Questions About Salvation – Part 1 (Introduction)		Download	PowerPoint

Introduction

John: We are starting something new today.  We are doing a new series on Salvation. This is the second series of the fall semester and the good news for you guys who are here, listening to the great worship and having a little bit of snacks, is that I am not going to go to long tonight.  But that depends totally on you.  Alright?

Tonight we are introducing this topic and we are kicking off, so let me just give you a little bit of what we do at the beginning of every series, which is just talk about why we are going to do the series.  And rather than give you a lot of reasons, I am going to show you a lot of series.  Here’s what I mean:  In almost every series we’ve done in recent memory the subject has come up over and over of what do we mean by salvation?  I am not going to go through every one of these instances, but it comes up repeatedly.  You would think that a subject seemingly as simple as salvation would be something we would understand.  But here’s the place where this series is so important to us.  As I have started to read really deep books on salvation, almost every one of them says something to this effect at some point: “Salvation is such a difficult concept to fully grasp that most of us reach the end of our understanding and have to rely on faith and affirm the mystery and  the infiniteness of God.”

Is Salvation An Easy Concept?

Think about that for a moment.  A lot of the time we think, “Oh, salvation easy, I understand how that works.”  Check.  The people who really study and spend a long time peering into the verses about salvation and the implication of those verses say, it will take you to the end of your ability to understand.  It will take you to a place where you either will be in complete awe of who God is and affirm the mystery and wonder of God.  Or you will be frustrated trying to figure it all out because this is a little bit deeper than most of us think.  And that’s why we have brought it up so many times.  That’s why every time we come up to a subject like evangelism somebody is like exactly what are we presenting?  And how does it work?  And the questions keep coming up.  Like what about people who say they believe, then walk away and change their mind. What does that mean? How does that work?  How about when we took on the Christian Views on Hell?  No matter what view you look at, whether you look at universalism, or annihilationism or the traditional view, we kept coming back to: What does it really mean to be saved and how do you understand that in light of these doctrines about hell?  We even looked at it in the Mystery of Gods Will.  It troubled us so much because we are talking about a sovereign God, and somebody was like, wait a minute, if He is sovereign, so what chance do I have to have free will to even make decisions  even about salvation?  It just keeps coming up.   Let me just give you a couple of examples from our series on Ephesians, I will actually just give you one.  We got to these verses in the very opening chapters of Ephesians where everybody nearly practically fell out of their seats.  Remember this verse: “For he chose us,”  everybody rustled in the room at that time.  Chose?  What do you mean He chose us?  Don’t we choose Him?  It says

“For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight.  In love He predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will – to the praise of His glorious grace which He has freely given to us the ones He loves.  . . . In Him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purposes of His will in order that we who were the first to put our hope in Christ might be for the praise of His glory.” (Ephesians 1:4-6; 11-12)

And everybody was just moving around.  It just seems like all the action is God’s action, where am I?  Where is my choice?  Where am I deciding these things?  Even back then we had brought up this verse here, which everybody loves to say in the church: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him,” from Romans 8.  Everybody loves that one, right?  Every time you are bummed about anything, there is a good chance somebody might say this to you: “Well, you know, we know that God works for the good of those who love Him,” and then we just stop.  That’s not even the whole verse, that’s just the part we like.  Pull out the verse magnifying glass that comes in the back of some Bibles, and  just zoom in.  “I just like this part I don’t want anything else in my vision.”  Here’s the rest of this that also made us wrestle: “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him.”  Who are those people who love Him?  Those “who have been called according to His purpose.  For those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son that He might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.  And those He predestined, He also called; those He called, He justified; those He justified, He also glorified.”  And we didn’t like it.  And I said, hold on, some day when the time is right, we will do a series on salvation.

Ladies and gentlemen, that time is now.  [Laughter]

We are going to do a series on salvation and answer some of these questions. That’s just a taste of some of the things that we need to talk about, but I want you to do some of the thinking tonight for me.

What Must I Do To Be Saved?

Here’s where I want to start in our introduction. I would like you to answer this question right now, and I’ll give you a few moments to think about it, and then we are going to talk about it and see how it comes out.  I want you to imagine that I come to you and I say to you, in a conversation we are having over coffee somewhere, where we are talking about something else and I finally look at you and say, “You know there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while.  What must I do to be saved?”  What is your answer going to be?  I’m going to pause like we do a lot of times when we are doing our introductions like right here.  I’m going to pass out … I want you to take a couple of cards and a pen and I want you to keep one card for a little bit later.  We are going to ask some questions you can write down.  But the first thing I want you to do is help me to answer this question:  If I come to you and say, “What must I do to be saved?” and I am seriously standing at that door, hoping that your answer might bring me through the door of salvation.  What are you going to say to me?  Let’s pause right there and pass these out.  In a few moments I want you to tell me, if you’re comfortable, what your answer might be.

