25 January 2026

Gettin’ Saved: The Good Myth

John 3:1-17

We read from the Gospel of John, chapter 3, verses 1-17. 

3 Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 2He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.’ 3Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.’  4Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ 5Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born again.” 8The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ 9Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can these things be?’ 10Jesus answered him, ‘Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

11‘Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. 12If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.  14And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 

16‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

17‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’

The hardest thing to unlearn is something that you don’t remember learning in the first place. Some things are like that. We don’t learn them so much as absorb them from our environment. That’s how people learn racism and sexism, for instance. but it’s also how people learn some good things like respect for elders, good sportsmanship. Anyway, absorption is how I learned what it means to be “Born Again.” Jesus used that phrase in his conversation with Nicodemus – “You must be born again” – and it’s not entirely clear what he meant by it. In fact, it’s not even certain that “again” is the correct translation. The Greek word can also mean “from above.” So the text isn’t exactly clear-cut. But none of that mattered to me. As a child of Southern Baptist missionaries in Singapore, whose parents who spent every fifth year speaking in Southern Baptist churches in Texas and Oklahoma, I had no doubt what “born again” meant, or how getting born again happened. Let me tell you about it.

Being born again meant the same thing as “getting saved,” and it happens when a person makes an intentional decision to accept Christ. Now, to make an intentional decision, you have to be old enough to understand what that decision means, so the earliest it should happen is, say, 11 or 12 years old. That decision is signified at the time by praying the “Sinner’s Prayer,” which is something like, “God, I know that I am a sinner, but I believe that your Son Jesus died for my sins, and I accept him into my life.” Different evangelistic tracts have slightly different versions, but that’s the gist. Now making a decision for Christ also involved going forward – walking the aisle – in a church service. If you made your decision during a church service, then you walked the aisle right away. It was acceptable to make your decision outside of a worship service, for instance in a personal “witnessing” situation, but if you did, you still had to go walk a church aisle for it to count. Either way, the time to walk the aisle was at the end of the worship service, immediately after the sermon, during the “invitation hymn.” The pastor or evangelist would stand at the front of the church encouraging people to give their lives to Jesus while the congregation stood and sang one of a select few hymns that were deemed suitable for invitations. Nothing peppy. People were supposed to be reflecting on their sins, not enjoying themselves. So we sang “Just As I Am” or “I Surrender All” or “The Savior Is Waiting” – all fairly dreary melodies, and we sang them extra slowly, so as to give the Spirit adequate time to convict sinners. We sang every stanza and sometimes started again at the beginning. With an invitation hymn, the preacher had the prerogative to keep it going as long as he felt moved. 

Anyway, after walking the aisle and saying the sinner’s prayer, the next step was baptism, which we understood to be an outward witness of the salvation that had already taken place. But even then we weren’t done. For most people (maybe not 12-year-olds) there was also the expectation that you would soon thereafter give your “testimony.” This was the narrative of how you came to be convicted of your sins, how you realized that you needed to be forgiven and accept Christ, and then something about how you had felt cleansed and renewed as soon as you had prayed the sinner’s prayer. In testimonies, alone of all church speeches, it was permitted to describe sin in detail, because you needed to show exactly what you had been saved from. As kids, we loved testimonies like that. We took notes. But most of all, I absorbed that being “born again” was (1) the most important thing that would ever happen to you; (2) it was the moment when you were no longer destined to go to hell but rather were guaranteed to go to heaven; and (3) it was a thing that happened to you at a distinct moment in time. Before that moment, you were lost in your sins; after that moment, you were born again. I was told as a youth that if you couldn’t point to the exact moment that you were saved, then you probably weren’t. That’s how important the moment of salvation was to us.

