Are You Saved?

Are You Saved?
Romans 10:8-13

Are you saved?  It’s a simple question.  It’s definitely  a religious question.  We associate the question with evangelistic types who feel no discomfort in walking up to a total stranger and asking the question, “Are you saved?”  I haven't seen any street preachers in the past few years who are buttonholing people on city street corners trying to save their eternal souls.  Or people walking up and down the sidewalks with a sandwich board that says, “The end is near.”

I don’t know why.  It’s still a relevant question.  It’s a question all of us have to ask ourselves, or be asked by someone in the church.  There are lots of variations on the little question, Are you saved?  What is the state of your eternal soul?  If you died today do you know where your soul would be?  When someone joins the church, the first question they are asked is, “Who is your Lord and Savior?”  There is only one acceptable answer.

If you are a thinking person, hopefully you ponder the question, Are you saved?  On one level, when you hear that question, you may be thinking the question really is, Have you accepted Jesus as your Savior?  That’s part of it.  But there’s more to ponder here.

If you hear the question, Are you saved?, you may ask, and rightly so, “Saved from what?”  It’s like the bumper stickers back in the ’70’s that said, “Jesus is the answer.”  Then the backlash bumper stickers started coming out that said, “What’s the question?”  Or there were the bumper stickers that said, “I found it!”  And the backlash bumper stickers that read, “I didn’t know you lost it.”   If I answer “yes” to that question, “Are you saved?”, you also have to be ready for the backlash question: From what are you saved?  The word implies that you are saved from something.

The word “save” in the Greek language of the Bible means:
1)  saved from serious peril
2)  to be kept alive
3)  preserve your inner being

So, think of those meanings when you think about being saved.  From what serious peril were you actually saved?  How were you literally kept alive when you were saved?  How was your inner being being preserved when you were saved?

When Paul Tillich retired as professor at Harvard Divinity School, on the occasion of his last class, he preached a sermon to his students on Matthew 10:8, “Heal the sick, raise the dead…”  Tillich then said to the ministry students, “You will go out to carry the gospel of healing, but your biggest problem will be persuading people they need to be healed.”  His sermon made the point that the biggest challenge Christian ministry faces is that of getting people to realize how sick we are without healing faith in God.

I think he’s right.  Most people don’t think they are that bad of a person.  They become “saved”—that is, as I mentioned before, they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, but won’t allow themselves to think any further about the depth of what they have just been saved from.

Being saved from what?  Hell?  Eternal damnation?  Eternal torment?  The fiery flames?  Pitch forks and torture?  Most of our understanding of what hell is all about comes more from Dante’s book, The Inferno, than it does from the Bible.

A man died and was taken to his place of eternal torment by the devil.  As he passed sulphurous pits and shrieking sinners, he saw a man he recognized as a corrupt television evangelist snuggling up to a beautiful woman.
"That's unfair!" he cried. "I have to roast for all eternity, and that TV evangelist gets to spend it with a beautiful woman."
"Shut up", barked the devil, jabbing the man with his pitchfork.  "Who are you to question that woman's punishment?”

I want to give you an alternate understanding of what hell is all about based on a couple of things Jesus said, rather than Dante’s seven circles of hell.

First, one of the most quoted and memorized verses in the Bible: John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”  The word, perish, in the language Jesus spoke, means total annihilation.  It doesn’t have anything to do with eternal damnation, fires, and torturous torment.  It means that your soul is fully destroyed.

What Jesus is contrasting here in this most favorite of verses, is between having your soul completely erased, or having everlasting life with God.

And secondly, add to that the statement Jesus made recorded in Matthew 10, “Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28).  Again, this word destroy has to do with having all traces of your soul expunged from existence.  From these two statements Jesus makes, we are forced to rethink what hell is all about.

What if hell is not a place of eternal torment, but is a place where your soul is totally obliterated?  What if what you are saved from is not eternal punishment, but the irreversible eradicating of all that you are body and soul?  If you had the choice to live eternally with God and with the souls of all who love God, or having even your soul absolutely and forever eliminated,  which would you choose?

Francis Schaeffer, in his book, No Little People, described the judgement of God as a great prairie fire.  He wrote:
A Christian has only one foundation:  Jesus Christ the Savior.  And on that foundation he builds—with either combustible or non-combustible material.  One day there will be a great judgment and the fire will come.  It will be like the great prairie fire which sweeps along burning everything in its path.  Suddenly it comes to a great rock outcropping in the midst of the prairie.  Everything around the rock will be consumed.  Only that which is atop the rock will escape the fire.

