We had boarded our church bus to make the trip to Atlanta. We would board a plane iin Atlanta to fly nine plus hours to Amsterdam. We would wait in that most beautiful airport (my favorite among international transitional terminals) for what seemed like forever. We would then board another plane for another nine hour flight to Nairobi, Kenya. We would arrive after dark, be taken to a nice, by Kenyan standards, Nairobi hotel. Our team would board multiple vans the next morning for an exciting and sometimes nerve-wracking trip to our destination. We arrived tired, ready to get some food and settle in for the night. But we were met by the church gathered eager to meet us and to begin to get to know us. I will never forget what happened next. It was one of those moments that God used to continue a revolution that was going on in my soul about what it really means biblically to be saved. I was at that time in my walk with Jesus at a place where God was turning my world upside down and showing me delightful and very disturbing truths in His Word. This experience I am about to describe began to confirm what I was being shown in Scripture. But that day it shook me in a very profound way and continued the reshaping that God was doing in my life. Here is what happened.
We sat in a big circle in what was then the sanctuary for the church. The pastor opened with prayer and then we sang, I mean we really sang, some wonderful praise to God. Our accompaniment was a bongo drum and tambourine. The pastor then read some Scripture and told us that he wanted all of us to introduce ourselves. Our team went first in the typical American way: my name is, I am married or not, I have children or not, I work at etc. Then came the Kenyans. Their introductions all followed the same format with one major exception; they went like this: praise the Lord, My name is, I am saved, I worship at the Choimane Baptist Church where Pastor James is my pastor, I am on the Praise Team etc. I have given my life to Jesus as my Lord. Each person said the same thing until we got to the fourth person, and then a few later the same thing happened, and then several more times. It went like this: My name is, I am not saved, Please pray for me that God will open my eyes to see so that I can be saved . . . This shook me. Honest. Open. Public confession of not being saved, but gathered with the others and embraced by the others right inside the church building. I could not wait until this time was done and I could ask the pastor what this was all about: are these people confused? Are they crazy? Are these people who are emotionally disturbed and mentally distressed?
This is what the Pastor told me when I asked. We have a very high view of God. He is Holy and He is Just. We fear God. We stand and tremble in His presence. We know that God alone knows our hearts. So, we would not dare to stand in the church and declare that we are saved when we are showing something different when we are not in the church. We fear God too much. He could kill us for lying about who we are. No, Pastor Al; we take “being saved” very seriously so our people are not going to say that they are when they know that they are not.
Here is what got me that day. Do you see it in what the pastor said: we have a very high view of God. He is Holy and He is Just. We fear God. We stand and tremble in His presence. Do we? One of the identifying marks of cultural Christianity is that cultural Christians exalt the love and grace of God TO THE PRACTICAL EXCLUSION of His holiness and justice. I have heard for years as a pastor statements like this one, “I know that God is holy, but the Bible says that He is is love and that He loves us. I don’t really live as I should and I know it, but I know that God loves me.” There is in statements like the above enough truth to get people to believe it, but it is laced with a lot of half-truth. Where are those people so awed by the holiness of God that we fear Him and tremble in His presence, so much so that we would not ever dare to profess to be saved when almost everything about our lives would indicate that we are not?
Every believer who is a biblically defined believer is absolutely dependent on the love of God in Jesus shown to us daily in lavish doses of grace and mercy. We have no hope without it. But those doses of grace and mercy drive us daily to worship and adore Him, to witness to His greatness to others, and to seek to live in obedience to His Word as we seek to walk in His way no matter what the cost is to us. Our daily declaration is simple: we do not care what others say, we will give ourselves to Jesus as Lord today; we are not after the world’s acclaim, we will live and we will die to lift high Jesus’ Name.