Daily Salvation

September 17, 2008
I Peter 1:3-9
“What a God we have! And how fortunate we are to have him, this Father of our Master Jesus! Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we’ve been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future in heaven—and the future starts now! God is keeping careful watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you’ll have it all—life healed and whole.
I know how great this makes you feel, even though you have to put up with every kind of aggravation in the meantime. Pure gold put in the fire comes out of it proved pure; genuine faith put through this suffering comes out proved genuine. When Jesus wraps this all up, it’s your faith, not your gold, that God will have on display as evidence of his victory.
You never saw him, yet you love him. You still don’t see him, yet you trust him—with laughter and singing. Because you kept on believing, you’ll get what you’re looking forward to: total salvation.”
Maybe your family is like mine—big! In a big family like the one of which I am a part you are destined to find varied theological perspectives and we have them. Some years ago, when some of my cousins learned of my own spiritual journey that incorporated struggles, trials and even doubt, they freaked out. How in the world could a minister—“someone chosen by God”—doubt the very One who had chosen them?! In their eyes I had committed the ultimate sin and in those moments they built a theological wall between us by deciding in their fundamentalist ways what is right for me and for everyone for that matter. To them, doubt in their faith was an evil—a temptation that was not to be embraced.
These verses are about salvation. While salvation and the end time perspective were very real to the audience of Peter’s day, even Peter understood the value of speaking to the topic of salvation as a present day and even a present moment reality. To Peter, one’s salvation was constantly being worked out. It was being worked out in the laughter and joyful singing of life but also in those bitter struggles that cause us to wrestle with God, to doubt and to feel as if we have been put on trial. With each experience that we weather we gain a new strength and our faith is taken to a deeper level. We have acquired new spiritual tools to deal with this life.
Peter knows that this community to which he writes faces all sorts of attack from wicked people and that it would be easy for this community to be swayed by the wickedness rather than holding firm in their faith. It would be easy for them to lose hope as Christians wishing that they didn’t need to know suffering.
Peter’s message to them and to us is that suffering happens. It is not necessarily something that we bring on ourselves. It is not created by God for our testing. It just occurs out of the flow of life, out of the varying perspectives, reactions and decisions of fellow humans. It just is. So, for Peter, the answer in the face of difficult times is not like that of my cousins. It is not a ‘how dare you doubt the reality of God’ mentality. Rather, it is an understanding that salvation is this gift from God that lets us face what comes our way, wrestle with it and hopefully choose God in the end and in so choosing find that we are stronger for struggle that has been ours. Somehow we find more peace in our lives and a new sense of freedom.
I don’t know what specific struggles you face but I do know that we live in a world that seems synonymous with upheaval and so I hope that you will take Peter’s words as assurance—that you will work out your salvation, wrestle, struggle and in the end find the living hope that exists for each of us who call God our Savior. May hope be ours today! Amen.