Those of you who are parents know those moments Madison Avenue has coined as “priceless.” I had one the other night that thrilled my soul when my son said something to the effect, “I’m so glad that God is my salvation.” The subtitled of my book gets at why this was so thrilling for me: “God’s Provision for Building an Enduring Faith in Your Children.” It’s very easy for Christians, saved fallen sinners that we are, to think our salvation is up to us: if we just do the right things, make the right decisions, live the right way, then God will be a little more pleased with us than he otherwise would be. The focus tends inward, subjective, on us, something I’ve taught our kids all their lives is not the Christianity we embrace.
My son, our middle child now 23, had read the chapter on Reformed theology. He got the point of this beautiful, and much maligned, perspective on the Christian faith, that our salvation, and sanctification, are totally of Lord. When most people hear or see the word, Calvinism, they conceive a caricature of which I am not familiar. God’s sovereign purposes in salvation, they think, become on the Calvinist perspective, another word for determinism. In other words, there is no freedom or human accountability, only God moving the chess pieces. This could not be further from the truth.
The Reformed, or Calvinist, perspective contrasts to the inward, subjective one mentioned above. It is outward, objective, focused on the work of Christ as it is applied by the Holy Spirit in our souls and lives. It is difficult to convey in words how powerful this has been in my own life, and in the way I’ve communicated the faith to our children. Maybe a little backstory will help.
When I was “born-again,” as it was called way back in 1978, I encountered a Christianity that was fundamentalist in orientation; Christianity was in some sense all about me. It was of course never put in such terms, but my performance was everything. Talk about pressure. What I did or didn’t do, how sold out I was or wasn’t, determined how I felt about my relationship to God. As long as I jumped through all the right hoops, me and God we were good. If I didn’t, well, you get the picture. I paint quite the Manichean picture, and of course it wasn’t like that. There was much good, but it was a constricting view of Christianity that eventually wore thin.
This kind of fundamentalist Christianity all about my relationship with Jesus, and that relationship was built through the Bible. So far so good. The problem was that it was pretty much just me and the Bible. There was little history, and no theology. Rather, when I read the Bible and God wanted me to understand something, I envisioned that he buzzed my brain and I got it. This was another piece of the subjective nature of my experience. By contrast, what I eventually embraced and taught my children is a more objective form of Christianity rooted in history and theology. The truth and my experience of this relationship exists outside of me in the content of Scripture, and 2000 years of Church history based on it; my feelings and subjective experience of it follow from that.
Most importantly, and as my son grasped, from the Reformed perspective of our salvation and sanctification are not up to us! I’ve used this passage from Paul in Romans 8 innumerable times with my children (especially verse 28) to inculcate into them that salvation is of the Lord:
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
The running joke around our house is that Paul certainly didn’t mean all things. Maybe 98 percent? But certainly not all? Yep, all! The good, the bad, and the ugly.
This is a very difficult passage for non-Reformed Christians who it seems to me ignore the plain meaning of the text. God knew in advance these things would happen. Not only that, he predestined them. The word in Greek means literally, “a setting forth in advance for a specific purpose.” Then he called those he predestined; when the King of the universe calls, you come. Then he justified those he predestined and called, and also glorified them. The end was determined, accomplished, from the beginning. That is where our confidence lies, not in us. Our children get this, and it makes all the difference.
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