Vol 1:30 What Are We Saved For?

I was talking with friends this past week about their son applying to different colleges. One of these happened to be a Christian college and in the application the question was asked, “Are you saved?” We talked about this for awhile regarding what kind of assumptions such a question was making; whether it was a question to alert the applicant to the environment at the college, or to alert the college as to the status of the potential enrollee?

But being missional involves the question of salvation, but maybe not in the way we are accustomed. Roxburgh and Boren express that, “we have lost the call to a salvation that not only saves us from sin but saves us for life the way God meant us to live in the first place” (p. 103). What are we saved for is indeed an important question and perhaps the kind of question that would make better sense on a Christian college application – because it says more about a person’s purpose and mission in life than merely asking if one is saved.

Lesslie Newbigin wrote that we often misunderstand the concept of election. Those who follow Jesus are the elect, but he notes, not in the way we think. We often tend to think of election and salvation as set us apart, perhaps even in a privileged way – but salvation and election in light of God’s mission is a call to participate with God in what God is accomplishing in making all things new. To be elect in this sense is a call, not to sit back and enjoy the privileges, but rather a call to minister as Christ Jesus did, often encountering hardship and opposition, in demonstrating the presence of God’s reign here on earth.

Roxburgh and Boren continue: “As a result, we don’t usually conceive of salvation as being a process of becoming God’s people who practice the way of life that he intended in the midst of the mess of the world” (p. 103). Indeed, being saved carries with it an onus, an onus of being part of what God is up to in the world, demonstrating a different reality, demonstrating a different way of being human, demonstrating a different way of dealing with institutions, with society, with culture – being saved in God’s mind is always being saved for God’s purposes, for participating with what God is bringing about and accomplishing.

A former pastor of one of the congregations I have served had the practice of asking those who were becoming members of the church, for what purpose they were becoming part of the community, what were they bringing into the community?. For him membership did not entail numerous benefits, but rather a call to serve, a call to act, a call to participate in what God was doing with the passions and gifts the Spirit of God bestowed upon them. He was asking, “what are you saved for?”

In being missional people, people set apart for God’s purposes, we need to get in the habit of asking ourselves and others, “what are we saved for?” As we try to answer that question, we will become more open to discovering what God is up to all around us, and how God has called and gifted us to participate in demonstrating what it means to be human in a very different way.