My Plan of Salvation 1.0

 

My Plan of Salvation 1.0

For most of my life, my plan for salvation was essentially this: I hoped what I’d been taught was right. I hoped the people who taught it were trustworthy. I hoped the tradition I inherited was the correct one. I hoped that when the day came, the account would balance out somehow. It wasn’t until I actually recognized the condition I was in—an incurable natural man who was going to stand in front of Jesus—that hoping stopped feeling like a plan. It started feeling like a way of not deciding. Everyone has a version of this. The details change. The authority changes. The vocabulary changes. The underlying move does not. Most people outsource the hardest question of their existence to parents, a church, a pastor, a prophet, a denomination, a culture, or simply the momentum of never having seriously examined it. Then they call the resulting comfort “faith.” The problem is that you do not get to bring your parents, your pastor, your prophet, or your denomination with you when you stand before Christ. You bring yourself. And if the natural man condition is real—if the heart is deceitful, if the will is bent, if the debt is not something you can settle by better behavior or sincere intentions—then the question of whether the teaching you received is actually from Him becomes the only question that matters. Everything else is decoration. That realization does not feel like a warm spiritual experience. It feels like discovering, mid-flight, that you never personally checked the parachute. The people who packed it seemed competent. Lots of other people were jumping with the same model. Some of them looked confident. None of that changes the physics of the ground. 'This is why the demand to choose is not an inconvenience. It is the point. You are supposed to have to decide whether a man who claimed to stand in the presence of God and describe what he saw, heard, and felt is more reliable than a committee that later disagreed with him. You are supposed to have to decide whether the voice offering you something “in the name of Jesus Christ” is actually offering you something from Him, or whether it is offering you a comfortable way to stay lost while sounding faithful. Your eternal condition is supposed to hang on how you handle that choice.(1)' That is not a bug in the system. It is the system refusing to let you remain a child forever. Fear of God is the only fear that consistently produces this kind of seriousness. Fear of man produces the opposite. Fear of man makes you protect the reputation of the institution, the feelings of the family, the cohesion of the group, or your own status inside it. Fear of God makes you willing to look foolish, to lose approval, to be called disloyal, or to discover that some of what you believed was simply wrong—because the alternative is to discover it later, in front of the only Person whose opinion will still matter. The natural man does not want this burden. He wants a plan that lets him remain mostly the same while still claiming the outcome. He wants the benefits of certainty without the cost of investigation. He wants someone else to have done the hard part of finding out, so that he can simply assent. When that desire is left unexamined, people can spend decades in religious activity while never once treating their own salvation as something that might actually be at risk based on whether they got the central facts right. You will face Jesus with whatever you actually are and whatever you actually trusted. The people who taught you will not be standing in for you. The sincerity of your hope will not substitute for whether the thing you hoped in was true. The fact that many other people made the same choice will not function as evidence. At that point the only remaining question is whether you ever cared enough to find out while you still could. That is not a complicated idea. It is an uncomfortable one. Most people prefer complicated ideas that let them stay comfortable. The natural man is an expert at generating those. The alternative is simpler and harder: grow up, accept that the stakes are real, and find out for yourself whether the claims you have been living inside are actually true. Or do not. But do not pretend the decision was ever really optional.

Signed

John The-Not-So-Beloved

(1) Lecture 2: Faith Denver C. Snuffer, Jr. 28 September, 2013 Idaho Falls - pg. 21

Denver’s April 26, 2010 blog post titled "AWAKE AND ARISE”

It ends with these words: "Neglect and indifference seem to be such prevailing impediments to the salvation of the souls of men that Satan must rejoice, look up at heaven with a great chain in his hands, and declare that he has bound all mankind!   How little the world has changed since the time of Enoch.    

Awake.  

Arise.  

Your soul is in jeopardy.”

From - “God in Our Day, Part 1, ”It is time for those involved to awaken to their awful situation and admit their mother is a whore. ...Now is time to awaken, arise, and shake off the dust.

