reject it. We choose. That’s love.
When a gift is accepted and then modified, it loses it’s original quality as the idea of the giver. When we accept God’s gift of salvation and then modify it by making ourselves responsible for how it all pans out, we no longer have salvation…we have a brand new something else. It is not longer God’s completed work. It eventually looks like pride, smells like pride, walks like pride, talks like pride but with a cheap venier of “I’m being like Christ.” This new something else makes it difficult to live in honest community, sharing the yucky pieces of our lives. Because if we’re in charge of parts of our eternity, we can’t afford to look weak or sound theologically illiterate. In the process of trying to appear super, we “other” the people who don’t understand things the way we understand them or who don’t live the way we live. We double down on appearance by trying to make our lives as spiritually “precise” as possible which isn’t the same as following Jesus.
Salvation enables us to enter into a healing journey with God…that’s discipleship. I’ll talk about that next.