signs-introduction

Introduction:

Fix Your Eyes Upon Jesus

Salvation comes at the intersection of grace and truth,

where God saves us from our enemies and all sorts of

evil, not least of which is the evil within ourselves. It

brings us into the joy and goodness that God intended from

the beginning of creation and gives us hope for eternal life.

This book is a rebellion against lesser ideas of salvation, particularly

any that suggest people can be saved without the evidence

of transformed lives. There is no salvation without signs

of salvation.

This book had its genesis in a Winchell’s Donut Shop in

Portland, Oregon many years ago. A young man sat down, uninvited,

at my table and asked if I was saved. He proceeded

to take me through a pamphlet with cartoons that illustrated

“the four spiritual laws.” I learned that (1) God loves me and

has a plan for my life, but (2) because of sin, there is a gulf

between me and God, and (3) that Jesus died on the cross to

bridge that chasm, and finally (4) that I needed to repent from

my sins and ask Jesus into my heart as Lord and Savior. The

pamphlet had a prayer that I could read and a statement that

I could sign.

Even then, before I could articulate why, I sensed that this

presentation fell woefully short of a genuinely biblical vision.

I do not fault it for being wrong so much as for being inadequate.

I kept wondering, how can you talk about salvation

and fail to reflect Jesus’ passionate concern for peace and justice,

and for the poor? Yet, my own attempts at political action

felt legalistic and alienating. The young man’s question, “Are

you saved?” kept provoking me to look more deeply into the

scripture and the cross.

This book is the fruit of that search. It presents a biblical

understanding of salvation in which legalism is replaced with

grace, and the cross is the entryway to a life transformed by

Jesus’ ethics.

Here is the plan. First, I briefly introduce myself and my

methodology so you have some idea where I am coming from.

The rest of the book is a meditation on the living voice of God.

The first chapter offers a biblical vision of what the saved life

looks like. The second chapter relates how the biblical understanding

of salvation developed. That is the story of the convergence

of four apparently contradictory imperatives: God’s gift

of unmerited love; God’s demand for justice and purity; God’s

intervention to save people in this life; the hope for ultimate

salvation in the next. These lines converge in Jesus’ sacrifice on

the cross, the subject of the third chapter. The remainder of

the book explores the signs of salvation as they are lived out

in the community of faith. It is a life of joy and power based

on a listening relationship with our living God. At the end, I

talk about baptism—not the ritual, but the costly experience

of yielding to God that brings us into this life.

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