[Pause for written comments]

 

Alright, so let’s see if I come to you and ask you, “What must I do to be saved?”  Anyone want to respond?  Yes.

Monique: Well, there’s like two answers, right?  To really be saved, because it’s grace, you can say, nothing, your salvation is free. But if we are talking about the steps that you have to take, not simple.  But I said that it means that you believe in God, like Triune, so Father,  Son and Holy Spirit, and that you choose from that day forward to life your life in love with Him, loving Him and trying to be, allowing yourself to be transformed. And so you now live your life in a different position where you ask yourself first what would God call me, what does this mean for me, what would He want me to do.  So it’s like a shift.

John:  Anyone else? Yes.

Andrew: Admitting your need of Christ as your Savior and declare Him as Lord of your life.

John: So admit your need for a Savior and confess Him as Lord of your life.  Any others?

Soren: To take a posture of humility and to give up your will and to submit or put your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

John:  Yes, Daniel.

Daniel: Salvation is the transformation of the heart from self-idolatry to Christ likeness.

John:  Yes.

Morgan:  I can expand on that.  I like the Lord and Savior aspect, but I say “place your faith,” which means “trust” in Christ as Lord.  So Lord meaning Jesus is your Master, you’re now going to follow Him as a disciple and student.  Savior, you no longer strive to earn God’s favor, but instead you trust Jesus for the forgiveness of your sin, and you’re accepted by God and that frees you to follow after him.

John:  Okay. Yes.

Megan: I think I was drawing from a bible verse here, if I remember it correctly, but I said, “That if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead then He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  But I was thinking of being saved is more of a justification aspect than less sanctification.  I don’t know if it goes as far as reorienting your life, it seems like it should, but then I’m not sure.

John: Ok.  You want to come back?

Monique:  Kind of.  It is a really complicated — which is why we are doing this series — but there are verses about burning the chaff, or cutting off from the vine, or all these things if we are not fruitful, and whatever, whatever.  It’s kind of a, I don’t know, a circle, since it’s like, yeah you don’t need works to be saved, but if you’re saved then your life should like produce these things.  If you believe in God and you’re putting him first, and I like whoever said, about not like idolizing yourself but idolizing God, there is going to be a shift, and things are going to be different.  And if they’re not, we can’t judge whether someone’s saved or not, but the Bible does have verses that talk about being cut off, so…

Andrew: I think that has to do with sanctification, but that’s not salvation.  So your works and your deeds tie into the fact that you have made this commitment, but it’s not necessarily . . .

Monique: . . . what saves you.

John: So I am looking at you from across the little coffee table and I’m [laughter] I’m getting confused because my question was,  “What must I do to be saved?” And it’s possible that this is one of those things where I can go, “Why don’t you guys work it out, and then when you have it done, formulated in a way that I understand it, then I will come back and ask again.”  Any other contributions of what you wrote down or that you thought about that you would like to share?

Soren:  I just like Megan’s distinction between justification and sanctification.  I think we are getting into a lot into sanctification which isn’t what the person across the coffee table is asking.

John:  Okay.  Yes.

Morgan:  It’s got to be centrally a matter of who you are trusting.  I guess trusting Jesus, that man on the cross in Luke 23, that guy didn’t have time to work out all these philosophical and things that are important for Christians to learn to grow.  He knew Jesus was the Messiah and he basically gave himself to over him.  And Jesus said “You’ll see me today in paradise.”  So the key question is trust, how that plays out, that that’s where we get to all these things.  I think people have said really good things, but ultimately it’s saying, “I trust you to take care of things.”

Monique:  Okay, so, I am a horrible Christian, I don’t remember where this came from exactly in the Bible, but we kind of talked about it on one of our retreats, where Jesus was sort of comparing following Him in salvation to like a project,  and basically don’t start it unless you can finish it, and take into account what you need to build it and the cost, and like whatever.  So basically weigh what it takes to follow Me and if you can’t complete it,  don’t follow me, and don’t chose me.  So I think it is irresponsible of us to be like,  just say this prayer, sanctification doesn’t matter. I think it’s like, hey, if you want this you, need to know it’s difficult and this is what your life should kind of look like,  and these are the things God calls of you and you should be willing to do these things and — not necessarily that you’re not saved — but I think it is irresponsible to be like, “just confess, you know, Christ is God, and you’re good.”  I know the concept that salvation is grace and its free and its mercy and all of that and we don’t earn that, it’s a gift.  But obviously He took it very seriously to the point that He said if you can’t finish this, don’t even start it.

