Episode Description

This episode our Senior Pastor, Dr. Kurt Bjorklund, talks with Co-director of Women's Ministry, JoAnn Adams, about how Christians should think about voting in elections, if you can lose your salvation and the sinner's prayer.

Transcript

Kurt Bjorklund: Hi. Welcome to Ask a Pastor. Today I'm joined by JoAnn Adams. JoAnn serves as part of our ministry team at our Wexford campus, working with Life Stages Women's Ministry. Welcome, JoAnn. And we are going to jump into some questions that many of you have sent along. If you have questions that you would like to have us address, please send them to askapastor@orchardhillchurch.com and we would be happy to address those in coming weeks as we roll through the fall.

Kurt Bjorklund: So here's the first question, and this question is about voting in elections, and it says this, JoAnn. As an American voter, is it more important to vote for allowing more freedoms for each of us, or for candidates and ideas that seek to uphold Christian values? So how do you think about that or frame that in your own mind?

JoAnn Adams: So I think that the first thing, it's just important to vote. That we live in a democracy, so there are not many places where people have the freedom to vote. So I think the first thing is people have to vote, but you have to be prayerful when you vote. Just like everything else, you are in prayer about what you do, so as you go and vote for candidates, one, I think it is important that you look at their records, and if those records match up to a Biblical standards, then that's how you decide who you're going to vote for. Now, I mean, there are so many candidates who say, "I'm a Christian and I believe in this," or, "I believe in that." And then when you look at their voting records, sometimes you wonder. So it always has to be bathed in prayer, and at the end of the day, the Lord's will is going to be done in the situation.

Kurt Bjorklund: Yeah. And I think the question about, "Do you vote freedoms versus views?" Is an interesting way to think about it, and it's actually a great question because it is saying in some ways, preserving freedom allows for the practice of Christian faith, which is significant, while at the same time saying, "Or do I want somebody who trumpets or promotes Christian viewpoints in their policies?" And I don't know that those two are mutually exclusive, is what I would say. Meaning I think you would want to say, "I do want somebody who preserves freedoms," and then there are certain key issues probably that that having a Christian worldview on that particular issue is significant enough that it doesn't impinge on freedom in terms of how that votes, but as a general approach in Christianity, I think it's dangerous when you start saying, "I want everybody in America to prescribe to Christian values, or to live in a theocracy," because then if the prevailing views are different than Christian views, then those views will be impinged on Christian faith. Kurt Bjorklund: And that's where the idea of saying, "I want to vote for freedom, for maintaining freedom,"-

JoAnn Adams: Yes. Exactly.

Kurt Bjorklund: ... makes sense over just saying, "I want somebody who has my views." But there are certain issues where, again, having a Christian worldview to me would matter from a candidate that I would want to vote for. But I love just saying, "Yeah, it's important to vote." So thank you.

Kurt Bjorklund: The next two questions really fit together, and so we wanted to use these, even though they're different, to allow for a longer conversation around the issue of salvation. So the first one's on losing salvation, and maybe what I'll do is I'll just set up both of these and then we can talk about them together. So losing salvation, and then the second one was kind of tabbed The Sinner's Prayer.
Kurt Bjorklund: So the first one says this. "The Bible says we cannot lose our salvation." I don't know that it actually says it in that many words. I understand the thought behind it, but just to say that. "But does that mean that when a child around eight years old believes, and then at age 20 he says she does not believe, was she never saved to begin with? Or will God give her time to come back and not let her die denying God? But if we are saved, how can we deny God? So that comes back to, was she never really saved or ever really saved? Why would God not let her see? If only through his will, we can see him, why doesn't everyone, if it's his will that no one should perish?" That's a question about election and some different things which is tied in. You see why I say this is multi things at once.

Kurt Bjorklund: The next question deals with Sinner's Prayer. It says, "I often hear the expression 'taking a leap of faith' in reference to The Sinner's Prayer." If you're not familiar with that phrase, often in Christian circles, someone will say, "You know, if you pray this prayer right now, if you believe in Jesus, pray this prayer called The Sinner's Prayer. Acknowledge you're a sinner to God, that Jesus paid the price for you, that you come to faith in him through that moment, and that that's the doorway to faith." Again, not found in the Bible, the idea of a Sinner's Prayer necessarily. It's hinted at. "Believe in me," Jesus said on the cross, "and this day, you'll be with me in paradise."

