(* Note – Toby also acknowledges and thanks Rob
Bell and a talk he gave in 2000,
which inspired and directed much of this sermon.)
We’re talking about salvation today, and
I want to begin with some BIG questions; important questions; my
questions…maybe yours too. They’re the kind of questions that might make you
uncomfortable. Ready?
1) What is “salvation?” Is it really just a ticket to heaven?
2) Of the almost 8 billion
people in this world, is it really
only us – only people who believe and live like we do – who “get saved?”
3) What exactly does somebody
have to do to get or become saved?
a. if it’s really just saying
some prayer, what about the people who say the right prayer but never end up
living at all like Jesus?
b. And what about those people
who never say the magic prayer but really do live an awful lot like Jesus?
4) If Jesus is the only way,
then which Jesus are we talking about?
a. there are at least a dozen
different Jesus’s talked @ on cable TV
b. there’s the Jesus who talks
to Pat Robertson and tells him about upcoming terrorist attacks and who we all
should vote for
c. there’s the Jesus some
people in this room worship who never ever gets political and there’s the Jesus
of Martin Luther King Jr. and Jim Wallis, who is inherently political
Which
Jesus are we talking about when we claim that Jesus is the only way? Now some of us might be thinking, “C’mon,
Toby, don’t make this so complicated and difficult. It’s the Jesus of the Bible
that we worship and serve. It’s the Jesus of the Bible that saves us.” OK. Fair
enough. So let’s look at this “Jesus of the Bible,” shall we? Let’s pretend
that we have nothing else to go on to get at our tough questions about
salvation except the Bible. That’s all that we’ve got. So what does the Bible
teach us about getting saved, about the way to salvation?
Get out your Bibles and do your best to
stay with me, because we’re going to have to move fast today. Let’s start with
our 2 passages for the morning: Romans
10:9 – “For if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in
your heart, you will be saved.” Well, there it is, right? Straight out of the
mouth of Paul the Apostle, clear as a bell. Confess Jesus with your lips,
believe in him in your heart, and that’s it. We might as well all just go home….Unless
you think we should look at more than1 verse?
Luke 18:18-25 – This rich young man
asks Jesus point blank, “What must I do to be saved?” And Jesus says, “You know
the commandments; follow them.” But the young man pushes further, saying,
“Yeah, but what else?” And Jesus says, “Sell everything that you have and give
it to the poor, and then come and follow me.” Wo. Just a minute here. Sell
everything I have? Paul didn’t say anything about that. What happened to just
confessing with our lips and believing with our hearts? Let’s press on.
Mark 2:2-5 – The great story of the
paralytic whose friends carry him to the house where Jesus is and can’t get him
in because of the crowd. So they climb up on the roof, cut a hole in it, and
lower their paralyzed friend down to Jesus. And the passage says, “When Jesus
saw their faith, NOT the paralyzed
dude’s, but his friends’ faith, and that’s what led Jesus to forgive and heal
the paralytic. So what do we conclude from this
passage – that we need faithful friends in order to get saved? Cool! Maybe we
can get in on our friends’ coat tails?
Luke 19:1-10 – The famous story of
Zacchaeus, the wee little man, who climbs the tree to see Jesus. Jesus calls
him down from the tree, invites himself over to Zach’s house for dinner, and
stuns all the people of Jericho in the process. “Not Zacchaeus! He’s a corrupt
tax collector.” And then, when Zacchaeus is at table with the Lord, he stands
up and declares, “Lord, here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor,
and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the
amount.” And what does Jesus say? “Today salvation has come to this house.”
Zacchaeus gets saved! How? It appears by giving 1/2 his possessions away and
promising to make amends with all those he’s ripped off.
So is this salvation thing getting any clearer
for you? All we’re doing is looking at what the Bible says, right?
Let’s try Matthew 6:14-15. This is in
the Sermon on the Mount, right after Jesus teaches the disciples the Lord’s
prayer. He wraps up saying, “For if you forgive others when they sin against
you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do NOT forgive
others their sins, your Father will NOT forgive your sins either.” Hmm…So to
get saved, it looks like we have to forgive other people’s sins.
But in Luke 7:36-50, we find still
another salvation story, the story of a sinful woman who barges in on a dinner
Jesus is having with the Pharisees. This woman never says a thing (she
confesses nothing with her lips), but she proceeds to take a jar of very costly
perfume and pours it all over Jesus, wiping it with her hair. The Pharisees and
Jesus’ own disciples are disgusted by this action, particularly given who this
woman is! But check out what Jesus says: “I came into your house. You did not
give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped
them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I
entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but
she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore I tell you, her many sins have
been forgiven – as her great love has shown…” Then Jesus says to the woman:
“Your sins are forgiven,” and “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.” What
does this beauty suggest we need to do in order to be saved?
