Salvation & Authority

A consistent theme throughout Jesus' teachings in the Book of John is the concept that God draws those that God would to God -that God calls the flock. That salvation is IN FACT up to God & God's leading. I like the implications of this teaching. Somewhere along the line, we all get this notion that we can proceed with our lives, live in sin when we want, then return to God at our own choosing. 'I was blind, but now I see' - because I chose to see. We all believe - BELIEVE - in our own Free Will to faith or refusal. It is up to us...on our own authority. Christ teaches the exact opposite. It is NOT up to our timing, discretion, or will to come to faith. God calls those that God would call. None come to God except those that God calls.

It is interesting, the implications of this for evangelism, for revival, for individual reformation. I was listening to a sermon on the way back from Minnesota about people who harden their necks against God - that was the phrase - hardening the neck against God. That resonated with me because it was in fact such an accurate description of rebellion - as in the rebellion I practiced in my own life, and the rebellion I had witnessed in others. All of us fell lower and deeper into vice and distress. This rebellion did not advance any of them or me but to the contrary cost us much. This rebellion is the living death that Christ teaches about in John, in it we are as dead, spiritual husks, self-centered, spiritually aimless, given to vice and shackled by the needs and wants of the flesh.

I know in my life, while living as an atheist, I was clearly called by God, ignored it, forsook it for the promise of atheistic freedom, felt the strangulation of distress, shackled firm in my own emptiness, and was then given a beautiful son, whose life was in fact, the sunrise of my faith. A gift too beautiful and too divine to ignore - the subtle calls lifted to an aria that surrounded me with its majesty. I trot freely through life now, submitting, as best as I am able, to the Holy Spirit and delightedly so.

Our individual will is a troubling thing. Striking out against God and the leading of the Holy Spirit we live in that death rebellion, in concert with Them we live in submission. Many - of Neitzschian persuasion find any submission to be intolerable, delighting in the promise of the superman, resulting in their own steady reduction to walking husks, dead, empty. Even while knowing that God desires for them more goodness than they are ever capable of imagining for themselves, they would have none.

Submission is the only path to life, even to freedom, certainly to goodness. Some will stubbornly harden their necks, and will God call them to life? That is what I want to know. Will God call my friend? My foe? The man on the street for whom I prayed? Yet, we can only know for our own hearing, our own story. We are only authors of our own submission and only hearers of our own call from God. Of course we can be led by the Holy Spirit to evangelize to someone, or pray for someone to be called...or to intercede on behalf of someone...the key is to submit to being led in those and all matters.

A beautiful passage in Job describes :

God heals the afflicted by their affliction,
and opens their ear by adversity.
And he also allured you out of distress,
into a wide open place, with no cramping.
And what was set on your table was full of fatness.

I think of the woman at the well, and how Jesus reveals Himself to her - replacing her shame with infinite worthiness. Her freedom was granted in that calling, that revelation broke her bondage of death in empty vice. Her future instantaneously wide open, with no cramping. And she became a prophet.