I’ve laughed at some of the Southern Baptist details of this story, but I do not mean to make fun of this template pattern for being born again. I call this story “The Good Myth.” And I don’t mean “myth” in the sense of being untrue. A myth is a story by which a people or community make sense of shared experience, and this standard salvation story does just that. And it has much to recommend it. It calls for people to make a conscious decision to follow Christ, making your faith your own, not just a thing you inherit from your family; it stresses that following Christ means changing your life; it offers specific ways to express your decision before others, like walking the aisle or getting baptized; it even pushes people to learn how to articulate their experience to others. For millions of people this salvation story has been powerful and meaningful, and as I said earlier, through the first twenty-plus years of my life it didn’t occur to me to question any part of it.

But here’s the thing: as powerful as this story is, it’s not everyone’s story. It wasn’t mine. So let me tell you my testimony. I walked the aisle in 1971 at the Gambrell Street Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas. I was seven years old, so, no, I didn’t understand what I was doing. I just knew it was a thing that I was supposed to do. My older brother had done it the year before, and a couple of boys in my Sunday School class had just done it, so I walked the aisle and told the pastor, “I want to be baptized.” That was wrong, of course. For Baptists, that’s not the correct order of operations. It’s sinner’s prayer then baptism. But the pastor knew my father, and so he handed me off to him to sort my decision out. Dad took me home, where he laid out the “plan of salvation” to me – probably something like the Roman Road – asked me if I wanted to give my life to Jesus (What did he expect me to say?), and led me in the sinner’s prayer. I went into the kitchen and announced to my mother, tearfully, “Mom, I’m a Christian!” So technically I followed the right steps, eventually, but in no sense was this a life-changing experience for me. I didn’t believe anything different after the sinner’s prayer than I did before, and I certainly didn’t behave any differently. It was a rite of passage, not a salvation experience. That didn’t bother me at the time. I was just proud to have done something that made my parents glad. But as I grew older, it began to sink in how very undramatic my salvation experience had been. And my “testimony” was pathetic. I’d gotten baptized long before I had the chance to do any interesting sinning. If I didn’t fit the story, was I saved at all? I wasn’t sure.

There are more problems with this story than just me doing it wrong, though. In the official line, being born again changes your life. So what if it doesn’t? What if you keep on sinning? Does that mean you did it wrong? An awful lot of teenagers in my youth group sweated that one. Fortunately, there was a sort of make-shift patch called “rededication.” You could go forward at another worship service to rededicate your life. I had one high school friend, who then went to the same college that I did, who used to do this at least once a year. It was one of the signs of Spring: the crocuses appeared and David got rededicated. I began to question the whole one-time-life-changing-cataclysmic-experience thing, but I wasn’t sure what other options were out there.

I blundered into Methodism almost as blithely as I blundered into baptism. I was already serving as a Southern Baptist pastor in Wausau, and miserable, when Rebecca found a Saturday evening service at the First United Methodist Church there. We started attending, and it felt delightfully wicked. Not only were they not Southern Baptist, but both pastors were women. That Saturday service was led by the associate pastor a young licensed local pastor working toward ordination named Cathy Hamblin. Three years later, when Cathy was commissioned and sent to a different church, I took her job – still officially Baptist but approved to serve among the Methodists. It’s like I had a green card. And in that job, I discovered another way to think about salvation, and in a sense, it saved me. 

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, believed that salvation was not a thing that happened to people at a specific time, but something that grew within us through the working of God’s grace throughout our lives, from birth to death and beyond. Yes, he said, each person does need to consciously choose to follow Christ, but that’s not a one-time thing. Walking to the altar at a revival meeting is neither the beginning nor the end of the salvation story. The New Testament speaks not only of those who “had been saved” but of those who “were being saved.” The Good Myth is right: salvation should transform us. We should be changed by following Christ. But change in people doesn’t generally happen all at once. We have been born again, and we are still being born. 

Throughout this sermon series I’ve been suggesting that we think about salvation not as a thing we have but as a relationship that we have. Now some relationships do start with a sudden life-changing decision – love at first sight, and all that. But other relationships, like those with our parents and older siblings, we have before we are even aware of them, and we grow into them throughout our lives. God’s salvation doesn’t follow just one standard template. People aren’t all the same, and God is more creative than that. Today, we choose to follow Christ, as our salvation continues, and we are born yet again.