Eternal Aliveness

Dave Brisbin 1.19.20 One of the drawbacks of the Sunday morning sermon is also its strength: uninterrupted speech. Good for developing and delivering a message, but not for conversation. And conversation, the give and take, question and answer is where ideas can really be conveyed and absorbed. And with a topic as large as salvation that was tackled last week, this Sunday is more about the conversation. Recapping the main lines of thought on salvation from last week’s “Becoming Saved” message, it seemed good to add a bit more thread. It’s hard for Westerners to get their minds around the Hebrew concept of salvation since it’s not grounded in afterlife, but here and now—as is all Jewish spirituality. It may help to understand that salvation and eternal life were equivalent terms to ancient Jews, but only if we know how eternal life was understood. Using Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus based around the famous verse, John 3:16, we get a glimpse from the Aramaic rendering of how eternal life is not life that continues indefinitely into eternity, but is life that is eternally alive, new, fresh, constantly reborn, as always, right here and now. Taking that definition and connecting it to salvation understood as spiritual liberation herenow, and then to Paul’s salvation statements in Romans, Ephesians, and Philippians, a new view of something so central to our faith begins to materialize. Let the conversation begin…