The Now and the Know

Being a United Methodist, I definitely come at this topic with a specific bent on what I have learned through my denominational resources, specifically the writings and sermons of our founder, John Wesley.  With that being said, I now present to you my ideas and case about the topic “Can I Lose My Salvation”?  First of all, this concept is one that I struggle with on a regular basis.  Is there ever any point where I can actually sin away the salvation imparted to me by the grace of God through the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus?  Is there any possible way in the world for me to actually self-sabotage myself enough to lose my salvation?  As is the case often with me, the answer is yes.  But the answer is also no.  Or maybe the answer is maybe.  Here is what I think, here is what I know, and attempted to be within the confines of 1500 words…

Sin.  Sin entered this world, from the Christian standpoint, when Adam and Eve directly disobeyed God and ate the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden.  Three chapters into the sacred text, humanity has already disobeyed God!  Only three chapters into the Bible, humanity is faced with the reality and the need to reconcile with the creator.  Throughout the Old Testament, animal and grain sacrifices were given to God as a way of this reconciliation. 

The New Testament comes, and Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity, is sent to take the place of the animals and grain, becoming the living sacrifice for those who believed.  The Father gives the Son up and is mediated through the Spirit.  We are told the Spirit of God continues to guide us and lead us if we obey. 
But there is that tricky thing that continues to get in the way, continues to harm not only you and me, but harm our relationship between God and creation.  No matter how upright of a life we try to live, sin is still a constant threat.  Sin does not cease to exist in the life and heart of a Christian.  Just because a person has had a change of heart, has accepted Christ as their savior and committed themselves to live a Christian life does not mean sin does not still attack.  Justified Christians are not completely and wholly transformed into the image of God simply because they are justified.  Christians are inundated with greed, lust, and other desires of the heart that are unclean and unholy.  This, for John Wesley, is proof for the need of continued repentance throughout the Christian life.  Wesley states, “In this sense we are to repent after we are justified.  And till we do so we can go no farther.  For till we are sensible of our disease it admits of no cure.”  If Christians do not continue to repent, to acknowledge their brokenness before God, then they grow stagnant, no longer being able to move forward in the life of Christ. 

But what happens when the repentance of our sin stops?  What happens when the sin that fills our lives becomes the chief focus, blocking out any and all traces of our relationship with God?  If someone is not responding to God’s love, if there is not a mutual indwelling, by all means the Spirit would grow stagnate and should withdraw.  But, how much does it take for the Spirit to do so?  How long must we ignore God before the Spirit departs?

At times, this thought of quenching the Spirit, disallowing the Spirit to actively work within our lives, almost seems like the moral of the story from “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”  This concept is oversimplifying the theological matter, but at the same time is insightful about proving the point.  In the story, a bored shepherd boy thought it would be fun calling out “wolf” as he tended his flock.  Villagers who responded to the wolf calls found that the alarms were false and that they had wasted their time trying to help. When the boy was actually confronted by a wolf, the villagers did not believe his cries for help and the wolf ate the flock.  At times, humanity’s sinful nature seems exactly like the boy crying out wolf.  We get bored, we are enticed to do something we know we shouldn’t, and then we feel bad about it.  But, then the cycle repeats itself.  Eventually, we don’t feel as bad about the mistake we made, and the mistake becomes a part of who we are.  When Christians know they have made a mistake, the right thing is to repent, fall on our knees and ask forgiveness.  But, according to the cycle described above, when we repeat a mistake enough times, the idea to need forgiveness for said action begins to erode.  We may go to God in prayer and ask forgiveness, but if it has become second nature to sin, we may not fully mean what we are asking God to do.  We are crying wolf.  Eventually, usually in times of trial or grief, we may find ourselves finally going to God in earnest.

But, when we continually sin, continually cry wolf, there has to be consequences.  If people did not adequately have a fear of God, they would simply live a life without care, which could end in a type of lawlessness.  The popular thought with Justification was that once a person was justified, this action wiped the slate clean, absolving the newly justified from all past and future sins.  This scared Wesley, because he believed in a proper fear of disappointing God. 
This is where the theology gets a little dangerous.  I agree with Wesley to an extent.  Wesley states, “For it plainly appears God does not continue to act upon the soul unless the soul re-acts upon God…But if we do not then love him who first loved us…his Spirit will not always strive; he will gradually withdraw, and leave us to the darkness within our own hearts.”  There has to be a mutual indwelling, of God in us and us in God. 