In Matthew 25:31 and following, we find
the famous passage where the King separates the sheep from the goats. The sheep
enter his heavenly kingdom, while the goats are sent to a burning fire. As the
king welcomes the sheep into salvation, he honors them for feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked, visiting the sick, welcoming the stranger, etc. Salvation
in this potent text is procured by using our resources to help “the least of
these,” God’s children.
How’s everybody doing now? Do we all
have this salvation thing figured out yet? I can go on all day, if you’d like.
But I think you’re starting to see my point, right? Using the Bible as our
guide in attempt to understand what salvation is and how one goes about “getting”
it does NOT elicit one clear answer. And those who say it does are not reading
the whole Bible. Sometimes the Bible seems to suggest that we get saved by saying something. Sometimes the Bible
makes it seem that we get saved by doing
something. At still other times, it seems salvation is tied to believing something. Elsewhere,
salvation comes to those whose friends
have a certain kind of faith, right? And in multiple other places salvation is
tied to using our resources to take care of those who cannot take care of
themselves.
Brothers and sisters, it’s time we all
realized that we Christians have done Jesus and the Bible a terrible disservice
by boiling down salvation to any one thing or one simple step or saying a
certain prayer. The Bible’s message is much bigger than that, and Jesus is much
bigger than that.
It’s time Christians realized that nowhere in this
huge and wonderful book is there a prayer called the sinner’s prayer. That’s a
man-made prayer designed to get people connected to God in one very narrow and
unbiblical way. The truth of salvation is much broader, much deeper, and much
more mysterious and grace-filled than that. The truth is that different people
throughout the Biblical narrative “get saved” in a lot of different ways,
through a lot of different channels and circumstances. The only thing we know
for sure is that it’s God who does the saving; NOT us. NEVER us. And God works
in many mysterious ways.
It’s time that Christians realize that
people out there have no interest in following a God who has some secret
password prayer to divide who’s in from who’s out. People out there are too
smart and have too strong a sense of justice to want to follow a God who would
withhold grace from those who don’t say the right words, or who happen to be
born in a non-Christian culture.
It’s also time we realized that when Jesus spoke of
salvation, he wasn’t talking about heaven. He wasn’t talking about some after
life. In all the stories we just looked at, Jesus was talking about the here
and now, this life. He didn’t tell
Zacchaeus that he’d get into heaven someday; he said “TODAY salvation has come
to his house. Zacchaeus’s life changed now, in this world where he collected
taxes. Salvation in the Bible is not a ticket to heaven. Biblical salvation is
a wholistic thing. It has to do with restoring and renewing all creation – THIS creation – THIS
WORLD – to God’s intended order and plan – HERE and NOW. The salvation Jesus
spoke of encompasses ALL of our life – here AND in the age to come. Salvation
is a life-long process of becoming more and more Christ-like, more and more
like Jesus. And from all the passages that we’ve looked at this morning, we’ve
got to understand that, to Jesus, salvation unfolds in different people’s lives
in many different ways. Salvation for Zacchaeus wasn’t exactly the same thing
as it was for the woman with the perfume. Salvation wasn’t the exact same
process for the paralyzed man with the four friends as it was for Nicodemus to
whom Jesus said, “You must be born again.”
Maybe you’re sitting here today and
you’ve never asked Jesus into your heart or your life. That’s an important step
in the salvation process and I’d encourage you to think about taking it. Or
maybe you’re here today knowing that you have
said that prayer, years ago, maybe even a couple of times. But your problem
is that you’re not LIVING very much like Jesus. You may have an addiction, a
broken marriage, a burden of guilt, or a regret from which you need to be
saved. Or maybe you love Jesus and know that he loves you, and maybe you’ve
even gotten involved in all kinds of wonderful ministries, but you’re still too
worried about money and your own finances to be generous with your resources.
Well the salvation process for you might entail God helping you let go of the
purse strings.
Whoever you are and wherever you are on
life’s journey, I challenge each and every one of you this day to admit that
your understanding of salvation – what it is and how it happens – has probably
been a bit too narrow and probably less than fully Biblical. I challenge you,
using the words of Paul in Philippians 2, to “continue to work out your own
salvation” (NOT other people’s) “with fear and trembling, for it is God who
works in you to will and to act according to His good purpose. Amen.
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