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Category: Salvation (Page 24 of 34)

Dead on the Shore

December 10, 2012 / / 1 Comment

“That day the Lord saved Israel from the hands of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians lying dead on the shore.” ~Exodus 14:30

God’s people were trapped. This rag tag band of slaves was cornered. The sea on one side and the desert mountains on the other and the mighty power of the Egyptian army thundering over the sand ridges right toward them. They watched in horror as their violent doom descended on them. It was over. They were as good as dead and they all knew it.

But then our God showed his power and sovereignty over nature and history by splitting the sea right down the middle so every last one of these rescued slaves could escape the enemy on dry ground. God caused the waters to spill back over the Egyptians — all their chariots, their horsemen, their archers. Scripture says “not one of them survived.”

“And Israel saw the Egyptians lying dead on the shore.”

Their enemies were powerless now to ever do them any harm. Ever. The escape was complete. The rescue was final. Their salvation was secure. They saw it. They saw their enemies dead now and strewn lifelessly about on the shore like washed-up seaweed. They saw it. And they feared the Lord and put their trust in him.

I believe God caused his people to see their dead enemies for a reason. He wanted them to see it. He wanted there to be no doubt that they were truly saved. They were totally secure. All threats had been erased. All evil against them had been eradicated. They really were free and in the faithful and loving arms of their all-powerful God. This visible and indisputable evidence gave God’s people the courage they needed to move from Egypt to Israel. God was taking them through the waters of salvation to a brand new place and they all needed to know that it was OK to press on in faith. He was taking them from one country to another. He was changing their story. They are no longer slaves; they are now the children of God. “The water flowed back,” Scripture says, cutting off thier connections to Egypt and their old way of life, their old story. They would only press ahead now, into the brand new story of freedom in YHWH, of salvation in the Lord.

As Moses and Miriam are leading the people in songs of praise to God for his mighty and final deliverance from their enemies and from their old horrible lives of slavery, it would have been impossible to imagine that within just a few weeks those same people would be begging to go back to Egypt. When things got difficult, their first instinct was to go back to Egypt. Their old lives were miserable; but they wanted to go back. Their old stories were terrible; but they longed to jump back. It was awful; but I suppose it was comfortable. Maybe. I’m not sure what made them want to return to Egypt back then. I’m not sure what makes us want to keep going back today.

Some of us are living the wrong story. We’re all on the other side of the Exodus. We’ve all crossed over from slavery to sin and death to a brand new life as God’s eternal people in complete subjection to him. In Christ, we’ve moved out of one country and into another. But some of us are determined to pass through those waters back to Egypt. Some of us are working for things and chasing dreams that the world says are important. And we’re not satisfied. We’re restless. Some of us are depressed or despondant because we don’t have the status or the security that our world says is so valuable. We’re unhappy. Some of us are living the story the world says is our story instead of the brand new story we’ve all been given by our God.

The enemies are dead on the shore! Do you see them? Our Father wants us to see those dead, lifeless, completely conquered enemies! In Christ, he has totally destroyed sin and death and Satan and all the things that might separate us from him. The pain, the past, the failure, the anxiety — all of it is helpless against our God. He’s already drowned it out in the salvation waters of our baptisms. It’s over! Whatever had so messed up our stories is gone now. In the promised Messiah, God has given us an eternal victory even more decisive than what the Israelites saw on the shore.

That’s our story. Our story is about the power of our God who acts in mercy and grace through his Son to deliver us from our enemies and bring us into a brand new life as his brand new people. Our identity is completely changed. Our values are totally different. Our story is radically transformed. Because the Kingdom we serve is not of this world. And neither is the King we worship!

May we be a people of the correct story — the story of salvation from God, not the story of fate and chance that comes from the world. And may that salvation story shape us by God’s grace into the holy people he has called us and saved us to be.

