Christian Perfection as Salvation

I might as well continue on the same theme from my last two posts (Christian Perfection for Today and Christian Perfection as a Second Blessing) and briefly explore the connection between Christian Perfection and Salvation. This is a post I’ve been wanting to write for a few months but haven’t had the right way to frame the conversation.

We all know the basic story: God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. But you have a sin problem that separates you from God. The good news is that Jesus came to die for your sins. If you accept Jesus’ death, you can be reconnected to God. Those who are reconnected to God will live in heaven with God.

I came to know God through this basic story line (however, when I first understood the story, I’m pretty sure a bridge  was involved). This story is definitely true, but the Story doesn’t end here. In fact, the Story goes so far beyond here. It goes so far beyond that when we end here we may even be doing some damage to the beauty of the Story.

I heard Erwin McManus recently say that the following line is one of the most narcissistic statements ever heard, “Jesus died for my sins, so I could go to heaven.” Let’s be honest here, if my experience with the Good News is this statement that Jesus died for my sins, so I can go to heaven, then I have missed the Story altogether. Somehow I have reduced the Story to be about me, my salvation, my fulfillment, my happiness, my life. The only place this message leads is to me going to heaven for a better life.

The Story is much more beautiful than being about me. The Story is a cosmic story. The Story is similar as before but much longer: God, in love, created the perfect world and yet we rebelled and removed ourselves from relationship. Because God is love, he bore our punishment for our rebellion and died so we could live a new life, a life of relationship. Through Jesus, we can live a life as we were intended all along to live. Through God we are shaped and molded back into how he intended for us. Through the Holy Spirit we begin to live the heroic life of a saint. We recognize that the Holy Spirit has always been chasing us in order to get us to recognize who we really are and the difference God wants to make in the world. Being loved by God, we go forward into the world in order to proclaim this Good News and to make the wrong things right. Because of salvation, we see ourselves totally differently. We see our role in the story as minimal, and God’s role as supreme. Because of our new identity, we eagerly wait for the New Earth, not so to escape from this life,  but so we can worship the One who is truly great.

If we can recapture the Story and begin to tell our people the full breadth of what happened how would that change our churches? Christian Perfection emerges as a vital teaching because it brings us back to the idea that life is not about going to heaven, it is about living in relationship with God. Because of this relationship, everything has changed. Because of this relationship, we begin to imitate the One who saves us. We begin to love, and in this we are perfected. What is salvation ? It’s not some far off event that will take place in some eternal sphere. Salvation is the new life that we experience today.