Working Out Your Salvation With…?
Just these last couple of weeks, something deep started stirring inside me—I got what I know to be a Divine Prompt, one I couldn’t ignore. So, after reflecting hard and praying long, I sat down and started to try and make some sense of recently raised questions, high profile theological actors musings and angsty conversations all swirling around one burning issue: How do I know I’m saved?
When I finally fired up the keyboard, thinking “maybe this will be a short post” (at least, short for me—ha!), the ‘Biblical dots’ (so to speak) just kept on joining up. Before I knew it, I’d written a little more than a 6-minute read. The piece was now rocking over five thousand words and the whole thing felt way heavier than a simple spiritual reflection. This was more like a slow-burning crisis sneaking up from under the surface.
After I hammered out the final draft, it was obvious this wasn’t just a simple blog post anymore.
Like anybody, I know I’ve got blind spots and the all too leant into ‘confirmation bias’, so I often bounce my writing off friends—especially if I sense I’m pushing up against the dominant zeitgeist in church settings. One of my closest mates isn’t just a back-pat kind of friend; he’s a marketing whiz and knows how to get people’s attention. He hit me back fast (for such a monster read, I wasn’t expecting that). Said he respected the guts it took to dig deep into this topic, but the piece felt too… academic—not raw or gripping enough. He wanted more punch, more “meat.” He told me straight up I needed to tighten it and give it “oxygen.”
He was right. As I tried reworking it, the piece started shifting—from a careful, theological journey toward something more like an emotional ride. For readers tuned into feeling and experience, my friend’s tips absolutely made sense. Two types of writing were duking it out: commentary, which guides people through the twists and struggles of faith, and an opinion piece, which tries to make an idea sticky and loud. Both are legit, but the opinion piece seems to be winning out these days—and that’s changing how many people drill down (or not) into issues, and that’s perhaps why the question we are looking at here is becoming more prevalent?
Culture’s living in soundbites now, and to my reckoning, it’s leaving us not only more fragile, but concerningly spiritually insecure and inept.
So, forget the formulas, one dimensional ‘proof texts’ – Salvation is not a process to codify or performance art to choreograph – it is a deep, robust and intimate relationship to live with and in the Triune God. This now, commentary, aims to make that unmistakably clear.
Read on with eyes wide open.
Shane Wesley Varcoe
Excerpt from the commentary
An Increasingly Common Conversation
A previously high-profile Christian woman (no-longer in the limelight) recently had her adult son pass away from a heart attack. The result of many factors, not least years of alcohol dependency and at times, other illicit substances. This man claimed Christ as Saviour and often wielded a tenuous socio-political ‘justice’ position as some evidence of that claim. I had journeyed with him for a couple of years, and he made some attempts to reconnect with the church community, he traded mostly of his legacy decision, affiliation with high profile ministry and, again, the all too misapplied social justice badge as the ‘proof’ for his Christianity.
Some weeks after the funeral his always praying and faithful mother contacted me with an anxious question that had only reared its head in her thinking after the death of her, clearly, wayward son. ‘Do you think he is in heaven’ she asked. (This is the softer flip side of the confronting question, ‘Was he Saved?’)
The conversation, as you can imagine, was replete with angsty musings and justifying caveats all the while trying to convince herself that her precious son was with the Lord.
These of course, are fair and reasonable questions, if she had had no contact with him and knew little of his state for the last 10 years, but not so in her setting. Every week for around 5 years, sometimes daily she received drunken verbal or textual abuse from the hand of this Bible ignoring, fellowship denying and unforgiveness filled soul.
This pattern of behaviour (not mere occasion moments of fragility) are not manifestations of a Disciple of Christ, nor are they manifestations of one even claiming Christ as saviour, but they apparently can be manifestations of one who has, at some point, said the ‘sinners’ prayer’. Of course, certain Church doctrines (not necessarily holistic Biblically complete ones) lend themselves readily to affirming this position, more on that later.
(For complete commentary Click Here)