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
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.
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