Saved for a Life Lived On Purpose

I begin most days in quiet time with God. To see how I approach this time, see here. Below is my journal for today's quiet time.

Look: “He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. (2 Timothy 1:9)

If Paul were a televangelist, I suppose you’d expect him to write here that we have been saved and called to live with God for eternity, focusing more on the sweet-by-and-by beyond death.

But that’s not what Paul writes. He says that God in Christ “has saved and called us to a holy life.” It’s an accomplished fact. Right now in this messy world.

The follower of Jesus is saved for and called to a different way of living in this life. Believers in Jesus aren’t waiting for their own resurrections to start living like people who have been called and saved by the God of the universe. They can do it right now.

Listen: That the implications for everyday life in this world is what Paul has in mind here is underscored by what he writes in verse 7: “For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline.”

God doesn’t give the Holy Spirit to believers just so that they can have goose-bumpy experiences with the wild and uncontrollable Holy Spirit. God’s not a junkie whose aim is to sell us a dose of Holy Spirit-religion, our fix until the next time we need to feel something.

The God we meet in Jesus Christ is uncontrollable by human beings, even wild as perceived on this side of the resurrection. He is the Lion and the Lamb (Revelation 5:5-6). Lewis has it right when several characters in The Chronicles of Narnia say of Aslan, the Christ-figure in his books, “He’s not a tame lion. But he’s good.” But God does not set us free to be Jesus addicts.

To all with faith in Jesus and through our Baptism, He gives us the Holy Spirit, Who bears down on the chaos of our lives (Genesis 1:1) of jumbled motives and self-serving actions to make us new (2 Corinthians 5:17), set free from the tyranny of sin and our selfish motives. As we attend to Christ faithfully, we can no longer be tossed to and fro by the latest craze, impulse, religious fad, or need to feel “relevant” (Ephesians 4:14).

Instead, we hold steady, filled with the strength of God for living.

The Holy Spirit empowers us with the boldness to live out our trust in Jesus by giving us “power, love, and self-discipline.”

He saves us to live holy lives, lives set apart for God’s purposes for our lives, according to the blueprint He set for us when He formed us in the womb.

I find that when I’m seeking to live in tune with the Holy Spirit, in submission to Christ and the will of God, I become more myself, not less. Jesus died and rose to save me for just this: to be myself, not the person my sin-darkened heart and mind sometimes imagine that I should be. I become more straightforward, less ambiguous, less complicated. Not simplistic, simple. Self-disciplined, more dependent on my Creator and therefore more the bold, powerful, loving, and self-disciplined child of God I am meant to be. Liberated to be my true self.

This isn’t passivity. I don’t stop dreaming or having ambitions. But my dreams and ambitions are set on being the me God sets me free to be.

Respond: Lord, You know how I wander from You and want to be my own god and become disappointed by dreams that come from my ego, from Satan, and from the world, rather than following the path of freedom to be all that I am made to be in Christ. Help me to live like a new creation and not an old Adam, mired in sin.Today, help me to live like a disciple of Jesus. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]