The quenching of the spirit is a theological issue, but is also a moral issue.  Living a life where we live in a mutually indwelling relationship with God, where we recognize the grace given to us to save us from what we truly deserve based on our actions, rescues us from forcing the Spirit out.  We cannot expect there to be an exact timeline when it comes to the Spirit departing a wayward sinner.  Time to God is not the same as time to us.  However, doesn’t there need to be some sort of “point of no return”?  Logically, this would make sense, but does not hold true to the nature of the grace of God.  Wesley thinks, and I agree, that even if one falls away completely, one can still be restored to life anew.  However, there must once again be a rededication of one’s life to the aims of Christ.

We cannot know what the timeline is for the Spirit leaving; therefore we should not worry about it.  Instead of focusing on the negative, how much it will take, we should worry more about the upkeep of the relationship with God, praying genuinely to overcome our sinful nature.  If we dwell in our sin, letting it control our lives, we simply allow ourselves to ask useless questions.  When we are able to look past our sin, when we are able to keep our mouths shut instead of crying wolf, we can see God’s grace and acceptance, the calling to be in relationship.  The question of when the Spirit will depart becomes irrelevant if we continue to allow our souls to breathe towards him.  The question of how much sin it takes for a human to force the Spirit out becomes moot if we strive to continue to grow in God’s grace.

You without sin cast the first stone.  A simple phrase spoken from the lips of Christ.  But in those words is great knowledge.  Even those who ran the temples, the holiest of holy, were not without sin.  They were not beyond reproach from God; they were not beyond Jesus knowing every wrong they did.  And neither are we.  We are not beyond God’s scope.  We are not beyond the need to ask for forgiveness.  It is only through continual repentance throughout our Christian life that we can continue to grow in faith and righteousness. 

By Contributing Author Andrew Bardole
Andrew attended Northwestern College in Orange City, IA where he received his degree in history. He then went on to Dubuque Theological Seminary and currently serves as the Associate Pastor at First United Methodist in Indianola, IA. He lives with his wife and two daughters.

Imagine you awaken, and you’re entirely submersed in water. As far as you can see in every direction, there is nothing but deep, blue water that seems to never end. You turn to the left, and the view is exactly the same. You turn back to your right, and again, you see nothing but the same endless blue. You look up, and down, and everything looks the same. Water. No source of light, no movement in the distance, nothing.

Then, you try kicking your legs to swim, but you don’t move. You look down to see what’s happening, but you realize that your legs are gone. Where you’d expect to see your legs and torso, and even your arms, it’s only more of the same: water. In a panic, you start looking all around you for something, anything to give you even the small idea of where you are and what happened to your body. And in that panic, you lose your sense of direction. You’re unable to remember where your eyes were when you woke up because everything looks the same. Suddenly, you don’t know left from right, up from down.

All of your attempts to move, to see, or to experience anything other than this despair-inducing depth of water are in vain. You don’t even know where you end, and the water begins…

What was the point of this exercise? It’s a fair question, and I promise the answer wasn’t to depress you or make you feel hopeless (though, if I did, it won’t have been entirely a waste).

When Chris asked me to write about why the world is such a mess if an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving God is in control, I instinctively went back to Genesis to re-read the stories of the creation and fall of man. I believe the answer is there, and that it’s simpler than we want to think, I just don’t think we talk about it much outside of the realm of a college-level philosophy course.

“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

Does this sound at all like the exercise you did a minute ago? It should. I wanted you to think more deeply about what it must have been like before God began his masterpiece, because I think that verse has some pretty heavy implications if we think about it in light of the proceeding parts of the story. Additionally, as Genesis goes on to recount the story of creation, I think some pretty important parts of God’s character are revealed.

From the darkness, God adds a light to provide a contrast between the two. “God saw that the light was good, and separated the light from the darkness.”

God took the formless, endless body of water and gave it shape. God made a distinction between water, and not water (sky). He then brought dry ground up from within the water, further defining the water from the sky and land. “God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

Again later, God further distinguishes light from dark, and night from day, and when each would cover the earth. “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night…”

All these things, I think, are God creating relativity where there was none before. And, at the risk of sounding horribly cliché, I’ll go on to say that the things we so often see as bad, hurtful, negative, or undesirable can, and should, be accepted as gifts right alongside all the coincidentally good, pleasurable, positive, and desirable things.

Am I saying that we should celebrate when people kill each other, when diseases ravage entire countries, and when seemingly unavoidable accidents hurt us at the worst of times? Absolutely not! I would never in a million years assert that we should kid ourselves into believing that the pain we experience isn’t real; or worse yet, that it’s unfounded and easily manipulable with some new age mind trickery garbage. However, I believe it’s entirely possible to experience pain in life, and at the same time, accept that it’s an inevitable part of life on Earth without blaming others, or God.