Peace,

Allan

Salvation Belongs to Our God

December 5, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The Red Sea crossing in Exodus 14 is the ultimate foundational event that creates and identifies the people of God. And we always refer to it as the Exodus. But you may be interested to know that the word “exodus” never occurs one time in the actual narrative. The Hebrew words used in the book of Exodus to refer to the creation and redemption of God’s people are these:

ga’al – to protect or preserve the integrity of the family or clan

padah – to pay the purchase price to free a captive or a slave

ha’aleh – to cause to go up

hevi – to cause to bring in

hotsi – to cause to go out

As Israel is delivered from Egyptian bondage and saved through the waters of the sea, the focus of the activity is on God and what he’s doing. God is doing all of it. Israel is completely helpless and powerless to contribute one thing to the salvation process. It’s all on God. Israel’s job is to trust God, to “stand firm,” to “be still,” and to “see.” God is the one who brings them out and delivers them and saves them with his strong arm and outstretched hand.

Just as the Israelites passed through the waters of the sea, we pass through the waters of baptism into a new life in the Father through Christ Jesus. And, again, our God is the one redeeming and saving. We bring nothing to the table except our willingness to trust him and submit to him and his salvation purposes.

“Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God.” ~1 Peter 2:10

Peace,

Allan

Groaning. Still.

June 26, 2012 / / 0 Comments

“We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait.” ~Romans 8:23

Our Scriptures do not hide the fact that disciples of the Christ do suffer. In fact, the Bible highlights it. As people who identify with and follow the One who came to overturn the values of this world, we’re going to inevitably share in the rejection and the trials Jesus suffered himself. Creation groans. We groan. The Spirit groans.

That’s just the way it is.

Committed Christian living always rubs the world the wrong way at some point. And it leads to suffering. But those sufferings — which are happening right now and are very real — don’t even begin to compare to the glory, which is also a very present and very real thing.

The glory already exists. It’s already a done deal. It’s just not fully given to us yet. It’s just not fully revealed to us yet.

Not yet.

We live in the tension of Scripture’s “already, but not yet.” The Kingdom of God, our eternal salvation, the defeat of sin and death, our Lord’s ultimate reign — it’s here. It’s already happened. And, at the same time, it’s all still to come. So we wait. And while we wait, we groan.

“We hope for what we do not yet have and we wait for it patiently.” ~Romans 8:25

Lord, come quickly.

Allan

Our Lord’s Patience Means Salvation

June 21, 2012 / / 2 Comments

For some reason — from the very beginning, in fact; check Genesis 3 — we have always decided that we know better than God.

We decided that God’s limits on us were oppressive. We rebel against our Creator and we sin. We blame Satan. We blame each other. We rationalize our actions and justify our sins. We argue with God about it. And in our sin, he clothes us. He covers us. He protects us and provides for us.

We kill our brother. And God puts a mark on us so we won’t be destroyed.

Every other chapter in Judges paints a dark picture of the rebellion of God’s people. They only do what’s right in their own eyes. They’re worshiping Ba’al; this is no little thing; this is full-blown apostacy. They forsake the Lord. They turn their backs on him. And God delivers them again and again and again. Even the deliverers are lousy. Barak refuses to obey God so Deborah gets the credit. Jepthah was a fugitive outlaw who sacrificed his daughter. I can’t find one redeeming thing about Samson. Even Gideon made a golden idol out of the people’s earrings. And God keeps rescuing his people. Again and again.

We see it all through the kings and the prophets: idolatry and rebellion and sin, pride and arrogance and defiance, doubt and disbelief. And, again, it’s been this way from the start.

After God makes a covenant with Noah, Noah gets drunk and naked. After the covenant with Abraham, Abraham panics and takes Hagar so he can have a son. God makes vows to Israel and they respond by building a golden calf before the words on the tablets can even set. After the covenant with David, the great king attempts to break all Ten Commandments in one weekend — and nearly does!

After 1,500 years of these adulteries, surely the Lord our God is going to sue for divorce. Certainly he’s going to destroy these ungrateful, unfaithful, stubborn people and start over. Or just quit.

No. The Lord our God sends Jesus. In an act of astonishing grace and incredible patience he sends his Son.

He. Sends. Jesus.

“He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” ~2 Peter 3:9

Our God is eternal. He always was and always will be. God is more than willing to let entire centuries go by, to let whole milennia pass, as he carefully works out his eternal purposes.

God is still patient. God is still waiting. He is patiently waiting for people to repent. He doesn’t want anyone to perish. He wants everybody to be saved. In Romans 2, Paul says it’s this patience of God, the richness of his kindness and tolerance and patience that leads to repentance. God’s patience is a big part of what saves us! In 1 Timothy 2, we’re told that God wants everybody to be saved. That’s why he waits. Praise God for his patience!

