In Need of a Bailout: Essentials Blue, Week Two

For The Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt.

For years, much of America hummed along in self-sufficient comfort. We didn’t need to have money to spend it. We didn’t have to wait for our dream house or our dinner. We didn’t need help and we certainly didn’t need rescuing…

…but then markets start plunging and banks start failing and bills start coming and jobs start disappearing…

Suddenly we wake up and realize that things are not okay. Our industries need saving, our jobs need saving, our homes need saving. We need saving.

This week I’ve been contemplating the idea of God as Saviour. His nature as our Rescuer has not been very popular in our self-sufficient, individualistic society. Like two-year-olds asserting our independence, we’ve cried that we can do it ourselves! Now we are realizing that we’ve made mistakes, we have messed things up, and something must be done to fix things.

In the coming weeks (months? years?), I suspect our broken hearts may become more receptive to the notion of God as Saviour. The church has an opportunity to reintroduce the Saviour of the world to hearts and minds that may begin to recognize a need for something (Someone) outside of themselves.

I often feel my need for God more deeply when I am in pain. I am especially comforted to know that God is not simply looking on, but he is with me in my trouble. I see God so differently when I realize that he not only suffered for me, but he suffers with me. He seeks us, and he longs to reconcile us to himself. [1]

In my personal quest to see God as Saviour, I face two areas of resistance. First, I must ask if I need saving from anything, and I must decide that the answer is yes. Second, I must ask what this saving will cost me.

I’ve often struggled with the idea of grace as a free gift. Some part of me still thinks I must have work to do to earn this rescue, and I have sometimes assumed this was what God meant when he gave the Law in the Torah. N. T. Wright counters with this:

When God frees you from slavery, said the Torah, this is how you must behave, not to earn his favor (as though you could put God in your moral debt), but to express your gratitude, your loyalty, and your determination to live by the covenant because of which God rescued you in the first place. [2]

So good works are not payment requested (or demanded) because of his salvation. Not only that, but trying to use good works to buy grace is a little like trying to use a pile of rocks to buy a car. The currency just doesn’t work.

Despite all this, God not only wants to save us, but it is in his power to do so. God is capable of saving us not because he is merely a better, more perfect version of us. Though we are made in his image, he is something else entirely. “He is his own category…That is why we can’t expect to mount a ladder of arguments from our world and end up in his, any more than we might expect to mount a ladder of moral achievement and end up making ourselves good enough to stand in his presence.” [3]

With this truth fresh in my mind, I will humbly and boldly approach the throne of God. I know I’m in trouble, and I know I can’t buy my way out. I suspect I may not be alone in this realization.

1. Dan Wilt, Essentials in Worship Theology: The Nature of God (New Brunswick: The Institute of Contemporary & Emerging Worship Studies, 2008), Essentials Blue Worship Theology Online Course Video.

2. N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 82.

3. Wright, p. 67.