We Must Know That We Are Saved...

WHAT MUST THE CHURCH OF CHRIST
DO TO BE SAVED? (10)

If the Church of Christ is to be saved its members must begin to believe that they are saved. You will see that I am using “saved” in different senses. If the Church of Christ is to have a redemptive role and an effective ministry in our changing world, then its members must have a victorious faith and a joyous assurance that they are a redeemed people, saved by God’s grace. I am fearful that this is not the case with the majority of our people. We do not know that we are saved. We hope we are. We trust that we are. We work at it. We answer the question, “Are you saved?, with a qualified yes at best, such as “If I am faithful. . .”

Seriously, it is a sad state of affairs. Try it for yourself. Ask a few of our people if they are saved. You should be sincere about it and not be putting them on. You will find an alarming degree of uncertainty, and this from members of longstanding, people who are delightful Christians in so many ways. It is simply that they have no real assurance of their salvation. It is a tragedy of no small proportion. And I know where they are coming from, for I was once as uncertain as they. The by-product of such uncertainty is a lack of joy. One thing Church of Christ people aren’t, in spite of many noble qualities, is a joyous people. We have little joy because we have little assurance.

We don’t talk like people who are assured of their salvation. We don’t sing that way. We don’t pray that way. That is why our singing is unexciting, our prayers dull, and our services generally boring. Take a look at our Sunday morning service at most any of our churches. Is it a funeral? Where is the spontaneity? Where is the joyous excitement of being a Christian? Who would seek solace from a troubled world among folk who go at their religion with a yawn and a sigh? Let’s face it, for the most part we are lukewarm.

Someone has said a gathering of Christians for worship should be something like the locker room of the winners of a Super Bowl game. That may be an overstatement, for there is a place for subdued quietness in our assemblies. But in that quietness there should be a contagious sense of joy, not unlike an athlete sitting quietly before being crowned for winning the race. That says it, we are winners, all the time we are winners in Christ, and we should feel it and act it. We certainly shouldn’t have the demeanor of the losing team after a Super Bowl game. Yet many of our people behave just that way, like losers. They are scared to live and afraid to die. Are you saved, are you bound for glory? “I hope so. I’m working at it,” they say.

But one can’t hope that he is saved. Either one is saved or he isn’t. One can’t hope for what he already has. The object of hope is always in the future. The believer’s hope is in eternal life in heaven.

There is no simple solution to this problem. We can’t turn ourselves on as one does a faucet. We can’t rev ourselves up by some kind of self-analysis. It is not a matter of calling out the cheerleaders. Nor can we solve it by resorting to what caused the problem to start with—by trying harder! If we are to be saved as a church, we must come to see that we have a fundamental problem. And what is that? Hold on to your seat, for it is a shocker: We don’t really believe in the grace of God.

While we deny it, we really believe in works-salvation. We are saved by being baptized (exactly the right way, mind you!), by taking Communion regularly (it has to be the right day!), and by studying our Bibles (the doctrine has to be exactly right!) To be saved we have to be “faithful” and “right” about all the things that make us good members. No wonder we are nervous when asked if we are saved! Who can measure up to the standard that we set for each other? We keep trying harder, but we are weary of trying. Occasionally we are on a spiritual high, for we have touched all the bases, but we are often down. We scale six rungs of the ladder of perfection one day, and slide down seven rungs the next.

So, to be saved we must seek a fundamental change in our faith. We must quit trying so hard and start surrendering more. We must slough off our self-reliance and our “Do-it-yourself’ religion and rely more on God’s faithfulness. We must start believing in the gospel of the grace of God, the basis of which is that salvation is His free gift to us. There is no work that we can perform to attain it. There is no way for us to buy it. We can’t be good enough to deserve it. There is no power that can. wrest it. It is a gift, a free gift, that is ours only because of God’s philanthropy. In short we must come to see what has been in holy Scripture all along: “By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Eph. 2:8).