“Our Lord’s patience means salvation.” ~2 Peter 3:15

Peace,

Allan

Discover the Good News

May 8, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We’re exploring chapter by chapter Leroy Garrett’s “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?”  In our increasingly post-denominational, post-Christian world, Garrett writes that we must make some significant changes if we are to remain a truly viable tool for God. The fifteenth of those suggestions is to center and focus our preaching and teaching and living on salvation from God in Christ, not on church ordinances and church histories and church rules.

Discover the Good in the Good News

Garrett points to the New Testament sermons of Peter and Paul and observes that they were centered on Christ and him crucified. They were all about God’s grace and his free gift of eternal life in the risen Jesus. New Testament sermons are about God’s great love as it’s revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of his Holy Son. That’s the Gospel! That’s the Good News! Jesus died for the sins of the world to redeem the world back into a righteous relationship with God!

Garrett says it’s wrong to preach sermons about baptism for seven straight nights and then call it a Gospel Meeting. But that’s what we’ve done.

Recent studies by some of our own scholars reveal that there has not been much good news in what we have called “gospel preaching.” In a 1988 article in the Gospel Advocate, F. W. Mattox explains that Church of Christ preachers have left it to “denominational preachers” to preach grace, faith, and the atonement while they “went about straightening out their misunderstandings of the place, action, and order of faith, repentance, and baptism in obtaining church membership.” Mattox notes that while others preached the atonement of Christ but not baptism, we preached baptism but not the atonement of Christ.

Garrett cites a study conducted by Bill Love in which Restoration Movement sermons from the early 1800s through the 1950s were analyzed for content. Compared to the 33 sermons found in the New Testament in which all 33 centered on the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus, our own Church of Christ sermons are embarrassingly weak. Love found the cross and empty tomb mentioned in only 25-percent of the hundreds of sermons he studied.

According to Love, 56% of the sermons during the Stone and Campbell generation contained the Gospel. But that number falls to 23% during the G. C. Brewer and Foy Wallace era. In the first two generations, before the Churches of Christ became a separate group, preachers referred to the cross an average of 52% of the time. Since then, the rate falls to 25%. Love’s conclusion is that “our focus moved from Christ crucified to his church, a subtle but destructive shift. Once our sickness took hold, we grew weaker and weaker, more and more anemic. Without the gospel, we lost the source of our faith.”

Yes, I’m afraid we have been guilty of diligently studying the Scriptures and believing that by them we have eternal life. At some point, sooner not later, we need to start preaching and teaching again that salvation is not found in the Bible, it’s found in the One to whom the Bible points. Forgiveness and reconciliation and eternal life are not found in the church, but in the One the church worships and serves. We’ve been guilty of maintaining a religion when we should have been maintaining a relationship with the Savior of the world.

More to Garrett’s point, he closes this chapter by claiming there are two “gospels” we can preach:

We can tell the world it is lost and must repent to be saved. Or we can tell the world what the Bible says, that just as in Adam all died so in Christ are all made alive, that all people are saved, so one only needs to accept the free gift. We can look at the world and say every one is lost except those the Bible says will be saved, or we can look at the world and say every one is saved except those the Bible says will be lost. Which is good news: You are lost, therefore repent; or You are saved, won’t you accept it?

The Church of Christ has had it backwards and has consequently preached bad news. We have preached that every one is lost, while the Bible teaches that every one is saved. Every one is saved except those who refuse the free gift.

Let’s preach the glorious good news. God has saved you through Christ, taking away all your sins. Won’t you accept it through faith and baptism?

