My Preferred Conversionary Sound Byte

I so prefer our sound byte, “You must accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior” to the evangelical sound byte, “You must be born again”.

Yes, I have discovered this is one of the windmills I like to tilt at, the notion that salvation can be boiled down to ‘born again’. The citation is John 3:3, “born anew” according to my faithful RSV, with a footnote referencing ‘born from above’.

But consider Lord and Savior. It defines a definite hierarchical and sovereign relationship between Jesus and ourselves.

He is our Lord, our boss, our master. All the American egalitarian definitions of our lives as a republican democracy are thrown out in this top down relationship with the Almighty. Yes, we are not God’s slaves, Jesus is the first born of God’s children, making us co-heirs with him to the glory of heaven. But he did it for us. He was being gracious.

And he is our Savior. Maybe atonement language is too legalistic, maybe the idea that the death of Jesus is a moral example to us is too thin, maybe the idea that Jesus won a cosmic victory is too ‘out there’, but we cannot deny that he shed his blood for us, that his body was broken for us, and that we who call ourselves preachers of the Gospel must proclaim the Good News of our eternal life acquired in the death of an Innocent.

I’m not talking about Ministers of the Word and Sacrament here. Preaching the Gospel message is the charge to EVERY Christian.

The jailer who was going to commit suicide in Acts 16 because he thought all the prisoners had escaped asked the question, “What must I do to be saved?”

The answer was “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household.”