That’s what you have been saved from.  Not eternal punishment.  But total and final incineration of your very soul.  Why does that happen?  How do people come to that end?

In the opening scene of the movie, La Doce Vita, there is a panoramic view of Rome’s skyline.  The focus is on the grand dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral in the center.  Then there is the sound of a helicopter, heard off in a distance, until we catch a glimpse of it, far off, dragging some obscure object through the air by wires.

As the helicopter flies closer, you can clearly make out the cargo.  It is a huge statue of Christ being dragged across the skyline of Rome.   In the middle of the helicopter's flight, the film cuts to a beach below.  Young beach goers, annoyed by the intrusion of the helicopter noise, laugh mockingly, pointing, as the statue flies overhead.  The helicopter comes to a stop, hovers in place, then releases the statue into a trash dump-site below, breaking into pieces as it hits.

The message is loud and clear:  Modern people have relegated Christ to the trash heap.  People act as if Christ really doesn’t matter.  In the early days of Christianity, the believers were hunted down and killed in all kinds of heinous ways.  The threat of the world was a clear and present danger.  But today, we as believers have no such external threat.  The world doesn’t see us as a danger anymore.  The world only sees Christians and our Christian beliefs as something that can be ignored, or laughed at as antiquated and irrelevant.   It is against this grim scenery that the drama of God’s salvation is played out.

That is how a person reaches the point of having their soul erased by God.  If you want to live as if Christ doesn’t matter, or as if Christ is some antiquated figure who has nothing to say to our modern sensibilities, or if you want to live as if Christ has nothing to say to you about how you will live your life, to all that God says, “Fine, have it your way.”

Remember when Jesus said,  “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26)  Notice Jesus doesn’t say if you want to gain the world and ignore Jesus in the process, your soul isn’t eternally tortured.  It is forfeited.  It is given up.  It is erased.

People say, “How can a loving God condemn someone’s soul to eternal punishment?”  Well, God doesn’t.  God just grants people their wishes.  If you want to live as if God doesn’t exist, and not believe in the Savior Jesus, then fine.  You won’t be subject to the evil whims of a devil.  You will simply reap what you have sown in this life—the total eradication of your soul.

That’s what you’ve been saved from.  Let me say again what the meaning of the word “save” is in the Greek:  saved from serious peril, to be kept alive, to have your inner being preserved.  It isn’t hard to make the connection about what you have been saved from.  Is it not serious peril to face having your very soul erased?  Doesn’t being kept alive mean more than just your body, but that your soul also has a life and it can be wiped away?  And what is your inner being but your soul, and to preserve your soul for eternity, rather than it being quashed at the end of life, is something you should desire?  And the only way to do that, as Paul has said here, “…if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”


There is one more piece to this statement by Paul that he goes on to explain in detail.  It’s a part of being saved, that is just as important as what we are saved from.  It is what we are saved for.  It’s not enough for God that we be saved from the peril of losing our soul.  God wants to benefit us, if we accept his salvation from annihilation, so that our life now may be full.

Here’s what we’re saved for:  to be put right with God (vs. 10); so that we won’t be disappointed (vs. 11)—interesting that the word literally means that we won’t be put to shame—that God saves us for a release from shame and a way to live into a sense of self-esteem and inner strength; that we will be richly blessed (vs. 12); and, that so we will be attended to by God whenever we call out to him (v. 13).

Whenever I talk to people who are going through some grief experience I try to help give them a sense of their resources to deal with that grief.  Is not this list of what we are saved for a great trove of resources that God has given us?  That no matter what, when we are saved, we are right with God; that we will not suffer ultimate shame and disappointment no matter how tough the situation; that we will be richly blessed no matter what we feel has been taken from us; and that God promises to always be there when we call out to him.

What we are saved from and what we are saved for is truly a cause for exultant worship and praise of God.

The British Parliament abolished slavery in the West Indies on August 1, 1836.  But the decree was not to be valid until the next year.  On July 1, 1837, twenty thousand slaves united in Jamaica.  At 11:00 at night, all of them dressed in white robes, they knelt down, faces turned upward at the clock tower, awaiting midnight.  As the clock struck twelve, the twenty thousand slaves rose together and shouted joyously, “We are free!  We are free!”  They knew exactly what they were freed from.  And they were just gaining a sense of what they were freed for.

Can we not also, at the moment we have confessed with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believed in our heart that God raised him from the dead, can we not also raise our hands in joy and shout, “We are saved!  We are saved!”