Peace,

Allan

Be Assured of Salvation

April 30, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The Mavericks played the absolutely best game they possibly could have Saturday night and still lost to the Thunder in OKC. Durant and his boys are going to take it in five games. Last night Derek Holland looked overmatched, Josh Hamilton pulled something in his back, Ron Washington got tossed out of the game on his 60th birthday, and the Rangers lost their first series since last fall. And the Cowboys used their top draft pick on a guy who just set the record for the lowest score on the Wonderlic intelligence exam in NFL draft history. Tough weekend.

~~~~~~~

Let’s resume our chapter-by-chapter look at Leroy Garrett’s “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?” The book is a compilation of suggestions Garrett makes for us if the Church of Christ is to have a redemptive role and an effective ministry in our rapidly changing world. We reach the halfway point of the book today with suggestion number ten:

Have an assurance of our own salvation.

Garrett claims that our members “do not know we are saved; we hope we are.” I know what he’s talking about. I hear it all the time. My own brothers and sisters in Christ talk about their eternal salvation in hesitant, halting, uncertain terms. “I hope I am.” “I pray that I am.” “If God will just give me a tiny back corner in the basement of heaven, I’ll be happy.” “I’m trying as hard as I can.”

The by-product of such uncertainty is a lack of joy. One thing Church of Christ people aren’t, in spite of many noble qualities, is a joyous people. We have little joy because we have little assurance. We don’t talk like people who are assured of their salvation. We don’t sing that way. We don’t pray that way. That is why our singing is unexciting, our prayers dull, and our services generally boring. Take a look at our Sunday morning service at most any of our churches. Is it a funeral? Where is the spontaneity? Where is the joyous excitement of being a Christian? Who would seek solace from a troubled world among folk who go at their religion with a yawn and a sigh?

Garrett says Church of Christ people are scared to live and afraid to die. We have no joy because we’re not really one hundred percent sure we’re good with God. Despite the clear teachings of Holy Scripture, our people have doubts and fears about their standing with God. They’re uncertain. They wonder if they’re doing enough. They wonder if they’re good enough. They wonder if they’ve loved enough or served enough or worked enough. (By the way, the answer to those questions is “No, no, no, no, and no.”)

Garrett’s dead-on analysis is that we really don’t believe in the grace of God. We would never say it, but the reality is that, for the most part, Church of Christ folks actually believe in salvation by works. We’re taught this at an early age. We think and talk this way. We practice this way. It’s been unambiguously modeled for us and by us for decades. Seriously.

We are saved by being baptized in exactly the correct way for exactly the right reasons. We stay saved by taking communion on exactly the correct day — and only on that correct day — in exactly the correct way. We keep ourselves saved and we save others by studying our Bibles and reaching the exact same correct conclusions about all the exact same doctrines. This is what makes us unique. This is what makes us distinctive. This is what sets us apart from all the others. We’ve got it down right. And since we know so much about God’s plan and God’s will, we’d better be about doing it exactly right.

No wonder we’re so uncertain and nervous! Who could possibly measure up to all that? If I’ve misunderstood a part of that doctrine or I’ve misinterpreted part of God’s will or I’ve done something in a worship service that’s not entirely in the proper order, then my salvation must be in jeopardy. I’d better figure things out and get right with God.

We must start believing in the Gospel of the grace of God, the basis of which is that salvation is his free gift to us. There is no work that we can perform to attain it. There is no way for us to buy it. We can’t be good enough to deserve it. There is no power that can wrest it. It is a gift, a free gift, that is ours only because of God’s philanthropy. In short, we must come to see what has been in holy Scripture all along: “By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).

“[God] has saved us and called us to a holy life — not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time.” ~2 Timothy 1:9

“I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.” ~2 Timothy 1:12

“He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.” ~Titus 3:5

“To him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy!” ~Jude 24

Look, I don’t believe in “once saved, always saved;” but I sure don’t believe either in “once saved, barely saved.” We are saved by God’s grace. We are redeemed by his mercy. It’s a free gift from our Father. And if we can ever all get our brains and our hearts and our souls around that, we’ll be freed from our own hangups to live and praise and worship and serve with great gladness and joy. Finally, we’ll be able to forgive people we haven’t been able to forgive before because we’ll be drawing on God’s goodness instead of our own. Finally, we’ll be able to accept those we’ve never been able to accept before because we’ll be depending on Jesus’ righteousness and not our own. We’ll be able to love every man, woman, and child on this planet in ways we’ve never been able to love before because we’ll be experiencing God’s unconditional love in our lives and not applying our own very conditional love to others.

It’ll be a huge shift for us. Huge. Radical. Dramatic. It’ll change us. It’ll mature us and grow us up. And it will have an eternal impact on those around us who just might see Christ in the Church of Christ for the very first time.

Peace,

Allan

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