http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9tAKLTktY0Clearly, this scene is meant to be funny and ridiculous. After all, the very thought of someone being "mostly dead" is absurd. Dying isn't like cooking a steak, or something that can be measured in varying degrees. You're either alive or dead. There's no real in between. At some point, everyone learns this fact.
And yet, for some reason, we frequently act as if death isn't binary. We act like death is a process that can proceed in varying amounts, and in either direction. Not literally, of course; most of us accept that dead bodies don't come back to life. But when it comes to spiritual death, we act like those rules don't apply anymore.
What I'm talking about is the way we treat salvation. We treat it like a debt, in the sense that it is somehow finite and quantifiable. This is not to say we think we could ever pay back this debt. But the fact is, that viewing our salvation as a debt cheapens it in a way we can't imagine.
Let's unpack this for a little bit. My guess is we get this idea from the Bible. Nothing wrong with that. It's a pretty trustworthy source of spiritual truth. Passages like Matthew 18:21-35, wherein Jesus compares forgiveness to a king forgiving his servant of a great debt, then that servant turning around and throwing someone else who owes him a small debt in jail. Another example is in Luke 7:36-50, where Jesus is eating with a Pharisee when a woman who is called a "sinner" falls at Jesus's feet and weeps. Jesus informs the pharisee that she loves much because she has been forgiven much, and that "whoever has been forgiven little loves little", which he says after giving the pharisee an example of two debtors who were forgiven their debts.
I'm not detracting from these examples at all. Jesus said them, after all. What I think has gone wrong is our understanding of these passages as it relates to our salvation. So often, we view our sin as this massive debt, one which God then forgives. Then, prompted by these passages, we decide that, since God forgave us, it is our job to love Him a lot and forgive other people, and serve God by telling others about him. Those are good things, and I'm not saying we should stop doing that. What I am saying is that that line of thinking is fundamentally flawed. When we view our salvation as the forgiveness of a debt, we are adding to that metaphor our modern understanding of what debt is; namely, debt today is quantifiable and, more importantly, avoidable. Comparing our salvation to debt forgiveness as we understand it today is saying that our sin, however great, was still finite, and that, in theory, we could eventually work enough to pay it back. And so often, that is how we view our Christian works: as paying back a debt. But this is such a flawed way of thinking!
See, debt has historically been treated very differently than it is today, when we have bankruptcy and foreclosure and defaulting and loans and debt is simply a reality. In the past, if you owed someone money, they could have you thrown in what is called "debtor's prison" until you or your family paid back the debt. If you think about this for a second, you'll realize that it is a lot harder to pay off your debt when you're in prison and can't work. Another, even older system is indentured servitude, or serfdom, wherein a debtor would essentially become a slave to their creditor until they had worked off their debt, which could be years, decades, or even never. So debt in Jesus's time was very different from debt in our time. In our time, one way or another, debt will eventually go away. In Jesus's time, there was no such guarantee.
This is why it is so important to realize that our sin is so much more than just a debt that we have to pay. Sin is death. And as we have already established, death is irreversible and unquantifiable. There is no "mostly dead". We were just plain dead, until Jesus sought us out and brought us back to life. And just because this is spiritual life and death we are talking about doesn't mean that coming back to life is any more extraordinary. Spiritual resurrection is every bit as miraculous as bodily resurrection, and in many ways even more so.
So then where do works come in? In the debt analogy, it made sense: we owed a debt, Jesus forgave it, and yet we still worked for Jesus to pay it off. No one would ever phrase it like that, at least not out loud, but if you're like me, you think that way sometimes in your head. You think "I'm doing all of this work for God, because he forgave me. Therefore, I have to work for Him." On the outside, this might look fine, but this is a broken way of thinking. We can never put a dent in our "debt" to God. What he has done for us far outweighs anything we could ever do for him. In fact, as we're about to see, we can never do anything for Him.
Hopefully most of us know that we are not saved by works. That's a given. But so often we think and act like our works are something we are doing for God. I think we need to remind ourselves of Ephesians 2:8-10:
"For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith--and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God--not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."These verses seem like they might hold the answer to our question, where do works fit in to all of this? It is clear, from these verses, that our salvation has absolutely nothing to do with works. In fact, our works never give us reason to boast. So why do them then? If they don't impact our salvation, and they don't give us any bragging rights on earth or entitle us to any extra jewels on our crowns in heaven, what's the point? That's where verse 10 comes in: God prepared these works for us. We are created to do these works. These works are our mission.
That's what we're all looking for, isn't it? That's what every person on this earth wants: a mission. A sense of purpose. To feel like we are a part of something bigger. To know that we are making an impact on the world. That's why we see so many people and organizations dedicating their lives to everything from cancer research to football to space exploration to playing the cello to defending our nation to running for political office. And to be clear, none of those are inherently bad things. But if you dedicate your life to their mission instead of God's mission, you are ultimately going to be left wanting.
So the picture we get from the bible is not one of a debtor who is forgiven of his debt and slowly works his way out of it. That view trivializes sin and glorifies our own efforts. The image we get is more like a man who is slowly dying of an unknown disease. He has no living relatives, no friends, no one that cares about him or that will miss him if he dies. The doctors can't help him and tell him he doesn't have much time left. He has no money and has to sleep on the dirty floor of a crumbling, third world hospital, in the hopes that maybe one of the doctors there will take pity on him and find something to help him. But slowly but surely, he wastes away, until one day, without anyone noticing, he breathes his last breath.
...
...
...
Suddenly, he wakes up. He's back on the floor of the hospital, but there is a man looking at him. This man picks him up and places him in a bed, a luxury he hasn't had for as long as he can remember. The man's rescuer is Jesus, and Jesus tells the man "It's okay. I brought you back to life." The man is speechless. No one cared about him before. No one even knew he existed. But then Jesus brings him back to life. He has him transferred to the top of the line health facility, where the man gets constant medical attention, gourmet meals, and the most comfortable bed he had ever felt. On top of all of that, Jesus comes and visits him every day and talks to him, treating him as an friend, which no one had ever done before. True, this man still cannot leave his bed, but he has companionship and food and comfort, everything he had every desired but had never had.
After a while, though, he realizes that even this is not truly satisfying. He knows he has everything he has ever wanted, but, put simply, he is bored. He has an empty feeling, an insatiable desire for something more, something he can't quite describe. It's the same desire I mentioned earlier, that every person feels. The desire for adventure, for a sense of purpose, to feel like you belong, to know that you will leave a lasting impact. And no amount of friendship, food, warmth, comfort, or medical attention can give satisfy this desire.
That's when Jesus says it. "I'll trade places with you," he tells the man. "What I did for you, I have also done for countless others. And still there are countless more people like you. But I'll trade places with you. I will lie, crippled, on this bed, and let you go out and do to those other people what I have done to you. It won't be easy. You'll have to find them."
This is it. This is the answer to the man's lingering desire. Finally, he has found his mission. No, it isn't easy, but it is fulfilling.
So you see, works are not our way of paying God back for all he's done for us. No, on the contrary, works are the greatest gift God has given us! God has given us a mission, a purpose, a group to belong to, a chance to love other people in the way he has loved us, a chance to bring the greatest news we have every received to someone else! Sure, Jesus could find these people much more efficiently if he chose to do it himself and not use us. But thank God that he does choose to use us, despite all of our flaws and imperfections. He lets us be the vessels through which he reaches the world with his love. He lets us do the good works that he has already prepared for us.
It isn't always easy. And we aren't always going to get it right. But this is our mission: to find the people who are dead like we once were, and show them the amazing love that this person named Jesus has showed us.
So let's go find them.
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