In Finding Darwin’s God, Kenneth Miller gives an excellent reconciliation of God’s goodness in light of the existence of the mess we’ve made on Earth:

“Can God be good when there is evil, even murder, in the living world? Of course He can. To religious people, God is the embodiment of good. Why, then, does He allow evil to exist? How could a kind and loving God allow a father to murder his child? How could He permit the carnage of war, the terror of natural disaster, the inhuman agony of famine and disease? He allows such things because He made us material creatures, dependent upon the physical world for existence. In such a world, the destruction of one form of life comes about as natural a consequence as the existence of another. We are connected to the natural world. We are born in pain, we struggle for our food and drink and shelter, we age, and eventually we die. He allows such things as a consequence of the gift of human freedom. The ability to do good means nothing without the freedom to do evil. In a world of individuals, some will always choose the latter, and their actions form an unfortunate backdrop to which the moral choices of virtue, charity, and honesty stand in contrast.”

Evil sucks, there’s no way around that. It’s never easy to standby and wonder, “God, where are you!?” But, as Kenneth brilliantly put it, those things provide us a “backdrop” against which we can see a contrast of the goodness that manages to permeate all the evil. God hasn’t forced us to see his goodness all the time; instead, He put us in a world that gives us the option to.

I’ll leave you with this. It’s a common verse, but I’d like you to think about it in a new way:

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds.”

Considering trials pure joy isn’t to jump around gleefully when you’re staring evil straight in the eye. It goes to say that we should think carefully about, contemplate, and reflect on our trials. And that, after the dust has settled, when we are allowed to carefully think about how God is allowing us to experience this trial in order to develop perseverance, we are free to be joyful, knowing that God is using it to help make us mature and complete, not lacking anything.

Post by: Luke Brown
Luke earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Technical Writing from Iowa State University in Ames. Currently employed by Nationwide Insurance, he has contributed to publications such as the Immersion Blog and Veritas Mag. A talented musician, Luke serves regularly at Lutheran Church of Hope in West Des Moines, where he plays multiple instruments. Luke is recently engaged and plans to marry his fiance, Tere, this summer.

I’m a pretty avid reader of the magazine Relevant, a Christian publication with stories that highlight stories of faith, but also bits about music, movies, and generally cool stuff (even non-Christian cool stuff, of which there is plenty). The most recent issue, which is marked as May_June 19, featured a story about career adventure guy Bear Grylls, star of Discovery Channel’s “Man vs. Wild” and the 6-part series “Worst-Case Scenario”. Bear is well known for his death-defying acts of survival and general manliness. What isn’t as well known about him is the fact that he’s a man of God and played a role in founding the Alpha Course, a 10-week “basics of faith” class that churches are now using world-wide. The article tells the story of Grylls childlike nature that pulls him into his adventures.

Simple, yet profound. For Bear Grylls, it’s not too complicated. As a child, Bear’s understood faith to be a very simple thing. He says it was natural; knew that God existed and that God was his friend and that was easy enough. But as he grew up he learned that faith didn’t actually work that way and the picture lost its color and eventually faded altogether.

Does Bear’s story sound anything like your story? I can tell you, it certainly sounds like mine. A lot of people can tell you about the moment they were “saved” (their language not mine), but I’m not one of them. For me, God has always been a part of the picture. I’ve got my parents (who I think read this blog) to thank for that! And when I was young, it was simple. Jesus died for my sins and because of that I was going to heaven. And honestly, that was enough, even through high school. But then I got to college and the picture changed some. Thanks to some excellent professors, I was challenged… in a big way. Almost all of things I thought I knew about being a Christian got put through the ringer. Makes me think that line from “Fight Club”… “You know you who you are? You have no idea.” At the time it was easy to get annoyed, and even down right upset, with those professors. I had a simple faith that answered all the questions sufficiently (yep, used that word on purpose) and that was all I really needed or wanted. How dare these people that I barely know question the faith that I’ve always had! Who did this people think they were exactly???

But now I get it. Through that grab-bag of intellectual and emotional experiences, I’ve learned a lot about myself and God. I learned to ask questions that I’d never thought to ask and learned new ways to think about the answers. And I’m still learning everyday.

Christianity has a rich tradition of asking questions and challenging everything we thought we knew. It’s happened countless times throughout the history of the faith. Bear Grylls understands faith to be simple, and he’s not wrong. At its core, when we get down to basics, it’s all about God loving us. But we can’t use that as an excuse not to think and ask big questions of a big God. As Rob Bell wrote in Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith:

It’s the spirit of people like Rob Bell, Stanley Haurwas, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther, and countless others that drives this series I am starting today. For the next 9 weeks here at chrispetrick.com, we’re going to explore together some of the big questions of faith and Christianity. You’ll read some essays by people close to me who have influenced my faith journey and asked some very critical questions of their own. If you’re looking for all the answers, you won’t find them here. If you’re looking for a bunch of people telling that you’re wrong and they’re right, well you won’t find that here either. If you are looking for a group of people who are doing their best to follow this Jesus person, then you are in the right place. My goal here on this blog has always been to contribute to the on-going conversation, and for the next several weeks I’ve invited other voices to chime in. Some of these voices are pastors, but most are not. Some have gone to seminary, but most haven’t. Each and every one of them has asked tough questions and taken the steps necessary to try and find the answers. I’m going to kick things off with a paragraph that introduced Rob Bell’s book:

I hope that you’ll join us for this journey.