John:  Okay.  So I’ve recently had this experience with my business partner, Caesar, who some of you have met, who very recently committed his life to Christ.  We went to the Harvest Crusade which is where Greg Laurie gives his kind of message and asks people to come forward.  It was a very interesting event because, first of all from an outsider’s perspective, he listened to the entire gospel presentation and didn’t understand it.  [Laughter]  Because we use a lot of Christian words alot of times, and he [Greg] kept talking and talking, and he was trying to say so much, and there was all these cheers, but I think most of the cheers came from the Christians who were kind of rooting for their team, but the non-christians where not understanding.  At least, he didn’t and I quizzed him later as to why.  It led to a lot of good conversations, though, and one of the things he has been doing is listening to the entire Gospel of Matthew series that we did and he goes through one of them each day, there’s 44 of them, so he is about half way through them now.  And here’s the funny thing he started to encounter: when he finally understood what Greg Laurie was trying to communicate, he said, “Oh, sounds simple and sounds very understandable.”  And this is not just Greg Laurie, but a lot of us when we try to boil the gospel message down we tend to package it into little sound bites and marketing messages that are palatable.  We’ve decided all the stuff that we are talking about here, too complicated!  Let’s just make it simple, like you’ve mentioned already, a prayer or saying something that we can just make easy, that might fit on a bumper sticker at some point or something like that.  When he started reading or listening to the Book of Matthew and hearing what Jesus actually said, what was interesting to me was his first reaction was anger.  He was angry because what he was hearing from Jesus was so much more difficult to follow and so much more difficult to comprehend than that easy message that was being given, and for days he was struggling with what Jesus was saying to the disciples, especially when you hit Sermon on the Mount, where many of us if you remember in the room where wrestling with Jesus words and that’s why that series is so valuable, because it’s just not going through the book of Matthew in a Bible study.  It’s kind of an audio commentary and even more, its actually live, people wrestling with the words of Jesus.  Even words we have grown up with our whole lives, even words about salvation and, yes, becoming a disciple.  Those were so difficult.  He’s now starting to calm down a little bit and understand how it all fits together.  He has a benefit that few of us have:  he is actually listening to it all from beginning to end and he is connecting the pieces and it’s starting to make more sense.  The reason I bring that up is because it isn’t easy.  That’s why we are doing this series.  And the words of Jesus come sometimes very sharply.  Let me show you a few:

Verses From Scripture About Salvation

Jesus was asked, “What I must do to be saved?”  Here are some responses.  To the rich young ruler Jesus answered this, “If you want to enter life keep, the commandments. … You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ …  If you want to be perfect, go sell your processions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.  Then come follow me.” (Matthew 19:17b, 18b-19, 21)

I could say a little bit unfairly the word belief doesn’t even appear in this passage anywhere.  I say a little bit unfairly because maybe that’s what’s implied in “come follow me.”  But would you say these words to me on the other side of that coffee table?  Would that be your response?  Andrew.

Andrew: You have to look at the context.  Who’s He talking to?  You have to take in the fact that I am talking to you across a coffee table. I might know that you are extremely wealthy and that you hold your processions with a closed fist and you walk around prideful by the fact that you are wealthy.  Might I say you just need to let those things go, this is a process of releasing what you have to God and following Him?  Absolutely.  But it’s also what his response was after that was: “Can’t do it, sorry. Adios.”  It’s all in contextual and who you’re talking to.

John: I’m going to build right off that comment and say one thing:  All the verses I am about to show you are all taken out of context.  I do not mean that in a bad way.  I just literally plucked them off the pages because that’s how most people read stuff and I am almost doing that almost in a sloppy fashion intentionally, alright.  So just, I am doing that on purpose, but I will come back and say, I don’t think this rule only applied to him [the rich young ruler], I really don’t. But we can talk about later why, because Jesus holds everyone to this standard.  We just like to think that this was a special case for him. I don’t believe that.  I believe He would say similar things to many people, maybe everybody in this room.  But, yes, it’s a good catch about the context being important.  I’m intentionally looking for verses where people respond because it builds the problem conveniently.  Here’s another one:

To the expert in the law who asked Him, “What must I do to be saved?  Jesus said this: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”  That sounds closer to what we have already heard about maybe turning from your inward love of self to loving God and loving others, even action that goes with that.  That’s a formulation.  Again, you could say, “well that you have to believe to do those things,” but I don’t see a specific belief in anything but God here.

