Believe It—or Not!
by Linda Nottingham | 28 March 2024 |
My father was a periodontist. While dentists did specialize back in those days, I don’t think the constraints about doing something for a patient outside your specialty were as well-defined as they are today. I remember my dad telling us about a patient who was being treated for severe periodontal disease, who also had such horribly crooked teeth that it made him appear disfigured. My dad knew it was outside his specialty, but he thought he could help this man by putting braces on his teeth while the other treatment was ongoing. He wasn’t going to charge the man—he just felt sorry for him and wanted to help.
The braces were on for a long time, as I recall the story. But apparently the disease affecting the patient’s gums was so severe that when the braces were taken off, his nicely aligned teeth went back to where they had originally been. I recall my dad’s disappointment that he hadn’t been able to solve the problem more effectively.
Those teeth were simply resistant to being anywhere other than their original, if uncomfortable, position.
Moving back to the bad position
While this little family story might seem tedious, there is a reason I use it as an example. We Seventh-day Adventists have a tendency to move back into an uncomfortable theological position.
We profess to believe in righteousness by faith. We subscribe to the idea that salvation is a gift and there is nothing we can do to earn it. We sing “Jesus Paid It All.” And we read and find hope in texts such as Romans 3:21-22:
But now God has shown us a different way of being right in his sight—not by obeying the law but by the way promised in the Scriptures long ago. We are made right in God’s sight when we trust Jesus Christ to take away our sins. And we all can be saved in this same way, no matter who we are or what we have done. New Living Translation (NLT)
Or what Peter says in Acts 10:43:
He is the one all the prophets testified about, saying that everyone who believes in him will have their sins forgiven through his name. NLT
One of my favorites is Galatians 2:16b:
So we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be accepted by God because of our faith in Christ—and not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be saved by obeying the law. NLT
And we say we believe it.
That is, until somebody mentions something like “Well, what about the Law?,” or “Aren’t there requirements for righteous living?,” or “The covenant makes demands,” or “Don’t forget the Ten Commandments!”
And then everything we thought we knew about salvation being God’s gift to us flies out the window and we begin to worry about whether we are living and behaving in the right way. Have we obeyed all the laws? Have we confessed every one of our sins?
Guilt blossoms and we are afraid. The result is we have no assurance of our salvation and Jesus feels very far away.
I think this is particularly true for those of us who are older and were raised in the conservative Adventist tradition. We were judged on our works. It was easy to quantify because there were lots of specific rules about how we should act. Rules about how to keep the Sabbath and rules about what we should wear or what we should eat.
Behavior was a very big deal. It was the only deal—people didn’t talk much about a “relationship with Jesus.” I think we all lived in fear of being judged and found lacking by God and other church members.
Why is this still true? Why is it so hard to truly believe, unequivocally, that Jesus paid it all?
Possible causes
The so-called “Puritan work ethic” has deep roots here in the United States. We don’t have much respect for people who can’t pull their own weight in the economic system. We are taught that we are to go to school, become trained in a profession or trade, and then go out into the world, work hard, and support ourselves and our families. There is little tolerance for those who, for whatever reason, are unable to do so.
And we should not be surprised when this mentality bleeds over into our spiritual lives.
My first job out of college was working for a big West Coast county as a social worker in the welfare department. I learned not to tell people I was socializing with about my work, because they had such antipathy for anyone on welfare. I got tired of defending people who had experienced some hard knocks in life and needed help—people who, I should add, generally hated their dependent status.
Years later I coined the term “spiritual welfare.” It means being unable to independently manage our own spiritual growth or development—to accept God’s gift of salvation to us without hope of reciprocity—with full recognition that we have nothing to bring to the table and there is no way to pay it back. We are totally dependent on someone besides ourselves.
This is a hard concept: being unable to contribute anything to our salvation is repugnant to us. We inherently want to be self-sufficient.
Undue influence
Another explanation might be that people like me have been influenced by years of what we read in our “literature” (because we old people do read our “literature”), and the “literature” commonly promotes a works-based approach to salvation. The constant drip of clichés or subtle innuendos about “right living” is frequently interspersed in the things we read that come from the denominational publishing houses.
There are examples of the traditional works orientation in this quarter’s Sabbath School lessons, which focus on the Psalms—generally considered a pretty benign topic. On page 42 of the Teachers’ Quarterly, the lesson author could not resist the opportunity to say,
“Thus, if God were not the Judge of all, then anyone could do whatever he or she thought best. There would not be any eternal law to obey. There wouldn’t be absolutes. Sad to say, we are inundated with this philosophy every day. Even some Christians fall prey to its pernicious sophistry.” (emphasis added)
“Absolutes”? What absolutes? “No eternal law to obey”? You can be sure they are not talking about the Beatitudes, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, or loving God supremely and your neighbor as yourself.
Further, on page 49 of the same quarterly, the author says,
“The practical implications of the sanctuary being the place of divine judgment are seen in the constant awareness of God’s holiness and demands for righteous living according to God’s covenantal requirements.” (emphasis added)
The dictum that God demands “righteous living according to His covenantal requirements” completely ignores that we are inherently sinful, and unable to do any good act of our own volition. And in case you were wondering about what “covenant” the lesson author thinks we are living under, the answer is on page 41: “The basis of the covenant is God’s Law.”
Note the capital ‘L’. This is talking about tables of stone. So we are right back to righteousness by works.
Getting it right
The word “covenant” appears hundreds of times in the Old Testament, but very few in the New Testament, and when it does it is usually referring back to the Old Testament covenants with the children of Israel. But there is one New Testament covenant that I especially embrace, and it’s found in Luke 22:20:
“After supper he took another cup of wine and said, ‘This wine is the token of God’s new covenant to save you—an agreement sealed with the blood I will pour out for you.” (NLT)
In other words, Jesus did the work that would assure me of salvation. Again, I have nothing to contribute. And I need to learn to rest happily in my state of “spiritual welfare,” trusting that He will transform me through the work of the Holy Spirit in my life—a new heart of flesh!—a heart that can love and is not worried about rules. This is what can give us the joy of salvation.
I know that the problem of accepting Jesus as the “author and finisher of our faith” is not limited to people my age. My daughter tells the story of one occasion when she was attending her young adult Sabbath School class and the teacher asked everyone who knew they were saved to raise their hands. In the group of 25 or so, only two people raised their hands: my daughter and one other woman. She was stunned.
When we talked about it later, she asked me, “Why, after all these years, doesn’t our church embrace what Jesus said about saving us fully? After all, righteousness by faith, as Luther understood it for the first time, has been around for more than 500 years. So why don’t we have confidence in what Jesus has done for us—wouldn’t people be so much happier if we did?”
I wish I had an answer.
Linda Nottingham lives in Florida, and teaches an adult Bible study class on Zoom for her church. She is semiretired, but serves as a mentor to women business owners.