From Alma

Alma 3:2-3 CE

Now I ask all you who belong to this congregation: Have you remembered your fathers’ captivity? Have you also remembered God’s mercy and long-suffering toward them? Have you also carefully considered how He rescued their souls from hell? He changed their hearts; He woke them from a deep sleep and they woke up to God. They were surrounded by darkness; but their souls emerged into the light of God’s everlasting word. They were bound by the chains of death and hell, and faced everlasting destruction. So I ask: Were they destroyed? I answer: No, they were not. I also ask: Were the chains of death broken? Were the chains of hell surrounding them removed? I say: Yes, they were removed. And their souls grew in understanding and they sang of redeeming love. I testify they’re saved. Now I ask: What are the conditions for their salvation? On what basis did they hope for salvation? How were they freed from the chains of death and hell? I’ll tell you the answer: Didn’t my father Alma believe in the words taught by Abinadi? And wasn’t he a holy prophet? Didn’t he speak God’s words and my father Alma believed them? Because of his faith, a powerful change happened in his heart. I testify this is all true. He preached the word to your parents, and changed their hearts as well, and they humbled themselves and trusted the true and living God. Then they were faithful until the end; so they were saved.

Now I ask you, my brothers and sisters of the congregation: Have you spiritually been born of God? Have you received His image in your own countenances? Have you experienced this powerful change to your hearts? Do you rely on faith in the redemption of the Lord who created you? Do you faithfully anticipate rising from the grave to immortality, freed from degeneration, illness, and corruption, to stand before God and be judged based on what you’ve done in the mortal body? I ask: Can you expect to hear the Lord’s voice then saying to you: Come to Me, blessed one; your works have been righteous on the earth? Or do you imagine being able to lie to the Lord and claim: Lord, our works on earth have been righteous (even when they were not), and He’ll save you? Or can you instead foresee standing before God’s judgment seat filled with guilt and remorse, remembering clearly all your guilt and wickedness, knowing you’ve defied God’s commandments? I ask: Can you look up to God on that day with a pure heart and clean hands? I ask: Can you look up, having the image of God engraved on your countenances? I ask: Can you think of being saved when you’ve allowed yourselves to obey the accuser? I say: You will then know you can’t be saved; because no one can be saved unless their clothes are clean, purified, and every trace of sin and iniquity removed through the blood of Him our fathers testified was appointed to come to redeem His people from their sins.

God's Bitcoin Bet

God's Bitcoin Bet

God’s Bitcoin bet is not on the coin. It is on you.

I check the wrong books every day. Gold. Silver. How my stash is doing. My 401k, up or down. Stock portfolio, same question, different screen. I have worked hard to accumulate. My debt is zero. My credit score is off the charts. None of that is hard to see. The number is either there or it is not, and I can refresh it until I feel informed. I have more trouble with the other set of books. Spiritual accounting does not post overnight. There is no quote. I cannot tell, most mornings, whether I am up or down, only that I am still the man who went looking for a number.

That habit has done more damage to my discipleship than most bad talks. If we had all bought Bitcoin early, we would be rich. Fine. Also useless. It taught me to treat a small righteous thing like an early coin.

Plant a prayer. Plant a fast. Plant a refusal. Plant a promise I actually keep. Then sit on it and wait for the chart to do something indecent. The return should be wildly out of proportion to the deposit, and it should arrive on a schedule I can check. Worse, I want it denominated in the wrong currency. I tithe and expect the windows. I fast and expect the lab result. I forgive and expect the other person to come back decent. I keep the commandment and expect the business, the body, the reputation, to mark my obedience to market. Spiritual capital in. Temporal coin out. Same motion as the morning refresh. I am asking the heavens for a quote.

