Trusting God Requires Us to tell Our Salvation

• Let us draw near with a sincere heart, confident in our trust, with our hearts sprinkled and cleansed from a harmful conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for the One who has promised is faithful.  
  • - Hebrews 10:22-23

Trusting God is hard work. It requires a deep and abiding confidence in our invisible God, a certainty that we are loved, sought, and led. It requires that we see our lives as the place where God will tell our salvation story. Perhaps the term “salvation story” (along with the idea of being “cleansed” with “pure” water) chafes for you; these terms have been used to create many barriers and hierarchies amongst the people of God within the faith. I invite you to consider the Greek word sótéria and its meaning “to be rescued from danger, to be delivered and preserved”.

It has become clear to me over the past year and a half that the only way I can trust God into the future is if I remember how God has shown up for me in the past. When I look out into the unknowable that lies before me, when I look head-on at the overwhelming and generational injustices and harm in our communities, when I ponder God’s call on my future story, it is easy for me to become overwhelmed. There is simply too much to do, and I am too insignificant and powerless to accomplish the changes necessary. These feelings are a gift; they remind us that we cannot do any of this, they remind us that we need God.

When we touch our powerlessness and sense of despair at the overwhelming weight of the world and our lives, that is the time to remember how many times we have been delivered and preserved from hopelessness in the past. Powerlessness is an opportunity to remember God’s power, God’s creativity, God’s myriad strategies for rescue. We have all been rescued from poor decisions, from hopeless circumstances, from impossible situations. Often when we remember these stories, we forget to tell them as stories of God’s activity. When Jesus tells His disciples, “do this in remembrance of Me”, He’s not just telling them to enact a ritual to tell His story. He ’s telling them to see how their story is part of His story. Tell each other about the power of being loved, of being welcomed, of being invited to face hardships with trust and patience. He is inviting us to tell His story through our salvation stories.

As people of faith, our salvation stories are probably our most useful tools for deepening and expanding our trust in God. Telling the story of how God has come through for us in the past is how we can trust that God will do it again. These are
not stories about how we saved ourselves; they are stories about how God acted, how God rescued, how God made a way out of no way. It’s time that we start practicing telling God’s story as part of our own story. 

Let us hold fast to this confession of our hope, for the One who rescued us before promises to show up for us again and again.

In Peace and With Love, Pastor Andrew