Kurt Bjorklund: But that's what's being asked. It says, "How do you know it's the right time to say this prayer and to make a proclamation? It seems as though I should feel something strong in my heart, my soul, my gut. I truly feel I can't do life on my own and I do need Jesus. Often during services at Orchard Hill, I'm moved to tears through worship songs or the message that's being delivered that week. I feel God is heavily pursuing me and I strongly want to believe, so why would I hesitate? I was not raised within church and I was historically an evolutionist theory believer until this last year or so when I really began to think it through from the origins perspective. At this point, I believe that God has created all things, but I continue to get hung up on the virgin birth, whether Jesus is the son of God, that he was resurrected, and that faith in him promises eternal life."

Kurt Bjorklund: "Yes, I realize my beliefs, hesitations can be confusing. If I believe that God can create all kinds of things, of course he can pull off a virgin birth. Despite my stronger faith and increasing knowledge on these specific topics, I am still hesitant to proclaim it, and that is very frustrating, and I'm not entirely sure what's holding me back. My concern is this. I want to be honest and respectful. If I recite The Sinner's Prayer and ask Jesus into my heart, I want to be truly sure that I truly know it's how I feel and I don't want to do it prematurely, i.e. take a leap of faith. What if I say The Sinner's Prayer and I don't feel any differently in my heart? Will that make me question it more and feel badly or false about myself because I'm expecting some feeling or sensation in my mind, body and heart, and take over a proclamation of faith?"

Kurt Bjorklund: So a whole lot of issues here.

JoAnn Adams: That's a lot.

Kurt Bjorklund: We have security of somebody who believes. We have, "Does God cause faith? When is faith enough? Is Sinner's Prayer enough? How and when do I come do it? How does that fit in with feelings, not feeling?" So it's really a question, a couple of questions about, "How does salvation-

JoAnn Adams: Really work.

Kurt Bjorklund: ... actually work in somebody's life?" So why don't you take a first swath that kind of responding to those things, and then I'll jump in.

JoAnn Adams: Okay. So the first question was about a child who comes to faith at an early age. So to sort of personalize it, I came to faith at an early age. What I'll say is I accepted Jesus into my heart at an early age. But did I really understand everything? I'm sure I didn't. I grew up in a very legalistic environment, and so I was continually, as I got older, going back and saying, "Oh Lord, forgive me. I don't want to go to hell." So I was continually going back and saying, "Please, Jesus, come into my heart."

JoAnn Adams: And I think as I matured, I began to more fully understand that once you accept Christ, you have accepted him. And actually, once you accepted him, he had already forgiven you. He'd already gone to the cross. So there was none of this going back and continuing to ask for forgiveness, even though sin is serious and we do need to ask for forgiveness. It wasn't as if I was going to lose my salvation. I think that as we mature, and I think that's why it's so important that as children we continue to pour God's word into them, because it's the more you pour into them, that Holy spirit is residing there. So when you get to the place where you're questioning whether or not you know that that is the Holy Spirit speaking to you when you something that's like, "Hmm." And then you have the assurance that you were saved.

Kurt Bjorklund: Okay. Okay.

JoAnn Adams: So that's one part of it. As a child, I think even in the Scripture, when the disciples didn't want the children to go to Jesus and he said, "No, bring them to me." He wants us to come with that childlike faith.

Kurt Bjorklund: Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot of issues, as I said, that these questions raised. I think there are terms that have crept into Christianity that aren't necessarily Biblical terms, and they're an attempt to make things easier to understand, like, "accept Jesus into my heart, pray The Sinner's Prayer," that aren't necessarily Biblical ideas. They're not anti-Biblical. I'm not saying that they're bad, but I'm saying they sometimes add confusion.

JoAnn Adams: Yes.

Kurt Bjorklund: Because in the Bible, the issue is faith, and it's always, "What is faith? What is saving faith?" And it's about current faith. So our assurance is not, "I prayed a prayer 10, 15 years ago," or, "Somebody prayed a prayer, and now what does that mean?" It's about, "Do they have faith today?" And that is where our assurance comes from. So in terms of losing salvation, I don't think we lose salvation, but the Bible doesn't say, "Because you prayed a prayer once years ago or even you had active faith, you should feel confident." It's, "What is your situation today?" So if somebody is saying, if I had a child who had prayed and then today was saying, "I don't believe," I would take their current state of saying they don't believe. I don't need to answer, "Are they, are they not?" Based on the prayer or the faith that they had in the past. I would say, "Right now it appears they don't believe." So I'm going to assume that that's where they are and deal with the current faith.

JoAnn Adams: But Kurt, why is it that we continue to go back to that? It's like we continue to question.

Kurt Bjorklund: Yeah. Well, there's something in us that wants such complete assurance, that says, "Well, if I can mark down a date in which I prayed this prayer," and this was why I thought this worked with Sinner's Prayer today, the question around that, because some of what this person's saying is, "I want a dramatic moment where I cross the line of faith." And what I would say to the person who asked the question about The Sinner's Prayer, "Sounds like you're pretty far down the line of faith already."

