Have you ever wondered, "Am I really saved?" Or how about, "How saved am I, really?" This kind of questioning can come in many different forms, and there are a ton of other lies that can be attached to these or spring up as a result of asking these, but I'll try not to veer off topic too far.
I suddenly feel inspired to write Jeff Foxworthy-type jokes about this...which may or may not be severely inapproptiate...
You know you've questioned your faith:
1: if you've answered an alter call more than once.
2: if you've ever stopped to ask yourself, "What if the Calvinists are right and only some are elect? Am I elect? How am I supposed to know?!"
3: if you've ever felt a desire to try and pay Christ back for rescuing you (hmm. That one wasn't really comic in any way...ah well, I'll fix that with the next one).
4: if you've ever partaken of communion because you missed breakfast and are hungry. (Ok, this one might not be relevant...)
Why is it that when the spiritual adrenaline rush of getting saved wears off, we begin to ask questions about our salvation? We wonder if it really happened, we feel like we short-changed God and need to make up the difference somehow, we question why He feels so far away if He's really supposed to be occupying our hearts now...
I find, in my own life, that these questions surface most when I'm struggling with some sort of sin. Especially the ones that seem to be an on-going struggle over the years and keep popping up from time to time. Shouldn't I have learned this lesson by now? If God really rescued me, then why am I still stuck in this bad habit? Why do I slide back down into the filth of sin? Did my salvation request not go through? Did it get stuck in transit, or lost in the mail? Am I one of the ones God didn't elect, and no matter how hard I try, He has no plans to rescue me?
Tough stuff. All of them lies. How do I know? Because the day (or night, rather, in my case) that God rescued me, He filled my heart and spirit with this feeling of joy that was so real, so much deeper than anything I'd ever experienced in my entire life before then (and this happened when I was 22, even though I technically became a Christian when I was 5 and even did the whole alter call thing when I was 14), I just knew that what I was experiencing was a gift from God that was greater than anything this world has to offer. And though I was not instantly cured of all my bad habits and have, at times, fallen hard on my face into sin, it doesn't mean that salvation didn't take, or that it never really happened in the first place. It just means that I'm human, and the difference now that I'm on the other side of salvation is that when I sin, I hate it terribly and want nothing more than to get back out of it as quick as I can, then learn from my mistakes so I will hopefully not make them again. And no, it's not easy, but then who ever said life was supposed to be easy? Especially if you're a Christian; did you get into this gig thinking it would be smooth sailing from there on out? Yeah...there's yet another lie trying to bring down those who've taken that step of faith towards God.
I forget who wrote it and in what book (might be from the book, "Speechless"), but one of my favorite quotes that encourages me as I struggle with those questions of sin after salvation is this: "God loves me just as I am, but He loves me too much to leave me this way." God loves me so much, He is helping me to get out of my sin, sometimes by allowing me to go my own way, stumble and fall, and get back up because the pain and scars are a much better lesson and reminder of where I've been than if He just instantly fixed me. Take, for example, parents and their teenage children: how is a teenager supposed to learn the value of providing for themselves if their parents buy them everything they want and don't make them go out and get jobs? Yeah, the kinds of jobs available to a 16 year-old might suck, but the feeling you get when you receive that paycheck and realize that this was something you earned, something you worked towards and can now enjoy the benefits is more than worth the struggles of the job. It might not have been fun getting there, but it means much more to you than if you'd just been given it for no reason...
Not to say gifts are bad or that God doesn't sometimes heal people instantly or any of the other seven ways that analogy has holes. But I need to get to work, so hopefully you get the point. God loves us enough to let us make mistakes so we can learn. And the awesome result of that process? It draws us nearer to Him as it teaches us dependancy on Him. Which is an awesome thing.
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