Salvation

Before I tackle the issue of faith, I have a question to ask you. Have you ever gone shopping - found everything on your list - paid for it, with a receipt to prove it - and then found you had somehow managed to come home - straight from the store, without some of the paid for items?

Somehow I managed to do just that today. I paid for everything on my list. I got everything on my list. Two items are not anywhere to be found and I've searched high and low so I for sure haven't misplaced them. So either the grocery store clerk didn't have my bags in one pile and I neglected to take one, or, I have lost my mind. I would vote for having lost my mind if I didn't have a receipt for the items that I don't have. Or is the receipt merely proof that I have lost my mind?

Please tell me I am not the only one this happens to. I remember thinking that the clerk must be new because she didn't know how to ring anything up so I am thinking (short of having lost my mind) that she might well have made a mistake since she just wasn't very efficient. Now what are my chances on a cash sale of getting either my money or the items tomorrow when I will ring up the store? The things I am missing are too large for me to have accidentally thrown them in the garbage. (Although I did go through the garbage just in case.) And why did I only notice this in the middle of the night?

ARGH!

Okay, enough of my griping. Regarding children and salvation: first of all I think we have to define what we see as salvation in Christian terms.

Some people believe that you have to ask Jesus to come into your heart. That is salvation, regardless of the age of the person. For most people that I have met that believe in that definition of salvation, they insist that those exact words have to be used and anything short of those words is not salvation, although the person may *think* they are saved. And I have also heard that if you don't know the exact date that you were 'saved' you aren't really saved because salvation is such an important thing that you would no more forget the exact date and time of your salvation then you would forget your own birthday. (God has a time card we all have to punch - who knew?!)

I do not at all dismiss that definition of salvation. For some people, knowledge and love of God can come like a bolt out of the blue Paul on the road to Damascus, that person somehow instantly becomes aware of the powerful presence of God.

For others though I think salvation - or the idea of God - is a something that happens gradually - one step forward, and two steps back. It is never formalized in words but expresses itself naturally in a growing awareness of the divine, and a growing desire to get closer to the divine much in the way that a child grows without being consciously aware of it, from babyhood to adulthood. A child never announces one day that from that day forward he or she wants to be 22 and presto! the child is 22. A child grows towards adulthood and all the longing in the world to be an independent adult is not going to make the child age any faster.

I understand what you are saying about the feelings that you had when you were born-again. My experience was not dissimilar, believe it or not. I don't recall ever being told specifically that I was a sinner and was going to go to Hell if I didn't accept Jesus as my personal Saviour. At that time, in the Mennonite church I grew up in, child evangelism was not something that was taught.

We were taught the stories in the Bible but without any sort of morality tale attached to the end of it. Many Mennonites of a certain generation didn't talk about God much in their every day lives. Their attitude was similar to that of many Jews, that to speak too openly of the divine was to cheapen it. Another thought was that if people couldn't see from how you lived what you believed, your words really didn't matter much. By their fruits you will know them, and all that.

However even though conversion wasn't a part of growing up Mennonite when I grew up Mennonite, around the age of 5 - which could have been 4 or it could have been 6 - since I don't know the date and time, I became aware of the presence of God in relation to me. Not as an abstract concept, not as a received faith - but me and God. I don't like to use the word 'saved' but I think that what I experienced then is what people who use the word 'saved' would call born-again.

It was bedtime and I've always been an insomniac. And it felt to me as if the entire room was filled with love - very suddenly - and that love was very specifically God. It had nothing to do with my parents or my community or my church or the bedtime Bible stories that my mother told me. It was so much more personal and real than that. It was God in the room with me. And He loved me and I was as sure of that as I was sure of my own being. And He was telling me I was His child. And I loved Him back so fiercely that I felt that I surely would see angels any second.

I immediately told my mother about my experience - for some reason I felt I had to but I was terribly embarrassed to do that. We didn't talk about God all that much. It was something you lived. We didn't go around saying, "Oh, praise the Lord for this" or "Praise the Lord for that." Obviously since I was a child in a Christian family, I had always believed in God because my parents believed in God. Everyone believed in God. It would never have occurred to me that anyone didn't believe in God. But it wasn't personal until then.

And my mother's reaction was - an embarrassed smile and a pat on the head. That made me even more embarrassed. And we never talked about it again.

When I hit my teens, I tried really hard not to believe in God. It didn't suit me to believe in Him. And how was I, or anyone else to know, that I was worshipping the 'right' God? People wouldn't worship the 'wrong' God on purpose. Everyone thought they were right. And since everyone thought they were right, what were the chances that I had been lucky enough to have been born into the real, 'right' faith?

Clearly there was nothing that I had done to choose my family or culture. So why should my Christian beliefs be right? Maybe the Buddhists had it right. Or the Muslims. Or pagans. Or the Catholics, a faith, that due to the history of persecution of Mennonites by Catholics in times past, caused greater angst among Mennonites than all of the other religions combined. Or maybe there wasn't any god anywhere at all.

