Claim it

 

YOU WILL BE SAVED

When the inside belief is married to the outside claim then the apostle Paul asserts you can be sure YOU WILL BE SAVED.  The language of being saved is not so often heard today. It’s easy to mock.  Unsophisticated. It’s a strong rescue word and most people laugh at the idea that they need rescuing from anything.  Someone who does 100 press-ups a day, plays squash 3 times a week, and walks 15,000 steps and whose fit life is as fulfilling as the next persons, scoffs at the notion they need saving:  'That's a guilt trip put on me by Christians...I'm as good as anyone else. I don't need rescuing, redeeming...any of that stuff.'

But when you grow closer to God, you begin to realize that there are possibilities you are missing out on. Again, its about SW spiritual wisdom – when you open up to spiritual reality of how different your life could be.  How there are messed up areas inside us and between us but, more radically, how our relationship with God is dead.  He remains totally beyond our world and our experience because for us there is no other reality but what we see.  We put our trust in human wisdom.  

Being saved is about bringing the messed up lives and relationships to God. The negative areas of our lives.  I love what someone said: I rather attend church with messed up people who love God than religious people who dislike messed up people.  We who belong together in church are fellow messed-up disciples.  That's why the words forgiven, cleansed, reconciled are vital and why confession is so necessary.

Being saved is also gloriously positive. It's about living large with God and his people and its progressive. 1 Cor. 1:18 stresses being saved - the process by which God's Spirit is helping us work out Jesus Christ character in our lives and communities. It's a profound ongoing journey. As Jesus put it: Life, life abundant.  

In our tough times especially, this spiritual wisdom reality of God's biggest purpose holds us together with everything else. My mother died in Addenbrookes Hospital, aged 57.  In good health she suffered a freak accident falling down the stairs and the hospital declared her brain dead.  On a life support machine we sat with her, read and prayed. She was a strong believer and a great influence on me. When I went in to be with her as they switched the life support off,  I read Scripture and prayed asking God to keep her safe. It was unbearably sad.  Looking out of the window, high up, I saw traffic on the main road and, in the distance, a train going to London. And in the bleakness of the parting came this conviction that Jesus is Lord. He is Lord over death, Lord over the world I could see, over my life as I returned to home and work.  The totality of his love, his claims are overwhelming.  We live in a larger world. Once and for all, at Easter, God has revealed himself in Jesus dying and rising, to bring us together to himself.

As C.S. Lewis wrote: Christianity if false is of no importance, and if true it's of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.