Saved
or Not

Here is the first hard truth, and it is the one nobody wants to say out loud. Most people do not understand salvation because they do not want to be saved. That is it. It is not that the gospel is too complicated. A child can get it. It is that they like their Godless life just fine, thank you, and they would rather you kept your opinions to yourself.

Jesus said the judgment comes down to one fact. The light came into the world and people loved the darkness more. Not because they could not find the light. Because they did not want it. A man doing something wrong does not want a floodlight on him. He wants the barn door shut.

Their faith and their treasure are right here, for the taking. Money. Sex. Power. And if that is where a man’s treasure is, that is where his heart is going to be, and you are not going to argue him out of it with a chart. Understand that before you open your mouth to defend your faith. You are not fighting a lack of information. You are up against a love for the dark.

This world has become one big Venus fly trap. You know how one works. It does not chase the fly. It just sits there looking sweet, and the fly lands on its own. The evil of this world has a seducing effect. It looks good, it smells good, and we fall right into it every time.

James does not blame the devil for it either. He says temptation comes from our own desires, which entice us and drag us away. Our own. The trap works because something in us wants what is on the leaf. Then the desire gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is allowed to grow, gives birth to death. That is the whole life cycle of a fly in a fly trap.

But a few see the truth. A few land, look around, and realize the leaf is closing. The wages of sin are death. That is the paycheck. Every man earns it. And right there in the same verse Paul puts the other half: the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord. Wages you earn. A gift you can only take.

Now the tough ones. You are either saved or you are not. There is no mostly saved. No pretty good. No working on it. John says it in one sentence a cowboy can carry: whoever has the Son has life, and whoever does not have God’s Son does not have life. Have him or don’t. That is the whole ledger.

Which means there are “good” people in hell and “bad” people with God. That one sticks in the throat. But Jesus said it first. On judgment day plenty of folks will show up saying Lord, Lord, look what we did in your name, and he is going to say I never knew you. Not I forgot you. Never knew you. Good deeds with no Jesus in them do not buy a thing. And a thief on a cross with nothing but a few hours left got in, because he had the Son.

So can you lose it? No. If you turn your back on God, you were never saved to begin with. A man who was truly made new does not go back to the fly trap and set up house. He might fall on the leaf. He does not move in. If you have walked away and never looked back, do not tell yourself you are saved and just backslidden. Ask the harder question.

Here is how it works, and it is simpler than the religion people have made of it. God has a Law, and it is perfect, and not one of us has kept it. Jesus did. He satisfied the Law by being perfect. Every day of his life, every thought, every word. The one man who ever earned heaven.

And God has a justice against sin that has to be paid, the same way a debt at the feed store has to be paid by somebody. Jesus satisfied that justice by taking our punishment for us. Paul puts it as plain as it gets: God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ. He got what we had coming. We get what he had coming.

Therefore, only his blood and his body can forgive the cost of sin. Not your church attendance. Not your giving. Not the fact that you are a better man than your neighbor. And do not ever let anybody tell you forgiveness was cheap. The cost of your forgiveness is the death of God. Let that one sit on you a while.

So how do we get this salvation? You have to become a new creation, created through your die-hard belief that God died so you can live. Not a decision you made once at a camp meeting. A new person. Paul says anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone. A new life has begun.

In other words, your life is never the same again. That is the test. Not whether you cried at the altar. Whether the man who walked out is a different man than the one who walked in. If it is the same life it always was, same loves, same treasure, same dark, then you need to check yourself. Not to scare you. To save you.

And here is the good part. You do not have to figure it all out by yourself. God did not save you and then turn you loose on the prairie alone. Next week we look at the “mystery” of the church, and we answer the hardest question there is: what is a cowboy?