Sunday, June 2,
2016
Sunday evening. A mother tucks her 9-year-old son into
bed. Some nights he talks to her about
Star Wars or soccer. But not tonight. Some nights he tries a dozen different
tactics to convince her to let him stay up just 15 minutes more. But not tonight. Tonight, he says, “My Sunday school teacher
said something in church this morning, something about Jesus and the cross and
me.” His shocked mother had not known he
had even been listening in Sunday school.
He never mentions it. So, she
encourages him to say more. She forgets
all about her favorite TV show, which starts in 10 minutes. She and her son talk and before she realizes
what is happening, they are kneeling beside his bed as he prays to receive
Jesus.
Sunday morning, two AM. Two college freshmen sit and drink and
cry. One discovered her boyfriend with
another young woman. The other consoles
her heartbroken friend. The young woman who has been cheated upon really does
not know much about Christianity. She’s
been to church maybe five times in her life.
Here suitemate tries to comfort her with hugs and sips from the
bottle. She appreciates the care, but it
feels so empty. There has to be
something more. There other roommate,
the goody-two shoes girl, never gets drunk and when she has boy-troubles she
has a perspective the two party girls seem to lack.
In frustration, she shouts, “Why don’t you
ever fall to pieces like this?”
She doesn’t expect an answer, so is
surprised to hear her friend say, “Jesus.”
“What?”
She snaps back.
Her friend proceeds to explain how faith
in Jesus helps her through disappointments.
At first she’s disgusted. Of course goody-two shoes girl says,
‘Jesus.’ But she doesn’t say
that. For a few minutes, she doesn’t say
much. Then, even in her drunken haze,
she finds herself feeling curious. She
asks one question, then another, and another.
They talk for another few hours.
She doesn’t go to church later that morning. But the next week she does. And before the semester ends, she has turned
her life in another direction and become a Jesus-follower.
Cancer has wrecked the 75-year-old’s body,
and whatever survived the disease has been damaged by the treatments. Radiation and chemo. His doctors think he might die within the month. He wishes it would be within the hour. He’s not afraid. He trusted in Jesus as a child and has done a
lot of praying over the last year. He’s
pretty sure the stuff his church teaches about going to Heaven is true. So, it’s not the afterward that scares
him. He’s just suffering in this dying
process and desperately wants it to end.
It doesn’t. Defying the odds, he
improves and within a month is actually back on his feet. As he walks out of the hospital, he reflects
on all those prayers. What exactly did
he ask God to do? He can’t put a finger
on it, but he knows that in prayer, he felt God’s reassuring touch. He kind of assumed it meant God was walking
him to the finish line. Now, he feels
God walking him out of the hospital.
What’s next?
In his letter to Titus, Paul writes, “We
ourselves were … slaves to various passions … passing our days in malice; but
when the goodness and lovingkindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us”
(Titus 3:3-4). It happened, from Paul’s
perspective, in the past. His salvation
is something that occurred at two distinct points. First, there was Jesus’ death on the cross,
where he took on himself the weight, the guilt, and the consequences of Paul’s
sins. Second, there was the day the
risen Christ confronted Paul as Paul traveled to Damascus to arrest Christians
for the crime of being Christians. In
the crucifixion and in the moment of meeting Jesus, Paul sees himself as one
who was saved. By the time he or one of
his followers in his name writes this letter to Titus, both events had happened
a couple of decades ago. Salvation came
in the past.
Then in Titus 3:7 Paul writes, “Having
been justified by grace, we become heirs according to the hope of eternal
life.” This is theme developed more in
Romans 8 where Paul calls those are saved sons and daughters of God. We are adopted and our inheritance is eternal
in God’s presence with the status of royalty.
We are sons and daughters of the king.
He makes the same point about adoption in Galatians 4.
First in the cross and then in the moment
or in the process in which we make the conscious decision to confess our sins,
turn our lives over to Jesus, and follow him, we see salvation as something
that has happened. Unless you are making
this decision to be a Christ-follower right now, as I speak, then your
salvation is a past event. You have been
saved.
If you have not made that decision, I
encourage you to consider it. I believe
that in knowing you have been forgiven and knowing you stand before God as one
who is completely clean and covered in the righteousness of Christ you will
experience freedom and joy you have never known. If you have never given the Lord your heart,
please prayerfully consider doing so today.
If you have been saved, it has already happened even if it was just last
night.
Whenever it happened, it holds for us
promise. We were saved. And we will spend eternity in relationships
of love and peace. We will be resurrected
into bodies that cannot be injured and cannot be killed. Once saved, we have complete assurance and
unflinching hope.
This is so in each case I mentioned at the
beginning. That 9-year-old boy who
listened to his Sunday school teacher and prayed with his mom and was then
baptized in church was saved and has the hope of eternal life with God. That college student whose life turned around
radically went from wild party girl to Christ follower. The 75-year-old cancer survivor walked out of
the hospital as a saved man with an eternity of life in the New Heavens and New
Earth ahead of him.
However, in each case, an extremely
important question cannot be avoided.
The 9-year-old boy may have as many as 81 years to live between the
moment of salvation, the past, and like in the eternal kingdom, the future. If the college student lives to be 100, she
could have a similar situation, 80 between being saved and entering
eternity. Even the 75-year-old who has
baffled his doctors by surviving is himself now wondering. I am saved and heaven is coming, but what
about right now?
