1Pentecost 19
12 October 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
W. Gregory Pope
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE SAVED?
Acts 16.16-34. Philippians 2.12-16
“Jesus saves!” proclaims the roadside barn, the man on the street corner, the cardboard poster at the televised sporting event. “Have you been saved?” is the evangelical question. But what does the question mean exactly? What does it mean to be “saved”?
The story of Paul and Silas sheds some light on the question. Paul and Silas were thrown into prison for freeing a slave girl from the clutches of her masters. She was being exploited for economic gain, and they got involved correcting an injustice. While in prison, they held favorite hymn night. And as they sang, an earthquake occurred, their shackles fell off, and the prison doors flew open. The jailer came rushing in, afraid his prisoners had escaped, which meant that he would be tortured and killed. So he was prepared to take his own life. Better to die by his own hand than to be tortured. But Paul and Silas stopped him. They assured him no one had escaped. Moved by the apostles’ fearless compassion and the fear of his own circumstances the jailer had to know, “What must I do to be saved?” Paul and Silas said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”
But what does it mean to “believe” and be “saved”? The biblical words for “saved” and “salvation” run deeper and wider than many of us who grew up in a Baptist evangelical tradition have understood them to mean. We have limited “salvation” to being saved from eternal separation from God. And while we are saved from that separation, that was not the primary concern of Jesus or Paul. Jesus was more concerned with our being saved from the enslavement to sin’s power and into a life of God’s grace and joy. The biblical word for “salvation” means to be healed, made whole, rescued, delivered.
And our salvation, our healing, our wholeness, our rescue, our deliverance comes when we believe, that is, when we give our hearts and lives to the way of Jesus Christ. That’s what it means to “believe.” Anybody can say they “believe” with their mind. But biblical “belief” is a verb. It is a force that takes over your life. To “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ” is to give our lives to the way of Jesus Christ – which is the way of confession and repentance, faith and trust, compassion and love, justice and peace, the cross and resurrection.
All the pride and racism, the greed and materialism, the hatred and violence that ravage our world and deform our hearts can only be healed and transformed by the love of God found in Jesus Christ. His life, death, and resurrection bring healing to the world and salvation to each and every person when we open our hearts to the gift of God’s love.
The Cross means that God’s love will go to any length and take every measure necessary to save us from all that seeks to destroy us. The Cross means that a relationship of unconditional love with God is wildly and wonderfully possible for us all. The Cross means that the guilt and shame of our sin and brokenness do not have to define us. The Cross means that God will not allow a breakdown in relationship to be the last word. The Cross says that grace and forgiveness will speak last. The Resurrection means that death is not the end of the story, that God has come to live among us in His Son Jesus Christ and through Christ God is at work restoring what has been broken, making all things new.
When we “believe” in Christ, that is, when we “give our hearts” to the way of Christ, we are freed from the impossible burden of trying to save ourselves and we are on our way to a new life.
From a biblical perspective “salvation” comes to us in three tenses: past, present, and future: We have been saved. We are being saved. We will be saved.
We have been saved by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Word of God who became flesh and lived among us revealing the fullness of God’s love for all the world. We have been saved the moment we placed our trust in Christ. We have been saved from the power of sin to ultimately conquer us.
You remember his dying words from the cross?: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing. Those words of forgiveness were meant for us all. God giving to the world the very best of God’s love.
And do you recall the thief who was crucified beside Jesus? He recognized that stretched out alongside him was the love of God revealed in all of its pain and glory. So the thief said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus said, Today, you will be with me in paradise.
To be saved is to humbly say to the One who gave himself for you: “Jesus, remember me.” To be saved is to claim God’s free gift of forgiveness, enter a new relationship with God, and receive a new beginning – what the Gospel of John calls a “new birth.”
For some of us, we can remember a definite moment in time when we opened our heart to the way of Jesus and claimed God’s gift of grace and new life. Perhaps it was at a revival or a youth camp. Or perhaps a pastor or parent or grandparent or friend shared with us about the love and forgiveness of God and how to claim it as our own. The great evangelist Billy Graham could remember such a defining moment in his life and sought to lead others to such a saving moment. His wife, Ruth, could not recall such a moment in her life. She said her experience of God’s saving grace was more like a gradual dawning within her. And her husband Billy wisely never said her experience with God was inadequate.
I hope there is for you a saving moment or moments you remember when the love and grace of God warmed your heart and called your name. Or like Ruth Graham it may feel to you as if you have been gradually throughout your life giving more and more of your life to Christ and you know that deep in your heart Christ lives there. If you’ve never known the forgiveness of God that makes you whole, that frees you to live the life God intends for you, all you have to do is ask God to make it so through a turning of your heart toward Jesus and a commitment to the kingdom of God he lived and taught. It is a turning commitment that takes a lifetime!
