Saved All Over Again

 

Fifteen years ago, I had a crisis of faith while driving to church early on Easter Sunday. I had a forty-five-minute commute back then, so I would practice my sermon as I drove in the wee hours of the morning. 

On that particular Easter Sunday, I was going over the sermon, speaking the words out loud, when a dark realization came over me that felt like it chilled me to the bone.  I didn't know if I actually believed anything I was saying. 

"What if none of this is true?" I remember whispering to myself in the car.  

I began to wonder what, if anything, I could say that morning that would feel true to me, or if I was just going to be regurgitating ideas that I wasn't sure I believed in any longer just to get through the day.  

In the end, I managed to get through that Easter Sunday morning and afterward began the process of determining whether I could still be a pastor with all the doubts I was carrying at the time.  Turns out, I could, and did.  

In fact, the years following that complete meltdown on the road to Easter became some of the most rewarding, challenging, and refining of my life.  It was the second season of my life where my faith got deconstructed and then reconstructed.  

To put it another way, it was the second time in my life that I thought my faith in God had died, only to see it resurrected.  

This is why I believe that resurrection is the foundation of the Christian faith.  The belief that God raised Jesus from the dead has implications far beyond the event itself.  

If, as followers of Jesus, we say that we believe in his resurrection, we should also embrace the idea that resurrection happens not only for us but also each and every day.  

The late Rachel Held Evans wrote about this, and the quote below speaks directly to what I mean: 

“It’s just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair. Most days I don’t know which is harder for me to believe: that God reanimated the brain functions of a man three days dead, or that God can bring back to life all the beautiful things we have killed...”

I remember reading the words above when I was going through the deconstructing process of all my certainty about my faith, and they still resonate with me today as much as they did then.  

God is constantly at work in the middle of all our dying and rising.  We are never a finished product because the notion of what it means to experience salvation is something we wrestle with every single day of our lives.  

The Apostle Paul got this.  He once wrote to the church at Philipi the following words of encouragement: 

12 Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence but much more now in my absence, work on your own salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:12-13)

I've come to understand all too well what he meant by "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," because the dying-and-rising aspect of transformation can be disorienting.  But when we trust that God is at work in us, moving us from certainty to faith, we can find hope that there is more on the other side of what we are letting go of.   

So may you know what it means to die to certainty every day, knowing that you will rise again to new life, new hope and new beginnings.  May you let go of whatever is keeping you from being shaped and saved all over again, all of the time.  

And may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you now and always.  Amen.  

Prayer: 

God of resurrection,

You meet us not only in our certainty, but in our doubt, our questions, and our unraveling. When our faith feels fragile or lost, remind us that you are still at work within us. Give us the courage to release what no longer gives life, and the trust to believe that something new is being formed in its place. In every ending, help us to see the promise of new beginnings.

In Christ’s name, Amen.

Reflection Questions

1. Where in my life might something be “dying” right now—and what new life might God be bringing from it?

2. How have seasons of doubt or deconstruction shaped my faith in meaningful ways?

3. What might it look like for me to trust that God is still at work in me, even when I feel uncertain?