God Offers Life

This week, we’re going to start with two quotes from Dallas Willard, both from his The Spirit of the Disciplines. Here they are:

One specific errant concept has done inestimable harm to the church and God’s purposes with us—and that is the concept that has restricted the Christian idea of salvation to mere forgiveness of sins.

…It becomes understandable why the simple and wholly adequate word for salvation in the New Testament is “life.” “I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly…”

Forgiveness has been the center point of much of Christianity since Jesus was here. More than once we read of the need for sacrifices for forgiveness, and we are told that Jesus preached a gospel of repentance for forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness of sin has been a constant of Man’s relationship with God. Getting rid of our sins, “as far as the east is from the west,” has held the attention of many believers over the years. We have used multiple rites and rituals around the shedding of guilt for our failures. These rites and rituals have kept forgiveness in front of us and at the forefront of our religious lives. Certainly, addressing our guilt in spreading of sin is important. What we have witnessed though, is that we have reduced salvation to generally equitable with forgiveness of sins. We say that we are saved when our sins are forgiven, and many folks teach that once your sins have been forgiven, that’s it – you’re good to go, no matter what. We’ve checked the box and now we can move on.

The problem is that mere forgiveness of sins isn’t the point and never has been. The purpose of those early sacrifices wasn’t primarily to achieve forgiveness of sins, but to restore us to a right relationship with God. You see, it was the sacrifice, the giving up of something valuable or the best we have to God that honors him and restores us to him. In being restored to him, we gain forgiveness. This is why John and Jesus preached a gospel of repentance, not a gospel of sacrifice for forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness has never been and should never be the focus of what God offers. He offers so much more.

What is it that God offers? Life. Life for those who will return to him. This Life reverses the spiritual death we live and gains God’s mercy over all and every sin we have committed. We are cleansed, dressed in robes of clean linen, and enter the heavenly celebration of those who are in him. But this Life isn’t “pie in the sky, in the great by and by.” We don’t have to die to enter and enjoy this Life. No, this Life is available right here, right now. When we join God, when we become his disciples, when we are convinced that his ways are the best ways, and we align our lives – our thoughts, our desires, our values – with his, we begin to actually Live into the image we already are. Living into that image is the most natural, the easiest, and the most satisfying way to Live for all humans, no matter who they are. This Life with God now and in the future is salvation, reversing the death that arises from our separating ourselves from God.

This is our challenge today – to shift our focus from avoiding sin, to Living with God. We have and we can continue to focus on our sin and make them an obstacle to our relationship to God. But we needn’t. Our sin will fall away from us if we will but enter the Life God offers and become his disciples, Living the Life of God on this earth.

Would you like that Life? Come home.