So I read because that is how I cope, that is what I do. I try to understand. I read the Koran, and bits and pieces of other people's holy scriptures, but no matter how hard I tried, I still believed that the Jews were a people chosen by God, a holy people, and through them, and through Jesus, a light was given to the Gentiles and that that God, that I Am That I Am was the true and only God. My understanding of Him might be faulty but I have never been able to dismiss what I experienced when I was 4, or 5 or 6.

It really would have suited me much more to be a vaguely spiritual, artistic, animal rights type of person, who lived off the land. My inner me is a flower child :-) It just wasn't cool or intellectual to be a Christian, not to mention, even at the risk of being called judgemental, that there are so many public Christians who are an embarrassment to the intellect. I don't particularly care to be associated with anti-intellectual fanatics with a gleeful delight in telling others they are going to Hell.

It was hard to behave in a Christ-like way. Pacifism to me, meant on an everyday level, going the extra mile, if asked, and unasked, even by those you just knew did not wish you well. It meant not defending myself against bullies in school who assumed, that if you didn't defend yourself, even verbally, that you were a coward or some pushover who could be talked into anything and didn't have the brains to know you were being used.

You know how girls can be, particularly girls in junior and high school. They can be mean and never think twice about it. And when you are a teenager it matters terribly to be accepted. And I didn't defend myself because that was my understanding of Christ's life. I could have. I knew exactly how cruelly true I could have made my words - I had a 'gift' for seeing people's weak spots. I could have demolished these schoolyard bullies and I knew it. But I didn't. I couldn't. It wouldn't have been Christ-like.

Immigrants, from whatever country, are often a target of bullies. One incident I remember particularly well was a new girl in my class. One of the class bullies would do those girl things like telling all the other girls in the class not to speak to the new girl for the entire day. To give her the silent treatment. Or in the lunchroom, this bully would tell all the other girls at the table to lift their feet off of the floor because the new girl's feet were on the floor and she had 'germs.'

So all the girls would lift their feet and squeal, "Germs!"

But Christ would not have wanted me to behave like that, and although I wanted more than anything just to blend in, to be unnoticed, I couldn't let Christ down like that. That was my thinking. So I didn't do what all the other girls did, from the most popular to the least (it's a funny thing that people often don't speak out about injustice because they are afraid they might be the next one picked on).

So the ringleader reversed her tactics. She announced that I now had the germs and everyone was supposed to lift their feet off the floor due to my germs. Guess whose feet came off the floor? The new girl's feet. The girl I had stood up for. She did not have the courage to meet my eyes.

Now all of this reminiscing and such about salvation, does have a point to your post, believe it or not, besides recounting childhood wounds. I believe that salvation can be lost - that there is no such thing as once saved, always saved. That you can choose not to be a Christian and part of choosing is your choice of behaviour - your fruit.

Now first of all, I am not saying that such young children as we all were then were going to Hell, but with regards to your description generally, of how you were saved when you were very young and then later did things that you knew were wrong with the idea that you were always saved - would you have done some or any of those behaviours if you had believed that your very soul was in danger of Hell?

Teenagers do stupid stuff in spite of themselves and I have done more than my share as well. But if I had believed that my salvation could never be lost no matter what I did, I think that I would have done much worse things than I did do. But I did fear losing my salvation. That was what restrained me from a lot of things that I am fairly sure I would have done otherwise.

I think that this idea of 'once saved, always saved' is the core of the problem with the more public sins of well-known Christians like Jimmy Swaggart and Bakker and such.

In Hebrews 6, Paul says:

4 For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost,

5 And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come,

6 If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.

To me this means that for anyone to claim a belief in God, and then to live deliberately or carelessly, and contrary to moral behaviour, not because of a mistake but because that person is counting on God to bail him out at the end anyway, even if minus a star or two in their crown, that person is shaming the holiness of the Most High, devaluing salvation, and metaphorically crucifying Christ over and over again, with each new, sincerely insincere repentance of sin.

I don't know how else the passage can be understood.

It is not the only passage that speaks about the possibility of the loss of salvation. The Spirit, speaking to the churches in Revelations. In the third chapter, for example, the church is told: I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God.

Why does the Spirit call them dead if they are saved? 'Death,' in much of what Jesus has to say, refers to spiritual death, which is Hell.

And: Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy.

And: I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

If they are forever saved, no matter how they behaved, then why does Jesus say he will spue them out of his mouth? Why does He reference those few who have not defiled their garments and make a point of saying that they will 'walk with him in white? If everyone is walking in white, I don't see why there would be a need to mention it.

You've made reference before to how you believe that those verses refer to people who aren't 'really' Christians, who are cultural Christians by virtue of birth and family. I don't quite follow that argument because it seems like it works more like an excuse. Those who believe that once a person has accepted Jesus into their hearts have no possibility of going to Hell but at the same time leaving a place where if people who did accept Jesus into their hearts do end up going to Hell, then we can always say well, he didn't really accept Jesus into his heart.

Maybe that person really did accept Jesus into their heart. Why not? People can change their minds and behaviour. Particularly when children 'convert.' It is easy to be a holy hermit if you are the only person in the world. It is easy to say that you would never commit adultery if Brad Pitt has never propositioned you (to use an example). No one can say they would never do something if they have never been in the position where it was a choice.

Layla