Being Saved

As I see it now, there were multiple ways that our ideas about being saved distorted biblical teachings. One is that our form of religion was about escaping from earthly life, whereas Jesus’s message was fundamentally about transforming it. Because we saw the central issue to be life after death, we tended to miss New Testament teachings about what God sought for this world. If we noticed in Jesus’s model prayer the request that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven,” we assumed that God’s will being done was primarily a matter of getting people to make a commitment that prepared them for eternity.