In the Book of Acts, when the jailer found out that Paul and Silas could have escaped but didn’t, comes to them and says, “What must I do to be saved?” And they say to him, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved — you and your household.”  Now that looks a little bit different, doesn’t it?

Here are some things you could say, and I am going to tell you again these are even more in accordance with the Andrew’s admonition, probably taken a little bit out of context, but I have seen these things bantered around.  “What must I do to be saved?”  You should “do the right thing.”  Because in Matthew 25:34-36 it says, “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ ”  And hence people will say, “If you’re not doing these things, you’re not inheriting the kingdom.”  So I hear people who would respond and say, “Do you want to find salvation and eternal life, you have to be acting right.”  And I don’t just mean living your life right, but you have to be acting towards others right.

I am not prescribing this to you.  I’m just describing what people say.  Part of the thing we have to discover in this series is, do you believe that?  I mean, it’s in the Bible, but we have to delve into it and find out, does He really mean that’s the test for salvation?

Or here’s another formulation:  “Stand firm until the end.”  That’s what you have to do to get salvation.  In Matthew 10:22, it says, “You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” So if you don’t stand firm, you won’t be saved?  If you were to somehow falter under pressure, you won’t be saved?  I mean, this would be a little bit easier to dismiss if it was something Paul said, but these are Jesus’ words.  What do we do with that?

Jesus said you should “leave behind people you care about,” that’s how you get salvation.  Some of you are all too happy to do that.  “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”  Matthew 19:29.  Do you have to do that?  Seems like He is saying that that would be an indicator of it.

Okay, for all those who just think belief is it, here’s a bunch of verses for you on the belief side.  “All you need to do is believe in Jesus Christ.”  John 3:16.  Easy enough.  How about John 5:24: “Very  truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.”   John 10:8: “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.”

For all those who think it’s just John who believes in belief alone, in Acts, written by Luke, it says: “And everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.”  In Romans, it says in chapter 10: “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.“  We like those.  That can fit on a bumper sticker.  We can narrow that down and say that’s simple.  Is that enough?  That’s what we struggle with.  That’s what all of our series have come back with.  What’s all the other stuff when it could be this easy?  Morgan.

Morgan:  Yeah, I deal with this all the time at Citrus College, where you have to deconstruct what that word “belief” means Biblically.  And I don’t know if we’ll get into that in this series along the way, because I think that one of the major issues that I experience is people think “belief,” and they think “mental assention.”   Just like assenting to Jesus did this, Jesus did that.  That’s not my understanding, and I don’t think it’s a Biblical understanding of what it means to “believe” in Jesus.  And I can unpack that more.  Just in the idea of, I think when I read the gospels, the examples I use, before Jesus actually appeared after He rose from the dead, the demons had the best theology.  They knew exactly who Jesus was.  While everyone else was confused at times, some moments of great faith, some moments of having no clue, the demons knew.  So that clearly means that you can know exactly who Jesus is, and not be saved.  So belief is actually, that acquired  knowledge, is actually into practice, to a point where you are following after it, because you have transferred allegiance.  You know, those are those things that I can unpack.  Because mental assent, we have to deconstruct that.  That trips up a lot of people.

John:  Okay, so assume that you look at the word “belief” and you change it to “faith,” meaning that you act upon that belief and put your life’s trust in that.  Okay? So we would still like it to be like that, even if we say intellectual assent or knowledge is not enough.  We would still like to camp on this page because this sounds good, and if you thought this was all there was, you could say, I could answer that question across the coffee table really quickly.  I could just tell you, as I sit across the table from you, here’s what it is.  I’ve got my answer ready.  And for some people that’s it.  You’ve just got to put those next to other things.

Let me show you just a few more, only one more slide, and then we are going to take some of your questions.  I’m only putting these up because I want you to see some verses that people pull things from to say, this is what it says:

“You need to believe in the correct gospel, not just any gospel, but you got to make sure you got it right.”  In Corinthians 15:2 it says: “By this gospel” (and he’s arguing for a certain gospel) “you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I have preached to you. Otherwise you have believed in vain.”  You might just pass right over that, but think about that for a moment.  Just a moment ago we were talking about, well, do you really understand the Triune nature of God?  Do you really have to get that?  And again, Paul is not arguing for a specific set of beliefs or saying here is the creed, but he did preach a gospel to them, and he is saying that if you don’t believe in it the right way, if you believe in something different, then you haven’t believed in the right thing, whatever the thing is. We would have to look at that context again.  But does that ever enter into our conversations?

