1 February 2026

Gettin’ Saved: Companions on a Journey

Philippians 3:7-16

We read from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, chapter 3, verses 7-16. 

7Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. 10I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

12Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. 15Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you. 16Only let us hold fast to what we have attained.

I’ve told this story before, but today I want to take it a little farther. When we were in Wausau, I had lunch twice a month with an elder in a very conservative church – I mean “We’re going to have to take up the issue of whether women have to wear head coverings in church” level of conservative. Greg was a good friend. One day over lunch he told me about the weekend he had spent knocking on doors in Milwaukee offering to share the Gospel with people. Nobody had responded well. Most had just slammed the door in his face. Greg shrugged and said, “I don’t hold that against them. I hate it when people come to my door, too.” I looked at him for a moment, then said, “So why are we are willing to suspend the Golden Rule when it comes to evangelism? Why is it all right to do unto others what we hate ourselves?” Greg looked surprised briefly, apparently never having seen it that way, but after a second, he replied, “I guess because the stakes are so high.” You understand, right? In Greg’s understanding of our shared faith, the only way that those people could avoid an eternity in hell is to accept Jesus as their savior. Given those stakes, Greg couldn’t let qualms about politeness prevent him from doing what he can.

Last week I talked about the revivalist understanding of salvation that I grew up with, especially the notion that salvation is a thing that happens once, at a specific moment, and which from that moment changes that person’s life and eternal fate. That moment validates their ticket to heaven. I also told last week how that narrative didn’t fit my own salvation experience, which didn’t really happen in a single moment; nevertheless, that story remains the primary understanding of salvation for many Christians, and it shapes the practice and ministry of those churches. For instance, because of those stakes, the main focus for those churches is getting people over that line, getting them to say the right words, pray the right prayer, by whatever means necessary. I mentioned the invitation hymn last week – the final hymn in every worship service, during which people are invited to walk the aisle and give their hearts to Jesus. In the churches of my childhood, that was the only absolutely necessary element of worship. Anything else in worship could be dropped for a week if necessary, but not the invitation. Baptists claim not to have sacraments, but they do, and that’s it. Even if it’s a Sunday evening service with only a handful of members present, most of them being deacons, you cannot skip the invitation. 

That invitation’s not enough, though. To give people extra – and more intense – opportunities to walk the aisle and get saved, we had regular revivals. That meant that we invited a professional evangelist to come and preach every night for a week. We prepared for months ahead of the revival, encouraging everyone to invite all their friends from work or school the revival. The evangelist himself would be a really effective speaker. To be fair, some were men of integrity who avoided manipulation and simply and clearly preached about salvation – Billy Graham is, well, the one I can think of – but others were just people who were really good at pulling on heartstrings. They had a stock of personal stories guaranteed to strike fear into the heart or bring tears to the eyes, and get people down the aisle.

But even that wasn’t enough. Evangelism wasn’t just left to the professionals. We were all supposed to know how to share the gospel with our chemistry lab partners or co-workers. I’ll talk more about this next week, but every faithful Christian was expected to be ready to share the gospel at the drop of a hat, and also to drop the hat ourselves if necessary. It was our most important job to get people over that threshold, to say that prayer, because – and this is important – once they cross that line, they’re in for good. That’s right. As we Baptists put it: Once saved always saved. So you see? From that perspective, my friend Greg’s willingness to annoy an entire Milwaukee neighborhood if necessary makes more sense. Anything to get people in the door, because once they’re in, the door locks behind them. In the world I grew up in, that moment of salvation was everything, and everything after that moment was anticlimax. 

Now let’s look at our scripture from Paul. Now there was an evangelist – the prototype, really. He had a testimony, and he knew how to use it. Originally a Pharisee, a former persecutor of the church, he experienced a miraculous and dramatic conversion that included Jesus speaking to him from heaven, which led to his immediate transformation. In the Southern Baptist Convention of my youth he could definitely have taken that story on the road – well, he did, didn’t he? Paul changed completely, gave up everything he had formerly valued to follow Christ. As he puts it, For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as so much manure, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. As we used to say in seminary: That’ll preach! 

But Paul doesn’t stop with the story of his miraculous salvation experience. He goes on: Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own …. Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. Wait, what? He’s not done? But he’s already been saved! Nobody’s been more saved than Paul! But he says he wants to press on. He says that his goal is to know Christ and to become like him – to the point of death, if it comes to that. And he says repeatedly, “I’m not there yet.” 

This is so Paul. In the space of ten verses he appears to say both “I have been saved” and “I strive daily for salvation.” That sounds like nonsense. If you are striving to acquire something that you already have, you would appear to be a … to be not very clever. But, once again, what if we stopped thinking about salvation as an acquisition? For weeks now I’ve been encouraging us to think about salvation as a relationship. And when you think in relationship terms, this isn’t nonsense at all. It is absolutely possible both to have a relationship and to keep working for that relationship. A wedding is not the same thing as a marriage. Weddings are great. They are times of joy, times of commitment, times of promises. But none of that is worth anything unless you then set yourself to live into that joy, that commitment, and those promises. That part’s marriage. Salvation’s like that. It’s not a line you step over, after which you’re done. It’s a journey that you start together. And then the next day, you start again.

Thinking about salvation in extended terms does lead to a question, though. What would happen if we didn’t? What would happen if, after accepting Christ, we stopped “pressing on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call in Christ Jesus”? Do we get un-saved? It’s a fair question. When I told one fellow Baptist minister that I was taking a job at a Methodist church, his first question to me was not, as I expected, “You gonna sprinkle babies?” No, he asked, “But … don’t Methodists believe that you can lose your salvation?” That was the unthinkable to him. The old “once saved always saved” mantra of the Baptists was what mattered most to him, and given what I’ve said today, you can understand his concern. If we talk about salvation as a long journey instead of a destination we reach at once, then that does seem to give us lots of opportunities to take wrong turns. And if we talk about salvation as a continuing relationship instead of an acquisition … well, relationships do sometimes fall apart. So let me end today by responding to that minister’s question. 

First, I don’t know any Methodists who teach that you can “lose” your salvation, partly because we don’t see salvation as a thing, an acquisition, but mostly because we simply have too much faith in the flexibility and creativity of God’s grace. The grace that has been with us from our birth is not going to abandon us every time we screw up. But we do teach that salvation is too precious to take for granted. God means our salvation to be an ongoing process and a growing relationship. Again, marriage is a good analogy. The good marriage continues growing and adapting, because people grow and adapt. It’s not about being perfectly suited from the start: it’s about continuing to grow together. Nearly thirty years ago, when I did my first wedding as a pastor, I required the couple to come to me for pre-marital counseling, because 34-year-old me had lots of advice to share. I even told that couple that if I decided after counseling that they were incompatible, I would decline to perform the wedding. 34-year-old me was a … was not very clever. Now, having been to too many 60th and 70th wedding anniversary parties of people whom I would have thought should never have been allowed in the same room, I don’t say that anymore. Compatibility’s nice, where you can find it, but it’s not what makes a marriage last. Marriages last while both members want it to last. Salvation’s like that, too. And the good news is that God will always want it to last, and even if we drift away sometimes, which will happen, God will always be waiting to take us back.