The Goal of Life—3

I think that the past two entries of Saturday and Sunday, April 10 and 11, are the most important of the over 175 I have written.  I find that rereading important pages in the notebooks I keep on everything I read is rewarding beyond measure.  I would ask you to thoughtfully consider again, or for those who have not read them,  to consider for the first time, what I wrote the past two days.

Upon reflection, I believe some will benefit if I elaborate a little on why I regard my most recent meditations so important.  I have been a Christian for nearly forty years, and in my experience the way in which many modern evangelicals talk about salvation just does not reflect what we see in the New Testament.  Christians today tend to regard being saved as a totally one-time affair, which is completed the moment they “accept Christ.”  The new Christian does not need to do anything else but “believe.”  Salvation is potrayed as a complete package from the start.  Now that you have it, you can return to your normal way of life.  You are free to pursue whatever you want.  Whether you chose to follow Christ or not, heaven is assured for you.  If you have sincerely believed, it does not matter what you do in the future—your salvation will never be revoked.  It leaves the new convert with the idea that they do not need to modify any behavior that is inconsistent with Christ’s commands, because salvation is not attained by our good works.  Some theologians have gone so far as to say that once a person has made a profession of faith, any sin can be committed—even renouncing belief in Christ—without any effect on their eternal state.  This is to promote a concept of faith that does not square with the Bible.  Saving faith includes repentance, which is the renunciation and rejection of the sin that makes you subject to God’s condemnation.  And the saving transaction between the individual and God includes regeneration, in which God gives the one who is “born again” a new heart that now loves God and righteousness.  A conception of salvation that leaves a person unchanged, without a radical alteration in their attitude to sin and the world, is not Christianity.  Jesus pictured it as entering a narrow gate onto an equally narrow, well-defined pathway.  The pathway which “by any means possible (we) attain to the resurrection of the dead” will for some be a long journey of much hard labor for God, for others a rough road of much suffering, and for others a short walk to martyrdom.  We will not find “sinless perfection” on this pathway, that will finally be ours only in heaven.  But if we are not on the narrow pathway, neither are we on the way to heaven.