It is a turning marked by baptism. The jailer believed. He gave his life to the way of Jesus. Then he and his entire family were baptized. Baptism is an outward expression of new life, of the change that God is working within us of sins washed away in the waters of God’s saving grace. Baptism is also an immersion into the Body of Christ, where we learn to walk in the way of Jesus with others. When we say “yes” to the way of Jesus we are baptized and gifted by the Holy Spirit. And we join with others in the Body of Christ to continue the mission of Jesus in the world which is “to seek and to save the lost” – teaching, preaching, and living the good news of God’s love for all, healing broken minds, bodies, and souls, caring for the hungry and those in need, living lives of compassion and justice. Jesus did not separate the saving of souls from the repairing of lives. His vision of salvation was holistic – body, mind, and soul personal righteousness and societal transformation. And the driving mission of every church must be to do what Jesus did. We continue the ministry and mission of Jesus to heal and restore the world by taking up our own cross, entering the pain of others with God’s hope, and giving of ourselves in suffering love.
The path to salvation begins with the opening of your heart to the love and grace of God. But “salvation” is not limited to one moment or to a sinner’s prayer or to a ticket to heaven. Salvation continues as the story of Jesus becomes our story and we learn to walk in newness of life, living lives of resurrection.
Paul says, Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, with holy seriousness. Paul not only talks about our having been saved. He also speaks of our being saved in the present as a process. Salvation is a lifelong relationship in which God’s grace is mending our brokenness, making us whole, changing our lives, continually delivering us from the hold of our false self, our old self, our bad habits, our character defects, our crippling sins.
We call God’s work in this saving process our sanctification, our becoming like Christ. This is important to remember because we will always struggle with doing the right thing. We will, as Paul says, sometimes do what we don’t want to do and what we want to do we will often fail to do. We are all in the process of being saved, being made new. We spend a lifetime growing into our relationship with God with the aim of becoming more like Jesus.
This redeeming work of God comes as God’s Spirit takes deeper residence in our hearts and lives through the spiritually forming practices of prayer and worship, immersion in scripture, spending time with other Christians, serving others in the world. This process of being made whole comes as we walk in the way of Jesus.
The jailer asked, “What must I do to be saved?”
Paul and Silas said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.”
We give our hearts to the way of Jesus. We trust our lives to God’s grace. We nurture our relationship with God until the day all things are made new, when we will be fully and finally saved, healed and made whole, rescued completely from sin and self, delivered from death to eternal life.
Anne Lamott tells the beautiful story of her conversion and the process of her coming to faith. She begins her spiritual autobiography, Traveling Mercies, with these words: My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads . . . these places summoned and then held me while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear . . . Each step brought me closer to the verdant pad of faith on which I somehow stay afloat today. I hope we all have those places, those moments, those experiences that sustain our lives of faith.
Anne’s father was an atheist. Only occasionally did she attend church with her grandparents. But when she did, she loved it. She says she always prayed and always believed that Someone was listening, that there was Someone who heard. But she never told a soul.
As an adult in her thirties on the road toward salvation Anne would attend a little church close to her house about once a month. She writes affectionately about the place: The church smelled wonderful, like the air had nourishment in it, . . . like it was composed . . . of warmth and faith and peace. No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying. But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.
During one particularly dreadful week she writes, . . . I stayed home and smoked dope and
got drunk, and tried to write a little . . . [Then she got sick, so sick she got scared. She said] I got in bed, shaky and sad and too wild to have another drink or take a sleeping pill. I had a cigarette and turned off the light. After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father [who had died years ago], whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there – [and] of course, there wasn’t. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this. And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends. I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, “I would rather die.” I felt [Jesus] just sitting there . . . in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love . . . Finally I fell asleep, and in the morning he was gone. This experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze . . .
Then with an unorthodox yet imaginative image of Christ she writes: But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever. So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered or left.
One week later when I went back to church, I was so hungover that I couldn’t stand up
for the songs . . .but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. (Sounds like hymn night in jail with Paul and Silas.) It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling – and it washed over me. I began to cry and left before the benediction.
I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock . . .under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, stood there a minute, then I hung my head and said, “. . . I quit.” I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “All right. You can come in.” . . . [And] this was the beautiful moment of my conversion.
In trying to describe what happened to her, she quotes the lines of a George Herbert poem: And here in dust and dirt, O here, The lilies of his love appear.
The playwright Eugene O’Neill said: “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”
So what does it mean to be saved? It means we are the broken yet beloved children of God. And in the dust and dirt of our lives the lilies of God’s love appear. And as we live we mend. And it’s the grace of God that saves us and holds us together. I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – writes Lamott, only that it meets us
where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
As a community of grace, we are called to offer God’s mercy of mending to everyone around us because we are all of us, in one way or another, broken and in need of grace.
Where does the story of God’s salvation find you this day? Have you been wandering through life, feeling alone as if you’ve lost your way? Longing for a community of friends to love and support you? Do you find yourself haunted by your past, in need of forgiveness and a new start? Perhaps you’ve sensed an unseen loving Presence nearby, but you’ve never invited the Presence into your heart and life. Wherever you are, God’s grace has come to find you this very day in the love of Jesus Christ and in the love of this church. Would you say yes to whatever the Spirit is leading you to do in these moments?