Friends since childhood called to say they were getting married; that is, if they could work out a dilemma concerning their faith. I knew them to both be persons who had taken their faith in Christ seriously. He was confirmed at thirteen and believed his faith was adequate unto salvation (Sounds Lutheran!). She had given her heart and life to Christ and been saved when she was nine. The students in her college group filled her with anxiety that her husband-to-be didn’t use the saved word.
How would you have joined into the discussion with my friends? I was too young for such an important inquiry.
After some soul searching, I boiled down my thoughts to say: The “saved” word can be said of one who believes in Christ with all his/her heart. (Sounds to me very much like the early church confession of faith which some manuscripts add to close the eighth chapter of Acts.) If you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and if you take up your cross and follow Christ, I believe that you are saved.
We wait for the Spirit’s stirring to speak to us and draw us to faith. Walter Rauschenbusch wrote compellingly that experiential religion is at the heart of what makes Baptists unique.
We boiled our thoughts down to this: salvation is a personal experience of trust in Christ that makes us whole.
My friends found common ground and were married and have been for over 50 years. Let’s consider salvation in past, present, and future tense.
Past: I have been saved.
An experience in Christ is an indicator of one’s salvation. The Standard Confession (1660) defined the converted as those who could “assent to the truth of the Gospel, believing with all their hearts, that there is remission of sins, and eternal life to be had in Christ.”[1] You may or may not remember the specific time and place (as Billy Graham is said to recall). Instead, you may simply recall a season in your life when you found yourself coming to Christ (as Martha Graham described her coming to trust in God’s faithful forgiveness). If you are not sure, you might pray, “If back then, then thanks! If not back then, then now! Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart.”
Baptists have trusted “union with Christ to be essential to salvation.”[2] Bill Leonard writes: “Salvific regeneration is required of all persons who claim Christian faith. In this sense, Baptists were, and generally remain, conversionists in their understanding of the need for personal response to God’s love and grace.”[3]
I placed my trust in Christ when I was eight years old. I felt God calling my name, I said to my dad, “I think God is speaking to me.” He responded, “God does speak to us in our hearts. Perhaps you should listen.”
I began a wonderful conversation with our pastor, Grady Cothen. One day, I trusted that I was as ready as I would ever be to take my initial steps of faith in Christ. While I didn’t know everything I would ever need to know, I did want to commit what I knew about my own life, my faith and even my sinfulness, to what I knew about the love of God. I expressed with my mouth and believed in my heart that Jesus Christ is Lord (Romans 10:9-10).
Paul writes to the Romans, “Since then it is by faith that we are justified, let us grasp the fact that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have confidently entered this new relationship of grace, and here we take our stand, in happy certainty of the glorious things he has for us in the future. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we have only a hope of future joys—we can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and trouble” (5:1-3, Phillips). “In Christ we have been made whole, sound, and safe even when hemmed in with trouble (5:3, The Message).”
Present: I am being saved.
Salvation can be trusted to be a present reality. Today is the day of salvation! (2 Corinthians 6:2). “Whoever believes in him shall not be disappointed” (Romans 10:11). Leonard speaks of regeneration as ranging between being a dramatic event and a sustaining process. Some may experience a dramatic conversion. On the other hand, others speak of accepting Christ having been nurtured to faith through gentle guidance and instruction.
However, a person may come to faith, “a new kind of life” is evidence of one’s personal experience of grace. Sanctification, growing in grace, involves daily Christian experience and discipleship. It is a life nurtured in the community of faith, the church.[4]
Salvation does not keep you from trials and troubles, but it does promise to take you through them. I like the way William Sloan Coffin described this when he said, “Miracles do not a messiah make. But a messiah can do miracles. If you ask me if Jesus literally raised Lazarus from the dead, literally walked on water and changed water into wine, I will answer, ‘For certain, I do not know. But this I do know, faith must be lived before it is understood, and the more it is lived, the more things become possible.’ I can also report that in home after home I have seen Jesus change beer into furniture, sinners into saints, hate-filled relations into loving ones, cowardice into courage, the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope. In instance after instance, life after life, I have seen Christ be ‘God’s power unto salvation,’ and that’s miracle enough for me.”[5]
Paul wrote, “We trust in Christ knowing that troubles can develop patience and that patience develops character and that character, hope (5:3-4).
Future: I will be saved.
While fulfillment may not be experienced here,[6] our salvation is promised to one day be made complete. We, therefore, are never smug or overconfident or overzealous. Believing that we will be saved, we are hope filled!
We trust in Christ. Our hope in him does not disappoint because the love of God has been generously poured into our lives (5:5). The Holy Spirit remains the “earnest of the inheritance” and not the inheritance itself.[7] Our faith is “already” and “not yet.”
Salvation looms large on the horizon; therefore, we trust God and sin on bravely (To quote Martin Luther).
John Donne’s believed, “All occasions invite God’s mercies!” There is not a time when God’s mercies will not yield hope!
An editorial in the Washington Post wrote this about Ruth Graham when she died. “She had a blue wooden sign tacked above her doorframe of her bedroom. It had been there for years. The sign read, ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve been!’”
I have long admired Ruth Graham. I love that sign because it reminds us to go under the mercies of God. God goes with us through past, present, and future experiences. Therefore, we trust in God!
The Christian life is lived in tension between the gift that one has received and the gift for which one hopes.[8] We look forward believing we will be saved.
“God’s love doesn’t seek value, it creates value. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement.[9]
Salvation is an experience of trust. We have been, are being, and will be saved! Therefore, work out the salvation God has given you with a proper sense of awe and responsibility! (Philippians 2:12).
[1] Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith, 316.
[2] Alvah Hovey, Restatement of Denominational Principles (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1892), 3.
[3] Bill Leonard, Baptist Ways, A History (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 2003), 3.
[4] Alvah Hovey, Restatement of Denominational Principles (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1892), 3.
[5] William Coffin, Credo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), p., 10.
[6] C. W, Christian, Shaping Your Faith (Waco, Texas: Word, 1973), p. 238.
[7] Ibid, p. 238.
[8] Burton H. Throckmorton, Jr., Adopted in Love (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), p. 32.
[9] William Coffin, Credo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004).