Let’s bug ourselves with things like the word “chosen.”  Look at this:  Maybe you should be one of those people who are “appointed unto salvation.” In Acts 13:48, it says “When the gentiles heard this, they were glad and they honored the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed.”  So those people who had an advanced reservation for eternal life, those people believed. Everyone else didn’t believe.  Why?  Because it seems that this word troubles people.  What does it mean?  Those who are “appointed for salvation”?

Alright just 2 more.  “You should work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”  In Philippians 2:12-13 it says: “Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed — not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence — continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.”   Would you say that to me across the table?  What must I do to be saved? Well, one of the things is that you got to do this, but then you need to continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.  That doesn’t sound like something I want to do.  “For it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill His good purpose.”  You have really confused me there.  If I am acting with fear and trembling, what does it mean He’s doing the work?  Like, which one of us is?

And finally (don’t throw things at me) the best one I came across was: “bear some children.”  [Laughter] What must I do to be saved?   Because in 1 Timothy 2:15, it says “But women will be saved through child bearing —  if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.”  [Laughter] It’s definitely in the scriptures, I just cited it, so [laughter].  So in our group that means that only Lina among the females is saved so far.

So what do you do with these verses?  These are just to show you that sometimes these things, when you lay them side by side, you have to actually start to work them together.  It is a little bit more complex sometimes than we want it to be, and that’s why when I say, why are we doing this series?  It’s because I think it is a little more complex.  That’s really the point of trying to introduce it tonight.

Here’s what I would like you to do.  I want you to drive the series.  Tonight is an intro.  We just kind of dabbled with a little bit, build a case why it’s good to spend Gods time over the next four or five weeks looking at these subjects.  What I would like you to do is on the cards, I want you to write down what questions you have about salvation.  That will drive our series, as it did with the last one.  We have plenty of resources. I am not going to recommend books to you yet, only because I want to see what your questions are.  We’ve got a bunch of them and I’ve been reading through them, but I would really like to hear from you, like what is it that you want to know about salvation?  What question is the one that troubles you?  We’ll do that for a few minutes and then I would like you to hand those in and, if you want, give me your formulation cards too, on what you would say to me about what must I do to be saved?  Pass both of those in and that will help drive us, and then we will get back to some worship and close it up that way tonight.  Take a few minutes to work on those if you would.

[Pause for written comments]

Salvation Is Important To God

Let me just close with this last thought and let’s pray.  The last thought I want to give you is, you know what, this series is not just another series for this reason: If God is about anything, He’s about salvation.  Some who ponder this subject would say that God created us to save us.  Salvation was not a plan B or something that caught God by surprise.  That’s why so many of these passages that we read talk about , “from the foundations of the world,” “from before the creation.”  God had a plan for salvation, because God knows/knew/always knows (however you want to state it), that to create humanity and to give us the blessing of life, and to know Him and for Him to reveal Himself to us, that meant for sure that salvation had to be a part of any plan that included us having a choice of any kind.  So one thing is, this is just not a series that we can think, this might be interesting.  This is not what God is all about, but this is a primary thing that God is about — in our relationship and just who He is.

The other thing is that some of us shy away from this subject because we have no desire to know about our own salvation, and even less desire to care about the salvation of others.  While this is not a talk on evangelism, because we have already done that, understanding salvation is crucial to ever caring about how you might bring somebody else into a conversation where they might learn about the Lord and find salvation.  So while we are going to talk about some of the difficulties of understanding the doctrines about salvation, the ultimate purpose of it is for us to understand our own salvation better, but more importantly to be able to bring others into a conversation like “what must I do to be saved?”  And to be able to handle even some of the difficulties of people reading on their own, and saying, but it says this, or I understand this, or what do you think of this, and being able to deal with that as best we can.

In the end, as we learned in our last series, it is the Holy Spirit that brings people to even the ability to be able to say that Jesus is Lord, so let’s pray that the Spirit blesses this series.  And you can hang unto those cards during worship if you want to think through a couple more things to write down.  Let’s pray:

Father you have authored a plan of salvation and you have known about it and you have planned it from before any of the creation took place.  Jesus you took your part in that willingly and laid down your life for every single one of us in this room, so that your offer would be available to all.  And Spirit, it is by your power that people are even allowed to know and to speak and to believe in the name of Jesus, so that they may be saved.  So Triune God, we ask you to bless this series, give us more than just a knowledge in our minds.  Use this to get us to know more about You relationally, and turn us outward.  Equip us with this series, so that we may see even more come to a saving knowledge of who You are.  We pray this in Your name.  Amen