The Need for a Savior
As you read this blog post a group of teenagers and adults from Chapel Hill, including your intrepid senior pastor, are hard at work building homes for several families in Mexico. You can read their updates by clicking HERE. These homes would pass for equipment sheds if they were built here in the states. Pray that the students would be reminded of their blessings as they gain valuable perspective on the way most of the world lives. But pray most of all that our teens would come to know that they are as poor and destitute as the poorest in Mexico, that they too need help, they too need a savior. Amen.
The concept of salvation has been a lot on my mind lately. When Troy Wilson shared this last Sunday (and if you missed it, you need to listen to his sermon ASAP (Click HERE and go to “Radical Mission”). He spoke on how we will too often look at a place like San Francisco, shake our heads in self-righteous dismay at the moral destitution of its citizens, and easily forget how we are in no less need of a savior than they.
We all have this tendency, though, don’t we? Life gets comfortable, we think we’ve got it figured out, we don’t mess up too much, then without realizing it we’ve put ourselves on a pedestal. We are okay, but that guy coming into the coffee shop in a cowboy hat and a tutu is not (you’ll have to listen to Troy’s sermon to get that one).
But the simple beauty of the Gospel is its reminder that none of us is okay. All of us are broken and sinful and all of us need a savior. You may have said the prayer of salvation (praise God!), but day in and day out you still need Jesus. No more or less than that guy in a tutu. In other words, the Gospel is not just a one time event that gets you into the Good People Club, it’s a lifestyle of dependence on Jesus that should lead us to live a grace-filled and humble life.
It’s easy to look at our teenagers in Mexico or Troy Wilson and believe that they are living this grace-filled life, but I pray that we do to. May we be broken and humbled for the hearts and souls around us, that they may know, as Paul says in Ephesians 3:18, “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”