A sermon preached by the Reverend Scott D. Nowack
on Sunday, August 16, 2009,
at Abington Presbyterian Church, Abington, Pennsylvania. 

What Must I Do To Be Saved?
Acts 16:16-34

Freedom is one value that all of us hold dear. We as citizens of the United States of America enjoy countless freedoms such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion. We are free to speak our minds and share our opinions. We are free to travel and live wherever we want. We are free to live our faith and worship Almighty God. As a preacher, I have the tremendous freedom to speak as I feel led by God to speak.

By and large, we as Americans have built a society that gives a substantial amount of freedom to its citizens. You and I are given a maximum amount of space so I may aggressively pursue my goals and dreams, as long as I don’t bump into anybody while you are pursuing your goals and dreams.

You and I have the freedom of choice, but what are we to do with this freedom? We are free, my friends, but we are also restricted. Too many of us are awfully lonely, isolated from one another, and driven to succeed at any cost. You may be retired living alone with not a lot of direct contact with your family and friends. You may have a full-time job with good pay and benefits that enables you to own a fine home, take vacations, own new cars, and pay for your child’s summer camp tuition and guitar lessons during the school year. But what if you’re miserable doing what you do? Is it worth staying or leaving? Perhaps you would love to quit, but there is the mortgage payment, the utility bills, the vacations, car payments, summer camp tuition and don’t forget the guitar lessons, and providing food to eat. These numerous obligations lead you to believe that quitting is not an option. What kind of freedom is that?

There are also our over-programmed children with sports team schedules, youth group and choir, SAT preparation, play dates and more. There is the cut throat competition among students in academia for the best grades and getting into the best colleges. Their lives are planned for them. What kind of freedom is that?

Our scripture reading today tells stories about people in Philippi who live in bondage and people who are free. Who in the story is free?

Paul and Silas arrive in Philippi as free men where they encounter a slave-girl who can give oracles to guide people about their future. Her owners are using her to make money, exploiting this woman who in reality is in the grip of mental illness; possessed by some “demon” holding her hostage. Paul frees her from her aliment in the name of Jesus Christ, but is she completely free? Her new found freedom from the evil spirit is a cause for celebration and rejoicing and giving praise to God, but she’s still in bondage, a slave, and likewise her owners are enslaved themselves; enslaved to making money and maintaining their high standard of living; willing to do whatever it takes to make a buck, even if it’s through the exploitation of the lowly and weak. What kind of freedom is that?

The owners seek revenge. The local judge rules in their favor, and Paul and Silas are thrown into prison in a maximum security cell. The liberators have now become the imprisoned ones.

Paul and Silas may be imprisoned in the body, but their spirits were free; free to pray and sing hymns to God. The guard at their prison knows a different kind of freedom; it’s more like the freedom many of us know well: working to live and living to work; living paycheck to paycheck. As the guard in a Roman prison, he was a part of the Roman civil service, a member of the middle class of society. While on duty, if a prisoner escaped, the guard would be held accountable and executed. That’s why he tried to kill himself. He figured it was inevitable and would rather die with honor that in disgrace. He lives with limited freedom.

Even though they had the chance to escape, all the prisoners remained in their cells. The freedom that Paul and Silas shared that comes from an intimate relationship with the Living God in Christ Jesus; they lived it out in that prison showing us that the freedom the Gospel brings us can not be confined to a prison cell; it can not be confined to a cubicle or a construction site or a classroom or a home or any place for that matter. It’s the freedom we find when we live our lives in the name of Jesus Christ, the one who surrendered his freedom, so we can have freedom from sin. Jesus preached in John’s gospel, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”. (John 8:32)

The guard of the prison witnesses this freedom. He has never seen or heard of anything like this before. Why didn’t everybody escape? Nobody wants to be in prison. The guard is convicted by what he sees and hears. He wants to have what Paul and Silas have. He wants to be free from the restrictions holding him down. This led him to ask, “What must I do to be saved?” and later his baptism and the baptism of his entire household.

What must I do to be saved? It’s a question that has reverberated across our country since its founding through revival meetings and Billy Graham crusades. “Being saved” in our modern times does not completely correspond with the meaning it held in biblical times. It’s the ancient meaning of this phrase that we need to recapture and apply to our current day.

A more accurate phrasing should be “What does it mean to be saved?” “What does it mean to be free?” By posing this question, he realizes his life is incomplete. The guard realizes that his life lacks something, something to be what life should be. “To be saved” are translated many ways in the New Testament: to be saved from enemies, from the guilt of sins, from sickness and disease, from demonic powers, from isolation and exclusion, from troubles, distress and death. Being saved is having one’s life put in right relation with God and other human beings. Being saved is being given one’s life as it was intended to be by God in the world. Being saved is being given the sure and certain hope of eternal life beyond this world. In other words, being saved is going from being lost to being found.

To ask what must I do to be saved presupposes that God has acted first in the salvation of his creation. The prominent early twentieth century Scottish Protestant Christian minister and teacher Oswald Chambers wrote, “Whenever God touches sin, it is independence that is touched, and that awakens resentment in the human heart. Independence must be blasted clean out, there must be no such thing left, only freedom, which is very different. Freedom is the ability not to insist on MY rights, but to see that God gets his”. The New Testament indicates that humanity is unable to redeem itself on its own. The freedom we gain by “being saved” is based completely on the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

The guard had heard the Gospel message from Paul and Silas and the salvation that comes from God wondering what he must do to get it, “What must I do to be saved?” We cannot ignore this question anymore than Paul and Silas could.

We, the Christian church of the 21^st century, need to be able to recognize this question, even when it takes different forms. A more contemporary form may be “How can I be really happy?”, or “Is there any such thing as right and wrong?”, or perhaps this “With the variety of appealing and influential options, how should I live my one and only life?”, or “Is there a God, or are we the highest and best there is in the universe?” or “What’s worth doing with my life?”.

These are the questions and others like them on the faces and hearts and minds of people all around us looking for purpose, searching for meaning, grasping for whatever answers they can get to take away the isolation and the loneliness that haunts them. We the church of Jesus Christ needs to be able to give a clear and biblical response to this question, even when those asking the questions are not clear about what they are asking.

We can not just sit back and expect those outside our church family to just come right in and be a part of us. We must go to them with a willingness to share what God has done in our lives, how our faith in Jesus Christ has changed our hearts and minds and given us a freedom that surpasses any freedom we humans could develop; a freedom that empowers each of us to take up our cross and follow Jesus; a freedom that strengthens us to rely not on the things of this world but on the one who created everything.

It is not enough to simply be a good person, or to do things for the poor, or attend worship regularly, or to know a lot about the Bible, or to give a lot of money to God, or to work for the church. All these things, when done together, will equip us to share with the world the true freedom we found in the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

It is our belief in the Lord Jesus as our Lord and Savior that makes this possible. This is what it means to be free, to be saved, and to live in the freedom only Christ can offer. Glory be to God for his amazing gift of grace and the freedom to brings to our lives. Amen.