JoAnn Adams: Right. Yes. Yeah. Exactly.

Kurt Bjorklund: That, "Maybe you've already crossed the line of faith, and what you're doing now is you're starting to say, 'Well, how do I have a feeling, or how do I give this kind of assurance?'" And assurance should be tied to current faith, not, "I prayed a prayer," or, "I did something." And I think the reason we like that, "we" being the church in general, is we like to simplify and categorize. We like to be able to say, "In, out. In, out." And point to things and say, "Well, you've prayed a prayer. You're in. You didn't pray a prayer. You're out." And the Bible, I don't think lets us have those categories. I think saving faith is more dynamic than that, and, certainly faith is like, "When do you need enough faith?" Is it that you can answer all your questions, your doubts? Well, not really.

JoAnn Adams: Right. Yeah.

Kurt Bjorklund: You walk into a room, like I'm sitting in the beautiful chapel in our Wexford Campus right now, and when I turn on the light switch, the lights come on. I have enough faith to believe lights come on when I turn a switch. I do not understand all the ways that the electricity is conducted from a power plant somewhere through wires to this facility, and then it creates ... There are people who can spend their whole life studying that stuff, understanding electricity, know way more about electricity than I'll ever know, and yet I can still have faith in electricity. And so faith doesn't always mean that, "I understand everything at a perfect level." What it means is, "I have enough faith to act on it. To say, 'I'll turn on the light switch.'" And those two things are, sometimes we don't think that through clearly enough. And so we say, "Unless I can answer every question, I'm not going to turn on the light switch."

JoAnn Adams: Right.

Kurt Bjorklund: Rather than saying, "I can take a step forward in terms of faith right here and now."

Kurt Bjorklund: So JoAnn, the the question I'd want to follow up with you is, if somebody comes to you and says, "I thought I believed. Now I'm not sure I believe. I'm struggling." How would you help that person navigate their own faith journey? Because I think that is a category, where somebody says, "I thought I believed. I believe, but now I'm not so sure." And how does that work from us from a spiritual standpoint?

JoAnn Adams: I think the first thing is to just get them talking through what they believe in. "What is it that you believe?" And then, "What happened to make you doubt?" And then really taking them back to the scripture that really forces them to take a look at God's word. Because I think that's what happened. We started looking at what we do versus what it is that Christ has done for us, and that he's done that for us, and that's all there is. Sometimes I think it is pretty simple, and we want to make it more difficult than that.

Kurt Bjorklund: Right. Well, and there is a category in the Bible, apostasy, which is taught in Hebrews and in some other places, and it's the idea of somebody who appeared to believe and then doesn't. And so there are those individuals who say, "I did believe, and now I don't believe." And again, I think if current faith is what we're looking at, rather than trying to say, "Were they or were they not genuine believers?" It's better to say, "Today it appears as if you don't believe." And to honor that path for somebody, to say, "Yeah, that can be a legitimate path."

Kurt Bjorklund: And so that's an important category to recognize exists, and I think the warnings in the Bible about that are to be taken seriously, that that's a possibility, even though I would say my reformed faith would tell me that once you've come to faith in Jesus Christ, Jesus will preserve you. God will preserve you in that faith. What's hard is that doesn't always match our experience. And that's why that's hard to say. "I affirm this, and yet at the same time I affirm that there are people who appeared to believe and then walked away from faith."

Kurt Bjorklund: To the friend who would write this kind of, "I want to take a step of faith. I'm not sure," the one pastoral piece of wisdom I would give is to say when you believe, you take hundreds of little steps more than one big step of faith, generally speaking. And I would say it's similar to somebody deciding to propose to somebody else for marriage. And that is, "When did you decide?" Well, you decided after the first date, after the second date, a hundred times to continue pursuing the relationship before you said, "This is the person I want to marry." And then one day you said, "I'm going to propose to this person," and you take a step and then you go before your friends and family and you pronounce your love to one another.

Kurt Bjorklund: And coming to faith is a little bit more like that than this big epiphany moment. Certainly God can give somebody an epiphany moment. He did with Paul in The Damascus Road, but more often than not it's hundreds of moments of, "I think I believe this. Maybe I believe this. This could be true. What if this is true?" And then all of a sudden you say, "I think this is true." And the implications become big, and your final step might be something as dramatic as saying, "I'm going to bow down and pray The Sinner's Prayer." Or it might just simply be, "You know what? I have come to believe this and embrace this, and this is true."

