Ok, so I’ve memorized my verse for the week. It’s one of my favorites, and it actually came into play in our youth service tonight:
“”But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us!” (Romans 5:8, HCSB)
That one has always kind of stuck in my head in some form or another since I first read it. I guess it’s because there’s so much theological content in that one little sentence. I was just talking with someone last night about how theology is just straight up overdone so much of the time. But when I think about this verse, I think about something I heard in (ironically) my systematic theology class last semester. There was this big discussion about how we know that we’re saved. I guess I’m more of an emotional person than I am a logical person, and I’m always looking and asking God for a new experience of Him, a way to really feel Him in my life. He’s responded in all kinds of ways from dreams to just an overwhelming feeling of comfort…on time I literally could just feel Him kneeling down beside me. But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether or not I feel saved. ‘Cause some days, I just don’t. But I always get hung up on a hunger for the experiential side of it.
Like, I remember being backstage at a concert last year, and I was with a group of counselors who were receiving people who had made decisions during the concert. I remember people who had just accepted Christ coming backstage in tears, totally broken, totally overwhelmed at what He had done. And I guess I remember being sort of jealous in a way, ’cause I didn’t have one of those really huge emotional conversion experiences. But I always wanted one. To just feel it. To just feel Him. I guess because I’m a little finite human, I want a referent for God that I can experience and wrap my brain around. And we were talking about this that day in class. A lot of answers were thrown out, people talking about different stuff, and finally this one girl who had been patiently waiting to be called on answered this:
“I know I’m saved because Jesus died on the cross for me.”
That shut us up.
And it’s that simple. “…while we were still sinners Christ died for us!” That’s why we’re saved. Not because we feel like it, or because we said a certain magic set of words, or because we were baptized, or because we spoke in tongues. ‘Cause it appears different ways with different people, and that stuff is the effect of it, not the substance of it. The simple summation of it all is, we’re saved because of what He did for us.
And every time I hear that verse, that’s what I think of.
Thank You, Jesus. ‘Cause You know I can’t deserve this.