I have yet another confession to make: I’m bad at quiet time. Spend more than 15 minutes in any church or vaguely church-related thing and I’d be willing to lay a five-spot that someone is going to give you a speech on the importance of “quiet time with God”. And if you’re anything like me, that meant you grabbed a Bible, went and sequestered yourself somewhere, and essentially waited for God to say something… And waited… and waited… and waited. Eventually you got hungry, thirsty, bored, or got a text from a friend and quiet time effectively ended. Well, there’s always tomorrow.

For a long time I was doing this just because I was told I was supposed. It somehow came with the whole Christianity thing, I had to spend quiet time with God. I didn’t like this for several reasons:

Eventually I just stopped doing quiet time altogether. If God wants to say something to me, let him do it while I’m eating a sandwich or, better yet, while I’m sleeping. He spoke to people in dreams all the time in the Bible, didn’t he?

Here’s a question: how do you expect to hear and see God in your life?

One of the things we do as church people is we use the Bible as a source of authority. Nothing wrong with that at all. But we tend to highlight all of the big, flashy ways God spoke to people. Moses and the burning bush, the angels appearing to the Mary and the shepherds, God coming down from the heavens like a dove, and so on. So what conclusion could we draw other than: when God speaks, I’ll know it! So we go through life as we do, all the while anticipating a burning bush of our own. And one day we stop and look around and realize that he hasn’t shown up… at least not in the way we anticipated.

Here’s the kicker: some of are waiting for a God that never showed up.

We said the prayers, sang the songs, and took a solid 30 minutes for quiet time everyday and still nothing. God did not come down to tell us where to go and what to do, much less give us the ability to part seas and turn our walking sticks into snakes… Okay no one really carries a walking stick anymore, but you get my point. Let’s go a little deeper: maybe you didn’t get that job. Maybe you prayed for that girl or that guy to notice you and s/he never did. Maybe you prayed for that relative or friend to miraculously healed and they died anyway. And the only conclusion you can reach is: God didn’t show up.

We have to understand how ridiculous it was for John to ask, “Are you the one? Or should we look for another?” John knew Jesus, he had always known Jesus. There had never been a doubt in John’s mind that this was the one, the true Son of God, the Messiah. He had dedicated his entire life to following this Jesus and even found himself in prison because of it. And it is in prison, in the face of certain death, that John wavers. Are you the one?

And Jesus’ answer to John is an answer for us too. “Yes John, I am the Messiah and yes, I am the one leaving you in prison to die.” To John in his situation, God “showing up” meant that Jesus would come and rescue him from his fate. But that wasn’t in the cards. God showed up, he always does, just not always in the way we expect.

Remember the question I asked earlier? How do you expect to hear and see God in your life? John expected to see him at the prison door, setting him free. But that wasn’t what happened. I have no doubt that there are countless stories we could share about all those times we expected God in a certain way and he showed up completely differently.

Remember the story of the Road to Emmaus? The risen Christ walks with them, eats with them, talks with them, but it’s only after he’s gone that they realize who he was. What that says to me is this: God is all around us, we just fail to recognize it.

The other night at worship band rehearsal I had my band try something a little different for our devotional time. I played a song by The Album Leaf (great stuff) for them and invited them to close their eyes and allow God to speak to them through the music. There were nine of us in the room and everyone came up with something different. One person saw the devastation of Parkersburg, an Iowa town ravaged by a tornado last year, and saw everything put back together around her. She saw, as she put it, restoration. Another saw a bride coming down the aisle and was overwhelemed with a sense of hope. Another shared that he and his wife, for medical reasons, were forced to terminate a pregnancy. Through the song he heard God saying, “everything is going to be all right.” What’s fascinating is that the song is five and half minutes of instrumental music. Not a single word was spoken, but much was heard.

One of the things we as a church should focus on isn’t so much the recognition of the big signs from God in our lives. Believe me, if God chooses to speak to you in that way, you’ll know. As Donald Miller put it in his blog:

When big things happen you’ll know, that’s what makes them big things. What we as people who follow this risen Jesus need to learn to do is atune ourselves to hear and see all of the not-so-obvious ways God is speaking to us.

Can you hear?