Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Do I Have to Know When I Got Saved?

Does a person have to remember the time and place they were saved in order to be saved? I recently read an article by a preacher who told of the time and place he was saved, but then he said that not all people who have been saved have had that experience. In fact, he said that it isn’t typical. [1] It isn’t? Why then do so many people tell of that experience? He also indicates that some people may come to saving faith so gradually that they don’t know at what point it was that they went from not believing to believing.

I’ll admit, that sounds good. I’m a preacher’s kid, so I was going to church before I was born. I knew more about theology than many people ever do before I started school. I knew about heaven and hell, Jesus, the cross, and salvation. I believed they were all real and that without Jesus I would go to hell. At first, I believed it because my parents told me so. Could it not be that I could gradually move from that kind of knowledge to saving faith? It seems logical, but like Russell D. Moore, that was not my experience. For many weeks, I struggled with my lack of salvation, but there was a night when I asked Jesus to save me. It was the Sunday before Vacation Bible School and I was lying in my bed. That memory is etched into my mind.

But two similar experiences don’t define a rule. What is important is what we find in the Bible. The Bible never tells us exactly what the experience will be like. The writers recorded the experience of several people. Gradually coming to know Jesus is not one of those experiences. Instead, it tells of people like the woman at the well, the jailer, Paul, and others. Always, there was period of them learning over a period of years, weeks, or even minutes, but it all culminated into a moment of salvation. Still, we can’t take the lack of a gradual acceptance as proof that it couldn’t happen. Russell D. Moore seems to think Timothy’s experience was like that. But the Bible doesn’t say that is that case, only that his mother and his grandmother taught him.

Something we should not miss when we look at the experiences recorded in the Bible is the fact that salvation and baptism were so closely tied together. There is enough evidence to show that salvation always came before baptism, not as a result of it, but when we look of the Ethiopian eunuch’s salvation, we see that when he reached the point of belief he was ready to take the action to be baptized. These days, we get this idea that we need to get people saved and then with any luck we can persuade them to help out in the nursery or help mow the church yard or something useful. But in the Bible it appears that the people getting saved saw it as a commitment to go to work for the Lord, to join the church, and a number of other things. Why is that?

With salvation comes the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. If anything tells us that there is will be an experience when salvation takes place, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit ought to. Now, we aren’t likely to see the Spirit sitting on people’s heads like flames of fire when they get saved, but we ought to be shocked to think it is possible for a person to go from not having the Spirit living within them to having the Spirit living within them without knowing it took place. What’s the saying? That’s the elephant in the room. God is too big and too powerful to go unnoticed.

As Russell D. Moore states, the Bible compares salvation to a new birth. Forget the fact that we know when we were born because someone told us. I happen to know a person who can’t remember when she was saved because an accident caused her to lose her memory when she was fourteen. Lacking the memory of an event is far different from the event being gradual. There’s nothing gradual about birth. Labor may take a while and there are those nine months before it happens, but the birth itself is a moment in time. The baby is in the mother’s womb and then he is out. He goes from not needing to breathe to needing to draw in air every few seconds. You never hear of someone who says, “I don’t know when I started breathing. I didn’t for a long time. I knew I needed too. Then one day, I realized I was breathing and I had been for a long time.

While every experience of salvation is different and knowledge of the exact time of salvation is not one of the proofs of salvation the Bible gives, I just don’t see a gradual salvation as possible.