Twenty Questions: #17 What Must I Do To Be Saved? (Acts 16:30)

Today in our journey through some of the biggest questions in the Bible, we move from the most important question God can ask, “Do you love me?” to the most important question we can ask, “What must I do to be saved?” Immediately, I am struck by the urgency of it. It is a desperate question borne out of a very real sense of danger. Somehow, it is a question I imagine people asking of one of the great preachers like George Whitefield, John Wesley or Charles Spurgeon after hearing one of their sermons; to be honest, I struggle to imagine anyone tearing their clothes and asking, “What must I do to be saved?” today (after one of my sermons, for instance—maybe that says more about me and my preaching than anything else). I could well conceive of someone asking, “How can I explore the claims of Jesus further?” or “What do I need to do to become a Christian?” but asking, “What must I do to be saved?”—that just sounds so needy. And heaven forbid we sound like sinners in need of grace!

“What must I do to be saved?” When I was reflecting on this question earlier, I realised what a contrast it is to the question posed by the lawyer and the rich ruler in the first of Luke’s two instalments: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” It seems to me like the latter is a question asked by people who think they are in control of their lives; the former, however, being a question asked by people who know that they are not. To ask, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” seems to me to express a certain level of confidence in our ability to be people worthy of eternal life; whereas, to ask, “What must I do to be saved?” seems to be an admission that we’re in a hopeless mess and we can’t get out of it by ourselves. I’ll leave you to decide for yourselves which is the more accurate reflection of the human condition. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that the question, “What must I do to be saved?” is a question we will only ask if when we have arrived at the point of self-despair. Once we have exhausted all our own resources, then might we cast out further and ask, “What must I do to be saved?”

Paul and Silas are in prison upsetting the Philippian applecart with the Gospel, when all of a sudden a great earthquake strikes. The doors fly loose. The shackles fall off. Unsurprisingly, the jailor suspects the captives to have made a bid for freedom in the chaos. Knowing full well the cost of failure, he decides he is going to jump before he is pushed. He draws his sword and prepares to do the ‘honourable’ thing. But Paul intervenes in the nick of time. “We’re all here!” he cries, “No need to do anything silly.” The jailor calls for lights to verify the facts for himself. Paul’s right. A prison full of inmates with the perfect escape opportunity and they’re all still there. In Acts 12, when Peter walked out of the prison in similar circumstances, the prison guards were sentenced to death; the Philippian jailor knew what was coming and was quite ready to circumvent the inevitable punishment for his failure. Yet, he is saved from certain death and still he asks, “What must I do to be saved?” It appears he already has. Apparently, however, the jailor was aware that there was another salvation necessary. The jailor knows that the even greater peril is to be found in running a life contrary to a God who can open prison doors without a key.

“What must I do to be saved?” Paul’s answer is simple: “Believe in the Lord Jesus.” I remember as a teenager a very wise youth group leader telling me, “God sets the bar for salvation pretty low.” He pointed me also to Rom. 10:9: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” As far as salvations go, we really don’t have to do a lot. To be saved, all we have to do is believe in the Lord Jesus. That’s it. As Ephesians 2:8 puts it, we are saved by faith through grace alone. Christian faith is not faith in a series of doctrinal propositions or creedal formulae; it is faith in the person of Jesus, who is the Lord. To believe in the Lord Jesus means to believe in the Lordship of Jesus. It implies a certain kind of relationship—one of trust, obedience and submission. To believe in the Lord Jesus means to know Jesus as King (and therefore to treat Him as such).

Christian faith is about more than believing the historical existence of Jesus or even about believing in the goodness or rightness of Jesus’ teachings; rather, it is about a personal trust in Jesus as the loving Ruler of all. To believe in the Lord Jesus is not an intellectual exercise; instead, it is an exercise in trust, the investment of our entire confidence in the person of Christ. For me to believe in the Lord Jesus surely means for me to throw my lot in with Jesus; it means to allow myself to become completely identified with Him. To use Paul’s language of baptism in Romans 6, it means to die to sin with Him in order that we might be raised with Him alive to God. Such faith is not only self-involving, it is costly. Think of the Philippian prison guard. By being baptised into Christ, he became thoroughly involved with the One for whom his prisoners Paul and Silas were incarcerated. Faith in the Lord Jesus is dangerous. But despite the risks, we’re told that the jailor rejoiced with his entire household that he had believed in God (v. 34). To believe in the Lord Jesus means taking up our cross and following Him in the joy that His way of self-denial and sacrificial love is the only true way of life.

Eugene Peterson writes: “A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think that the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquility, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith. A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace.” Have we, I wonder, got desperate enough to ask, “What must I do to be saved?”

A God for the Ungodly

Preached at St. Thomas’, Thurstonland & Christ Church, New Mill
27th October 2013: Last Sunday after Trinity
2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18; Luke 18:9-14

Why are you here this morning? Out of all the places in the world you could be, why here, why in church? I mean, you could be outside having fun. Okay, maybe not outside, not in this weather. But you could be inside at least, wrapped up in a warm duvet enjoying a lie-in and a lazy Sunday morning in bed. You could be sat by the fire with your slippers on, drinking a cup of cocoa and reading the paper. What was it that made you get up, get dressed and come here today?

