I’ve been thinking a lot lately about salvation. Well, I think a lot about salvation anyway, but lately I’ve been thinking more about salvation with relation to the view held by many that one must “accept Christ” before death in order to be saved. This is the common view that drives some church evangelism and often, I find, is what pushes some people to attempt to convince loved ones to believe. I’ve done a few baptisms in the hospital that have also be driven by this belief.
But I’ve been asking myself, is this really what it’s all about? Is this what God really wants from us – to grudginly admit that there might be a god who will save us and that god might have appeared in the form of Jesus and if I say that I believe (which I may or may not really) before I die in a sort of self-centered way then I will be saved? Is this really what it’s about?
I think it’s not.
I think God wants to be in a relationship with us. I think true salvation is found in loving God, following God, following Jesus, and the freedom that is found in that. I think we don’t have a real relationship when we grudgingly admit that there may be a god who… because that’s only self-serving. I think of it like a person who gets into a marriage not because they love the person they’re married to but because they don’t want to be alone. It will be a disaster because the person who loves the other will resent the other’s lack of love while the one who doesn’t love will resent the love of the other (somewhat convoluted I know, but hopefully that makes sense).
Now, the funny thing about love – pure, unadulterated love – is that it tends to transform people. So perhaps in all my cynicism about how it isn’t about accepting Christ before death, I can still hope that if somebody does grudgingly accept Christ for their own sake, the love that God shows will transform them just as it transforms all of us.
So that’s where my mind has been lately….