Kurt Bjorklund: And yes, there's probably something good about having a moment where you say, "I came to believe this, and I recognize it, and I identify this as part of my story," because it gives you something to look back at. But I don't know that it's completely necessary for the journey of faith either, because a lot of people ... I think one of the great ironies was, I think it was Billy Graham's wife never had a moment she could point to. And for those of you who are older or younger, Billy Graham was an evangelist who traveled around, and he would always say, "And make sure today ..." And he was the one who popularized the notion of The Sinner's Prayer. "Come forward and pray this exact prayer, then you are a Christian." And a great irony is his wife could never say-

JoAnn Adams: Identify. Yeah.

Kurt Bjorklund: ... "Here's when I trusted Jesus." And Billy would always say, "Here's how you trust. You trust on this day. Write it down. Now you know." And she's like, "I don't know when I came to faith." And so it's much more dynamic than we give it credit for.

JoAnn Adams: Well, it's interesting, interesting. The writer of one of the questions says that, "I had trust God, I've been going to studies, but I don't feel, I don't feel anything." And I think that's an interesting thing, because the writer also says, "I come to Orchard Hill and I hear the worship music or the teaching"

Kurt Bjorklund: "And I'm moved to tears."

JoAnn Adams: Yeah. "And I'm moved to tears, yet I don't want to say the prayer if it's not real." And what I'd say to that person is that we are made in the image of God and we have feelings, but you can't depend on those feelings all the time, because sometimes you feel good and then sometimes you feel bad. Sometimes you leave the church after feeling worshipful, and you get in your car and you run into a slow driver, and then you forget all about that. So it really is that going to the Lord in prayer and being honest about, "Hey, I'm not feeling it today." Kurt Bjorklund: Well, and this individual said, "I'm afraid I don't have feelings," and then said, "but I have feelings."

JoAnn Adams: Yeah. Right.

Kurt Bjorklund: And so sometimes we're looking maybe for something grander when you have had feelings.

JoAnn Adams: Exactly.

Kurt Bjorklund: When you have had moments of "aha," and intellect that have connected the dots. And that's why I would say you're probably closer to or have already crossed that line.

JoAnn Adams: Exactly.

Kurt Bjorklund: And maybe now it's just naming it and saying, "I actually did believe, I don't know exactly where, but somewhere back in here I crossed this line." And if it helps you to say, "Okay, today's my day," then do that, and say and acknowledge what's already true. And that's why I say it would be like deciding to marry somebody, you know? Yeah, you decided at some point in time you were going to do it, but you had already decided it, by the time you actually decided-

JoAnn Adams: Yeah. You're just dragging your feet a little bit.

Kurt Bjorklund: Yeah. Well, there you go. Some people do that with marriage, I'm told, where they just wait and wait to make a proposal. The one other piece of this is, when the person just again asked about their eight year old, and the 20 year old who doesn't believe, the thing that we want so often is to tie a bow around salvation and be able to say, "In, out, in, out," for ourselves and for everybody else. And I think one of the ways God designed it is that the only person we really know about is ourselves.

JoAnn Adams: Right. That's so important.

Kurt Bjorklund: Because otherwise we would be so filled with judgment and pride to be able to say, "Well, I know." And sometimes people try out beliefs verbally that they don't even believe internally. And what I mean by this is sometimes what any of us do is we just start talking, and it might be the coming football season. "I think the Steelers are going to be this." And we start to talk, and the next thing you know, you're saying something that you may not even believe, but you're trying it out. And that happens with faith too. Sometimes people will say, "Well, I don't believe this, or I don't believe that." Or, "I believe it." And they're trying it out to see how it feels on them when they try a belief system. And what I mean by that is sometimes what somebody says doesn't even match what they actually believe. And that's why I say it's hard to even look out and say, "Oh, they're this. They're that." You have to know the heart. And certainly fruit tells over time, but the only people who know our own hearts are us. And so the possibility of faking that and not even intentionally faking it. Like, I don't mean that negatively, but believing something to be true that isn't even entirely true.

JoAnn Adams: Yeah. And I think oftentimes people we love, we don't want them to miss out on heaven, so we're always like, "Oh, I'm not sure if when she was that young, she really ..." So we're always forgetting that we don't make the decisions. It's the individual's decision, and we forget that. But I think sometimes it is because of our love for other people.

Kurt Bjorklund: Well, and then we take the weight, and this goes to the question about, "If God draws who he wants," we try to take the weight. And the good thing of saying, "God's in charge of that," is then you say, "Look, my job is tell about it, tell about the hope in me. It's between them and God, how they ultimately respond to that invitation."

JoAnn Adams: Exactly.

Kurt Bjorklund: Well, JoAnn, thank you.

JoAnn Adams: You're very welcome.

Kurt Bjorklund: Thank you for spending part of your day with Ask a Pastor. If you have questions, send them to askapastor@orchardhillchurch.com.