Indeed.
What is salvation today? And what
do the past and the future have to say about how I live today? We’ve looked at hypothetical examples of a
child, a college students, and a senior citizen. What about your life? Mine?
Maybe I live just one more week.
How does my past – saved at age 11 in 1981 and my future – eternity with
Christ in the resurrection frame my life and form my identity for the next week
that l live? Or the next 40 years? How do past and future shape you? How do they shape the church?
Gordon fee of Regent College in Vancouver
in his commentary on Titus points to verses 5 and 7 where Paul writes that
believers undergo rebirth, are renewed by the Holy Spirit, and are justified by
God’s grace.[i] In being born again, the death that sin
brings is removed. Salvation is far more
than just a transaction. Our
relationship with God is restored.[ii]
The Holy Spirit brings renewal. I believe even our initial step toward God
where we make a conscious choice to confess our sin, receive forgiveness and
acknowledge Jesus as Lord is aided by the Spirit. Before we turn to God, the Holy Spirit draws
us and works in us. Then at the moment of salvation, “the Spirit,” Paul says,
“is poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.” Fee says this renewal means a change in our
inner being. God does something that
defies precise description. We are not who we were prior to turning to
Jesus.
Third, Paul mentions in Titus 3:7 that in
salvation, we are justified. Our status
before God is now the status Jesus has before God. His righteousness is given to us. So, if in rebirth, our relationship with God
is restored and if in renewal, our inner being experiences transformation, in
justification, Jesus gives us his perfection.
We are made right.
Because we have been saved, in the past,
today, we are born again, renewed, and justified. What does the future aspect of our salvation
contribute to our lives today? Knowing that
our future home is the new Heaven and new Earth, we completely reject the current
condition of the world as it is mired in sin and death. Resurrection hope breeds in us a holy
discontent. In Titus, Paul says we are
to renounce worldly passions, avoid stupid controversies, and devote ourselves
to good works (from 2:12; 3:8, 9). Dr.
Fiddes writes, “Christians will engage in movements of liberation refusing to
tolerate any dehumanizing methods of authority in the present world, contrasting
them with the Holy Spirit” who restores humanity to the original good condition
in which we were formed.[iii]
Spurred on by the Spirit who fills us and
is poured out on us, we become voices advocating for God’s kingdom. My friend Luke is an example of what I mean.[iv] Remember, to be saved in
the present is to devote ourselves to good works, to love our neighbor, and to
renounce dehumanizing powers and authorities.
Luke and his wife and four children came to the United States with
nothing but the clothes they were wearing.
Though their situation appeared desperate, they were grateful to be out
of their home country, Sudan, where in the 1990’s, the Muslim government
carried out atrocities against Christian and against other Muslims.
Our church visited Luke and his family at
their apartment and learned that they had a few mattresses, the rent paid for
three months, and an insufficient food allowance. The present Holy Spirit told us this was
atrocious, that we needed to act, and that we had much to learn about God from
Luke and his wife Nya. So we went to work acquiring furniture, stocking their
shelves with groceries, welcoming the kids into our children’s and youth
ministries, and helping Luke with the paper work he needed for employment. We shared hospitality, which they gratefully
needed.
Luke and Nya shared their stories –
stories our church desperately needed to hear.
Our limited faith perspective expanded as they gave first-hand accounts
of fleeing persecution in Sudan, meeting Filipino missionaries who led them to
Jesus while they were in a refugee camp in Cairo, Egypt, and then made the
journey to the U.S.A. Their stories
which broadened our faith, the Filipino missionaries who carried the gospel
around the world, and the connection with us were all part of the Holy Spirit’s
influence not just over us as a church or over Luke’s family, but over the
world that was lost in sin. The Spirit
looked at this family and looked at the refugee crisis and said, “This will not
do.” As a church, we heard the Spirit’s
call, did our best to answer, and ended up richer for it as we welcomed Luke
and Nya into our family.
Maybe this idea of a church helping a
family and that family blessing the church seems a few steps past the simple
notion of salvation. This and 100 other
examples should perhaps be discussed on other Sundays, not this morning. But salvation in the present, lived
salvation, is no simple notion. It is
the individual believer and the church born again (born into restored
relationship), renewed (having experienced inner transformation) and justified
(in right standing before God). It is
the believer and the entire church responsive to the Holy Spirit. The story of Luke and Nya and the church
drawn together, transformed, and drawn deeper into the heart of God is a
picture of lived salvation. The past
event and the future hope lead to a present that is Godly and different from
anything the world would predict.
Think of the 9-year-old or the college
student or the cancer survivor living between that salvation and the final
resurrection. Think of yourself in that
in-between space, from right now until judgment day. How will we live? In Christ, we will live as if the Kingdom has
already arrived. It has come in him and
will come to completion at his return.
Every day we live toward that end.
Every day, the reality of salvation takes shape in our lives.
AMEN
[i]
G.Fee (1988), New International Bible
Commentary: 1&2 Timorthy, Titus, Hendrickson Publishers (Peabody, MA),
p.204.
[ii]
P.Fiddes, Past Event and Present
Salvation, p.15.
[iii]
Fiddes, p. 31. See also Guthrie
[iv] A
reference to Luciano Karlo and his wife Ny Fasher, who are from Sudan and whom
we helped at Greenbrier in 1997.
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