In the story Jesus tells, he paints a portrait of two very different people coming to church for two very different reasons. One is a very, very good person—someone who gives a lot of money to church, who spends their time doing religious or charitable activities; someone widely regarded as an upstanding pillar of the community. The other, however, is a very, very bad person—someone with loose morals greedy for money, who spends their time looking after number one to the detriment of anyone else around them; someone not so much famous as infamous, a scourge of society.

Anyway, both go to church one Sunday to pray. The former comes parading their religiosity before God, seeking to press their claim for favour with the Almighty and looking down their nose at anyone not measuring up to their embarrassingly high standard. The latter, however, comes hesitantly, lingering at the door, uncertain, unsure whether or not to go in, whether they’re fit to darken the door of this holy building; and then, when at last they do go in, they sneak in at the back, scarcely wanting to be seen, compelled to come in, not out of a sense of duty or responsibility but desperation, with nowhere else to go, not knowing where else to turn except into the arms of a merciful, forgiving God. That Sunday both went home righteous, but one got more out of worship than the other. Can you guess which one?

Dwight Moody, a Christian evangelist of the 1800s once said something which I think sums up this story to a tee: “God sends no one away empty, except those who are full of themselves.” As far as the Pharisee was concerned, he was right with God when he got to church, therefore when he left church nothing had changed, nothing had altered. The prayer he prays asks God for nothing, and he gets nothing. His prayer is all about how thankful he is to be so righteous, that he’s not like other people—crooks, cheaters, adulterers, or even the money-grabbing, immoral tax collector over there in the corner. And well he might be thankful—it is a blessing to live in tune with God and to avoid falling into the sins that so damage our relationship with God and with one another. The problem, though, is that he doesn’t see it as a blessing, as a gift; he sees it instead as the result of his own moral efforts, something he’s done and worked for.

The tax collector, however, comes to worship in quite a different way. He knows he’s done nothing deserving of a right relationship with God; in fact, he’s well aware he’s done a lot deserving of a wrecked relationship with God. He knows he has no claim to righteousness, no right to life with God; lacking anything to give God, he asks for a gift. His prayer, quite unlike the Pharisee’s prayer, asks everything of God, and gets it all. The tax collector stands before God, naked and exposed, and when he prays he throws himself on God’s mercy.

In this, his prayer comes very close to the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray. In that prayer as with this, all hangs by the thin thread of God’s mercy and undeserved kindness. The whole time, God is in our sights. We open with a view to God’s name, God’s kingdom, God’s will; we move on asking him to meet us in our need for daily bread, forgiveness and deliverance. The tax collector’s prayer is one of someone who needs God. The Pharisee doesn’t seem to need God at all; by the sounds of his prayer, he’s doing fine by himself.

Tax collectors were notorious ‘sinners’ in Jesus’ day. Not only were they collaborators with the Roman overlords, they were cheats. They had a ‘£1 for Caesar, £1 for me’ kind of approach to tax collecting. In other words, your tax code in Roman-occupied Palestine would have included a little premium for the taxman himself. He had ample opportunity to defraud countless numbers of people. What hope did someone like him have of being right with God? Repentance for him according to Jewish law required not only the abandonment of his profession, but the restitution of his ill-gotten gain plus an extra 20%. Well, how on earth could he have even known all the people he’d cheated? He didn’t have a prayer, and certainly not a prayer like the Pharisee.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to go and sit in on a Year 9 RE lesson at the High School. As part of their module on the Abrahamic Faiths, they were learning about Jewish, Christian and Islamic understandings of judgement and the end times. The teacher started the lesson with this scenario. Imagine, he said, that there are 24 hours left for you to put right all the wrong you’ve ever done in your lifetime before the world ends—all the people you’ve hurt or mistreated, all the times you’ve lied or cheated. What would you do? Who would you need to go and say sorry to?

I have to say, as he said that I began to feel a bit like the tax collector. How on earth could I begin to make amends for every sin, every failing, every peccadillo from infancy till now? Where would I begin? Where would I get the resources to compensate all those people? And even if I could remember everyone I’ve ever wronged and did have the resources, how would I find the time to do it in a whole life, let alone in a single day? What’s more, after all that, I still wouldn’t have started thinking about the wrongs I’ve done to God. Don’t be fooled by the fact I’m standing up here preaching, wearing a cassock and surplice; I too must cast myself on God’s benevolence and pray, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

In that same RE lesson, as I was walking around the classroom one of the students there asked me a question: “How good do you have to be to go to heaven?” she said, “And how bad do you have to be to go to hell?” The scandalous thing about grace is that apart from the King himself, there won’t be one good person in heaven. It’s bad people who go to heaven, sinners. The shocking truth revealed to us in Jesus Christ is that our God is a God for the ungodly. Heaven isn’t for good, self-sufficient folk like the Pharisee. People like that don’t need God. Heaven is for people who know they need God, who know they have nowhere else to go, who know that they’re not right without him.

What a strange invitation lays before us, then. We are invited to assume the role of the tax collector, to throw away the pretences of our self-righteousness; not to see ourselves as all big, grown-up and independent, but instead, to see ourselves as small, helpless and needy children, beloved by a heavenly Father who delights to lift us up and hold us in his arms. The question really is: are you alright on your own, or are you not right without him?

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.