Scripture is not without example here. A mustard seed. A little leaven. Five loaves. Two Fish. A cup of cold water. The widow’s mite. Small inputs are not nothing, and the fruit can be disproportionate. Malachi really does say the windows of heaven, and the devourer rebuked. People in the Gospels really are healed. I am not arguing with that. The lie is not that fruit comes. The lie is the kind of return, the clock I put on it, and the assumption that righteousness is a claim on temporal bid.

Bitcoin’s myth is one early buy, then sit. The gospel is repeated small obedience in weather that does not look like a bull market. Line upon line. Grace for grace. The man with five talents and the man with one are not judged on whether the first deposit did a hundred times. They are judged on whether they did the work. The servant who buried his was not punished for failing to 100x. He was punished for refusing the job. Fear made a theologian out of him. It usually does. I understand him better than I want to. A buried coin at least holds still. I can count it.

Here is the part I kept/keep missing. If God is placing anything like a bet, the bet is not on the coin. The coin does not appreciate into a saint. The bet is on the holder. He is not watching the mite to see if the treasury reprices it. He is watching what the giving does to the woman who dropped it in. He is not betting long on the loaves. He is long on the hands that broke them. Job’s friends ran the other book: spiritual books balanced, therefore temporal books must balance. The whirlwind was not a revised earnings report. My gold does not become a different metal because I looked at it. I can become a different man because I obeyed, and the screen will not show it.

A coin’s gain is mostly someone else deciding it is worth more. The coin does not change. I do not change. If the market reprices it to zero, I am the same man holding the same object. The value never lived in me. It lived in a third party’s willingness to take the other side of the trade. God’s position is the reverse. Spiritual investment has no ticker. The thing being formed is the investor. Obedience, repentance, patience, telling the truth, refusing an idol: these alter capacity, sight, and desire. If nobody notices, the change is still there, because the asset and the owner are the same person. I cannot sell it. A crash cannot separate me from it. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much” is not a promise that least becomes a press release. It is a statement about the man. That is the position He is holding. It is also the position I cannot refresh.

The counterfeit feels reasonable because sometimes the temporal quote does arrive. Rain falls on the field of a man who prayed. A check clears after a fast. I log it as proof of concept and quietly turn the next prayer into an invoice. Then the quote does not come, and I have only two explanations left: He failed, or I did. Both assume the trade was temporal. Often the investment did exactly what that kind of investment does. It changed the holder. It refused to become a claim on someone else’s bid. I was waiting to be paid in the currency I prefer. He was waiting to see whether I could be trusted with the next ordinary step without the bribe.

Some fruit does leave me. A cup of cold water, and the Lord says the giver shall in no wise lose his reward. A promise kept. A child formed by a house that did not collapse. That looks a little like value transferred to a third party. It is not a price. It is an effect of what I became. The widow’s mite was not valuable because the treasury repriced it. It was valuable because of what the giving confirmed in her. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth. The warning is not that earth is fake. The warning is that I will start serving whichever master is paying me in the coin I can actually see. Zero debt is a real mercy. It is not the accounting that counts.

God does not need my currency because the currency will grow in value. Money, work, compassion, kindness, sacrifice: He asks for them because I will. Alma’s seed does not make me a spectator of my own portfolio. If I do not cast it out by unbelief, it swells, sprouts, and begins to enlighten. The experiment is run on me. The first fruit is not a healthier balance sheet. It is a different man, and I will not get a morning number for him. In the world I will have tribulation. That sentence was not a rounding error.

So the correction is not that small things do not matter, and not that temporal mercies never come. They do. The correction is that righteousness is not an asymmetric bet I place once and then watch, and spiritual capital is not a wire into a temporal account. It is the slow construction of a person who can be trusted with more, and the more is often just another ordinary step, taken without a visible quote. When I have done all those things which are commanded, I am still an unprofitable servant. I have done that which was my duty to do. My 'stash' I can price. The man I am becoming, I mostly cannot. That is not a reason to stop looking. It is a reason to stop confusing the two screens.

His bet is not on the coin. It is on you.

Bit by bit. Not one bit.

Signed 

John  The-Not-So-Beloved