Journey Not Destination

When I was in fourth or fifth grade, I went to church with a neighborhood friend. We went to Sunday School before the service, and one of the kids in our class asked our Sunday School teacher how she knew she was saved. She explained the whole thing about praying and asking God to forgive you and asking Jesus to come and live in your heart. Then she described how she felt different afterwards. She described how things looked and felt different from that moment on in her life. I decided that day that I wanted that. I wanted to see the world the way she did and feel the way that she described. That began my salvation journey. 

I don’t know how many times I prayed that prayer after that Sunday. It was more than a few times though. No matter how many times I prayed that prayer, I never felt the way that she described or experienced the world the way that she said she did after she was saved. I can remember standing in the front yard in the middle of the night one night when I was in high school crying and screaming at God asking Him what was wrong with me and why I wasn’t good enough to be saved. I truly believed that since I did not feel different immediately after praying that prayer, I must not be saved.

I continued to search for God and read the Bible in a desperate attempt to figure out what was wrong with me and how I could be good enough for Him to save me. I tried to do all the right things thinking that if I worked hard enough, I would finally be good enough to be saved. I had an experience with God in the fall of my junior year of high school that finally convinced me that He had heard and accepted my prayer to be saved once and for all, and that is the moment that I would describe when people asked me about my salvation. 

Over the next few years, I would hear some pastors say that God knows our hearts, and we can pray that prayer all we want, but if our hearts are not ready, it won’t do anything for us even if we feel like we are ready for it. I would accept that as the reason I felt like it took so long for me to be saved for many years. Then I was on a retreat with a church I was attending at the time, and I had a conversation with a lady that was on the retreat with me. She talked to me about not comparing my relationship with God to someone’s else’s. She said that everyone’s relationship with God looks different and just because one person experiences God one way and we don’t experience God that way, it doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with us or that we are not as important to God. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have a relationship with Him. After that retreat, I began to wonder if I had been saved longer than I thought but didn’t realize it because I thought my experience with God had to be the same as that Sunday School teacher’s was. Now, it really doesn’t matter to me when it happened to be honest, I just know it happened. 

The first few years of my faith journey were really frustrating for me. I really identified with Romans 7:19 during that time. I kept questioning why I was doing all of these things I knew I shouldn’t be doing if I was really saved. Why was I so weak when it came to certain temptations? Wasn’t I supposed to be free from the desire to sin now? I felt like I was failing at being a Christian many times. I would get so frustrated with myself and cry out to God, begging Him to forgive me. I played that game where I tried to bargain with God so many times. I would promise Him that if He would just do (fill in the blank), I would never do whatever sin I had participated in at the time again. I can’t imagine how many times He must have rolled His eyes at me during those years. 

I needed those “Old Covenant Laws” in the early days of my faith to keep me in check. I had been living my life with no rules or boundaries up to that point. How was I supposed to know that some of the things I was doing were wrong if I didn’t believe in God? Those laws were like guardrails in my life, and once I became a believer, I had to learn to live inside those guardrails so that I didn’t go over the edge and crash down the mountain. 

My husband loves the mountains. He went to school in Brevard, right next to Asheville, so he spent a lot of time on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The highest point on the Blue Ridge Parkway is Richland Balsam Mountain. That mountain rises 6,410 feet. There are guardrails along all the roads that make up the parkway. Those guardrails are there to prevent cars from driving over the edge of the mountain and falling to the bottom. My husband could probably drive that parkway with his eyes closed and be fine. He is quite the expert at knowing when to use brakes and when to downshift on the way down and how to take the curves on the way up and down the mountains as well. I do not have the experience he has and am therefore not nearly as comfortable or knowledgeable about driving the parkway.

About 7 years ago, we went to Colorado for my brother-in-law’s wedding. While we were there, we visited Pike’s Peak. While Pike’s Peak is not the tallest mountain in Colorado (that title goes to Mount Elbert), it still stands at 14,115 feet…8,000 feet above Colorado Springs. It has tight switchbacks and steep inclines, making it a challenge for even the most experienced mountain drivers. My husband was a nervous wreck driving up that mountain at first, but not because he wasn’t comfortable driving up and down a mountain. He was a nervous wreck at first because Pike’s Peak has no guardrails! Can you imagine? How do you have a mountain that massive and not have guardrails all the way up the road that goes up the mountain? It just seems crazy! Fortunately for us, my husband knew what he was doing and drove his family up and down that mountain with the expertise of an experienced mountain driver. If I had been driving, I certainly would have burned those brakes out on the way back down.

That is exactly how I felt about other believers in those early years of my faith, and still do today at times if I am being honest. I remember looking at other Christians and seeing how easily they stayed away from sin, and it made me wonder how in the world they did it. They didn’t appear to need guardrails at all. How could they not need guardrails? Some of the things they were facing seemed massive to me, and they drove through them with ease, just as my husband had driven us up and down Pike’s Peak with ease. How?

I believe that the more time we spend with God, the less and less we need the guardrails in certain parts of our lives. The more time we spend in His word and in conversation with Him, the more He forms us into His image. Jesus spent a lot of time with His Father, and because of that, He was able to go into the desert and stand firm in the face of temptation. He didn’t need guardrails during His time in the desert. He knew who He was and who His Father was. I believe that the more time we spend with our Father, the more His ways become second nature to us. It doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen without some work on our part. We have to prioritize time with Him in our lives. We have to learn to be still and listen for His voice more than we speak to Him. We have to learn to engage with the scriptures rather than only reading them. 

I believe this is what Paul is talking about in Philippians 2:12, and I believe this is a lifelong process. Our lives don’t simply change immediately after praying a prayer for salvation. We will still struggle with sin in our lives. It doesn’t just give up and go away forever. We have to work out our salvation through reading scripture, praying, and allowing God to move within us to make us more and more like Him each and every day.