"Christianity 101: Salvation"

Let me start off by thanking everyone for their prayers in support of InterVarsity’s Encuentro Conference that was held at our church facility this past weekend.  We were able to host nearly 20 students (and just about as many volunteers), providing them the opportunity to come together for a great time of fellowship, worship, and spending quality time with the Lord as a Latino community of faith.

We also had the opportunity to hold our quarterly Congregational Meeting after the service this past Sunday, where our Deacons shared their annual ministry reports about what we’ve been doing as a congregation in 2019, and where we’re pointing in 2020.  We also shared that, due to some timing issues, we were truncating the Meeting and doing the bulk of our Financial Report at a future time.  Nonetheless, Randy shared that we have been blessed by a generous gift from Cliff Johnson’s estate that really should help us meet our financial needs as a congregation, both in the short run and in the long run, if we pace ourselves and steward the gift well.

We spoke about gifts in our message this week, as we continued through our sermon series on “Christianity 101,” this time looking at the gift of salvation.  In some ways, this is the part of Christianity that most of us are the most aware of (that we’re “saved,” that we want others to be “saved,” etc.), and yet, it’s also one that many of us are the most confused about.  I mean, we know that we earned spiritual death by living our lives ignoring God’s leading, and we know that God’s salvation is a free gift that has been given to us through Christ’s work on the cross... and yet, even saying that, we get a bit confused about what all of that means.

1)  We tend to think that “sinning” is all about doing clearly bad things like murder or adultery or whatever, and so some of us think, “Well, I’ve never done anything really bad, so God shouldn’t send me to Hell...” utterly missing the point that it’s not so much God sending us to Hell for being naughty as much as it is us choosing a path without God in life that leads to a path without God after our deaths -- we effectively send ourselves to Hell.

2)  We thus tend to think that being “saved” means that we’re thus now expected to do a bunch of “churchy” things in order to be good enough to be Christians... utterly ignoring the point that we’re saved not by what we do, but by in Whom we believe (which, to be fair, really should then be reflected in the stuff that we do -- but let’s not put the cart before the horse there).  Salvation is a gift, not something that we’ve been “good” enough to receive.

3)  And, finally, we often don’t really think about what we’ve been “saved” from or to.  We’ve been saved from the power and the penalty of our sins -- from being enslaved to every whim and weakness that our personal foibles lead us toward (leading us away from God’s healthy, perfect path) -- but we’ve also been saved back into the relationship with God that He had originally created us to be in, when we used to walk in the cool of the day with Him in the perfect Garden that He’d planted for us.

If we don’t accept Christ as our Lord and Saviour, we tacitly choose Hell for ourselves.  But if we do accept Him, we receive Heaven, starting even now -- and that’s worth choosing wisely over.

How can you choose well -- and have a passion for helping others choose well -- today?