The Grace of Re-creation

Several interesting questions arose around our table on the recent Emmaus walk I attended.

Question: If you give you life to Christ, go to the altar, and are saved, and then you go out and kill someone, what does that mean?
Answer from a person at our table: It means you were never saved in the first place.

Question: Why bother to be baptized right before you die?

Question: Do you have to be baptized?

I believe certain things, and to me, what I believe connects closely to the larger picture of God and his grace that is presented in the Bible. I was a table leader on this Emmaus walk. I don’t think that a walk is the time to try to convert people to my own particular faith doctrines, so at times I kept quiet about them.

But this is my blog, and I’ll argue if I want to!

There was a general feel on this walk that there exists for everyone a point of justification – a point in time at which one says, “Yes.” I do believe that for some people this is the case, but for some of us there are never been that one moment at which we could point and say, “Here is when I became a Christian.”

I also think that for all of us, saying “yes” to God is an almost daily occurrence. Time after time, God walks into our lives and asks for our trust and obedience. We can say, “yes” or we can say, “no.” Having a particular turning point in our lives at which we said “yes” doesn’t mean that we won’t be tempted later to say “no” to God. I guarantee that everyone says “no” to God sometimes.

Why is it that some people seem to believe that salvation – even if it is a point change in our lives – means that we will no longer sin? What person has ever had that experience? If we could do that, then why did God need to send his son in the first place? We are sinners. We can try to do the best that we can, acting in accordance with God’s will, saying “yes” as often as we can. We will be blessed in the process, but we will not stop sinning. Sin doesn’t negate God’s salvation; it is the motivating factor for it.

No matter what we do, what mistakes we make, or how many times we say “no” to God, he continues to love us. He continues to chase us. He never lets us go. Ever. None of that, thank God, is in our control. We can’t change that. We can only say “yes” or “no.”

Why is it that we limit what we call salvation? Why is it that we equate it to our ticket to an afterlife with God? Why is it that we ignore the fact that salvation is at hand today? Salvation is a life lived with God now. Here on earth. In this moment. To God, death is nothing. Why do we insist that it is moment of truth?

Do we have to be baptized? Methodists believe that baptism is a sacrament, and it is the moment that symbolizes that God has claimed us as his own. By Water and The Spirit explains it this way (from a previous post):

Baptism is not a requirement for salvation. Our salvation is a free gift of God made possible by the work of Christ.* I really like what Wesley said about it: "the ordinary means which (God) hath appointed...and to which God hath tied us, though he may not have tied himself." Baptism is not unimportant or optional, but we limit God if we believe that baptism is the only way that God can can bring people into relationship with Him.

That resonates with me. We try so many times to limit God. Why do we do that?

I really like the word “re-creation.” God created me. So often sin “re-creates” me, pulling me away from God and from the person he created me to be. He reaches toward me, over and over again, re-creating me. Molding me back into the person he designed me to be, erasing the effects of sin. To be perfect, I think, is to be the person that God created me to be. I can’t do that on my own, any more than at pot on a potter’s wheel can shape itself, but God can do it, and he never stops working on me.

That’s grace.