Individual Salvation
August 24th, 2025 “Individual Salvation” Rev. Heather Jepsen
Summer Sermon Series: Stump the Pastor
Exodus 20:1-17 and John 17:20-26
This morning, we continue our summer sermon series, “Stump the Pastor”, where you ask challenging or difficult questions, and I try to answer them. Our question for today is quite complex. The person asks, “Is individual salvation based on what a person believes or does? Why is believing the right thing emphasized more than following Jesus’ teachings? Are Jesus’ teachings to be understood at an individual level or a society level?” These are all wonderful and challenging questions to try to answer.
It wasn’t until the last 50 years or so of the modern American Christian movement that the emphasis for salvation, or right relationship with God, became extremely individualized. Questions of “are you saved?” or “have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” imply that right relationship with God is simply between you and God. Sort of a “one and done” thing. Say the prayer, some heavenly door opens, and that’s all you need to worry about. Unfortunately, though you hear this language a lot in “Bible based” churches, it is not actually a biblically based point of view. In fact, nowhere in the Bible is Jesus referred to as a “personal Lord and Savior”. I’m going to say that again, nowhere in the Bible at all is Jesus called “personal Lord and Savior”. So, let’s look at what the Bible does say about how we get right with God.
In the Old Testament, when God makes covenant with the Israelites to be a nation, that covenant is based on community life together. Your personal welfare, and your salvation, were bound up with the well-being of all your family, friends, and neighbors.
In the Exodus story, the people of Israel are rescued from a life of slave labor in Egypt and formed into a covenant community. In the forming of that community, God gifts the Israelites the 10 commandments as a guide for their life together. They move from an economy of scarcity and slavery where power and resources are controlled by one person, Pharoh, into an economy of God’s abundance for all people with power and resources shared in community.
Scholar Walter Bruggeman suggests that we examine the 10 commandments through the lens of the Israelite’s escape from slavery in Egypt. He writes, “The 10 commandments are not rules for deep moralism designed to clobber and scold people. Rather, they are the most elemental statement of how to organize social power and social goods for the common benefit of the community.” In commandments 1-3 people gain freedom from Egyptian power structures by loving, serving, and trusting in God to provide. In the 4th commandment, all work is stopped, and people celebrate freedom and again trust in God to provide. In commandments 5-10 the people learn that all their neighbors are to be respected and protected as vital members of the community.
When God creates the nation of Israel it is a nation bound up in community life. There is no personal relationship with God. There is no individual reward or punishment. Rather the whole community together is tasked with caring for each other, especially those that really need help like the orphan, the widow, the stranger, and the immigrant. God judges the community as a whole, based on how they care for each other. Throughout the entirety of the Old Testament, we see that this is what God asks of God’s people. How you get right with God, or receive salvation, is by taking care of each other in community.
When we move to the New Testament nothing changes. Still, we are tasked with caring for each other. When Jesus is asked what the greatest commandments are he tells us that we are to love God and love neighbor. And most of us here know the story of Matthew 25 where Jesus separates the sheep from the goats. Nowhere in that story does Jesus ask us how we believed or if we said a special prayer. Rather, in that story Jesus makes clear that how we treat each other in the community around us is how we treat God in our midst. We will be judged based on how we treat each other.
I chose John’s gospel as my second reading for today because it so clearly talks about the importance of community. This is the very end of Jesus’ final discourse in the Gospel of John. He begins by giving his disciples a new commandment, that they love one another. This is the sign of being a follower of Jesus. Not that you accept Jesus into your heart, but that you love other people.
Jesus ends his speech with a prayer asking God to knit the people together into one community. “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.” This isn’t one person, this is everyone together as one group. There is no such thing as “individual” salvation here or individual followers of Jesus. To follow Jesus demands that we are part of community and that we work for the betterment of the community.
One of my favorite modern theologians, Richard Rohr, describes it this way. “Christianity is now more of a contest, or even an ego trip, than a proclamation of divine victory and love. Western individualism has done more than any other single factor to anesthetize and euthanize the power of the gospel. Salvation, heaven, hell, worthiness, grace, and eternal life all came to be read through the lens of the separate ego, crowding God’s transformative power out of history and society. For five hundred years, Christian teachers defined and redefined salvation almost entirely in individualistic terms, while well-disguised social evils – greed, pride, ambition, deceit, gluttony – moved to the highest levels of power and influence, even in our churches.”
Rohr warns that this individualized focus led the church to demand obedience to authority as the highest of virtues instead of love, communion, and solidarity with God and others, especially the marginalized. By contrast, Jesus calls us to a horizontal accountability to one another. For Jesus to pray that “we all be one” is a corporate reading of the gospel, focused not on power structures or individual efforts but on good will for the whole community.
And lest you think I am making all of this up, even the classic reformation movement was all about the work of God in community. Calvin himself preaches that our unbelief in God is seen in the ways we turn to our own resources to save ourselves. I can fix it, I can do it, I can handle it myself and I don’t need God or community. That is the epitome of unfaith in Calvin’s eyes and brings us back to the 10 commandments which remind us that we are freed from a slave economy by the love and providence of God. Even if we consider the classic phrase, “Justified by grace through faith” Calvin argues that we are saved for service. We are called and created to work with God to bring about the kingdom of heaven here on earth. Not to go our own way, worry only about ourselves, or to sit on our laurels like kings.
My friends, look to your left and notice the person there. Now look to your right and smile at that friend. Know that we cannot make ourselves right with God, we cannot be saved alone, we do not have an individual salvation. Your right relationship with God is bound up with your relationships with your neighbors in the pew, and across the street from your home, and everywhere else in this world. Just as our church’s good work is measured by our welcome and our service to the community, not by how many “souls we have saved”.
The Bible teaches from cover to cover that we are all, always in this together. You simply cannot be a Christian by yourself, so there can be no individual salvation. It has always and ever been all of us or none of us. And so, my friends, may we rise to the challenge of being “one” in Christ. Amen.