This reliance upon the grace of God rather than ourselves must occur one by one among our people. That is the only way it can reach the congregational level. We must “save ourselves” first, by suing for God’s mercy, and in that way we can save our sisters and brothers in the Church of Christ. They must “see the grace of God” (Acts 11:23) in us. We may begin by doing what few Church of Christ folk have ever done, by inviting Jesus into our hearts. Let us make the promise of Rev. 3:20 our very own: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.”

This was written to a church, not to the sinners out in the world, though it would apply to them also. But here Jesus is standing at the door of his own church seeking entrance. The minister doesn’t have to open the door, or the elders, or the mission committee. You and I arc invited to open the door. Here we have the power for change in the Church of Christ. If you want to effect the change, start by getting on your knees and—even if you have never done it before—invite Jesus into your heart. Ask him as he enters to take away all your self-righteousness, your pride and conceit, your resentment and bitterness. Ask him to make his home in your heart. Tell him that you will take him to work with you, to play, to church. Crown him as the Lord of your life, and then praise and thank God for His goodness and mercy. As Jesus lives in our hearts the fruit of love, joy, and peace will grow and abound. Now you will be able to forgive people that you could not forgive before, for you are now drawing upon his goodness rather than your own. That will be your joy!

Along with inviting Jesus into our hearts, which can be done again and again since he can and will move deeper and deeper into us, we should pray the sinner’s prayer (Lk. 18:13), “God, be merciful to me a sinner.” It is the prayer that impressed Jesus. The lowly publican was justified or made righteous by that prayer, or the faith that it expressed. It should be our prayer too, for we also are sinners in need of God’ s grace, always, over and over. We have been too much like the Pharisee who in the same story prayed “God, I thank you that I am not like other men,” which was the prayer of an insecure believer. Assurance comes only in approaching the throne of God empty-handed and with a contrite heart.

This is the way that we can know that we arc saved, fully assured of our redemption in Christ. We can be as sure as Paul was when he wrote in 2 Tim. 1:9, “He has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began,” and the apostle goes on in verse 12 to say “I know and I am fully persuaded.” We don’t have to equivocate. We can be sure, for we are relying upon Him “who is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy” (Jude 24).

This in no way compromises the necessity of good works in the life of the believer. There is a context in which we can say as Jas. 2:24 says, “You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only.” But no matter how great our works may be we are to be like Paul: “not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith” (Philip. 3:9). In Tit. 3:5 he insists that “not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us.” It is in that connection that the apostle refers to baptism as “the washing of regeneration.” This shows that baptism is not our “work of righteousness” but the work of God’s grace upon us.

Included in Alexander Campbell’s view of baptism was that it was a pardon-assuring and pardon-certifying act rather than a pardon-procuring act. That is, we do not “gain” or “procure” salvation by being baptized. It is a passive act. God is doing something to us, it is God’s “washing of generation” upon us, an act of His grace. In baptism we have the assurance of pardon and the remission of sins. I can know I am a Christian and saved because “I have been to the river and I have been baptized.” Campbell used the illustration of a highway sign. One can know he has crossed into the state of Ohio because the sign says so. Baptism is the “sign” indicating that we are pardoned. This is the force of 1 Pet. 3:21 where baptism is described as “the answer of a good conscience toward God.”

Martin Luther viewed baptism in this light. When the pope was calling him the likes of “that drunken priest in Germany,” Luther retorted with, “The pope can’t talk about me like that, for I have been baptized just as he has.” Luther was a good Campbellite! He had assurance of his salvation because he had been baptized. Lest the modem church forget, baptism is an ordinance of God. And what is its purpose? Part of its purpose is to give us something to submit to so that we can know that we have entered into a new state and a new relationship.

If any people should be vigorously confident of their salvation it is Church of Christ folk. And why? Because they have been baptized into Christ. Not baptism in and of itself but all that it signifies, a new life in Christ and a behavior commensurate to that.

Once we see that the only righteousness we can have is Christ’s righteousness within us we will have the kind of assurance that is evident in the letter of 1 John. That little apostolic love letter has a way of linking the Christian’s assurance with a life of love, as in 1 Jn. 3:14: “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren.”

We know because we love! When that great truth becomes our own we will be saved as a people. Let it be so!—the Editor