Another diddy from Willimon

Eventually I will end up having the entire book quoted on this blog Go buy Who Will Be Saved?

I like what Willimon says here:

I know that Paul wrote, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord…you will be saved,” (Rom. 10) words meant to reassure anxious believers (I suppose) rather than make a sweeping judgment about nonbelievers.

The church is composed of those who confess with our lips and our lives that we have somehow heard our names called by Jesus when he said, “Follow me.” I confess that I have often wished the story of my salvation were more dramatic, more interesting. Nothing would please me more than to tell you that I led a life of degeneracy filled with murder and mayhem then I found Jesus and got my life put right. Unfortunately, my salvation is just not that interesting. I got put here by my family when I was an infant, before I could resist. True, I wandered a bit as a youth, but nothing too noteworthy. Eventually I found that my efforts at resistance were futile. I relented; I believed. The folks at the church just wouldn’t let me go my own way, took time for me, put up with me; salvation is always a corporate gift rather than a personal attainment. Looking back, I can’t believe that church people believed in God enough to believe in me.

He goes on….

To believe in salvation is to acknowledge something as true. It is to wake up to what is. Yet to hold such a belief means that one’s life is summoned to be different. Christian belief is linked to Christian witness. Christian believing is not just to adopt some intellectual proposition but rather to get in step with reality, to join up, to have your life subsumed by the one who, despite all the perfectly rational reservations based upon your inadequecies, called you to follow him, to go public with your profession.