I sat spellbound and immensely entertained as the balding preacher spasmed and spat the Gospel at us for over an hour.  Most weeks I sat comfortably in church like any other carefree six year-old, playing with crayons or folding bulletins into paper airplanes. Our regular pastor lulled me to sleep under the canopy of my father’s arm stretched over and behind my head and laid across the top of the pew. But this was not our regular happy pastor.  This was his friend, angry pastor, the heavy artillery brought in for a week’s worth of revival services.

And he blasted away.

He wore a light blue three-piece suit that showed his white socks underneath if he stomped out from behind the pulpit, which he did often while his balding head shone like a spotlight into our souls.  In his right hand he waved a black brick of a bible the size of my six year-old body.  I could feel the breeze from the thing from my seat half way back in the crowd.  His right fist he balled up like a gavel and struck against the pulpit again and again like a judge, punctuating every sentence with canon-blast booms of flesh against oak.

After wearing himself out he finally hollered an invitation like none other I’d heard before.  “WHEN YOU LEAVE CHURCH THIS MORNING!  YOU! COULD GET HIT! BY A TRUCK!  A TRUCK!!” he spewed. “AND IF YOU DON’T KNOW JEEEEESUS THAT TRUCK’S GONNA SEND YOU STRAIGHT TO HELL!  STRAIGHT! TO! HELL! WHO WANTS JESUS?!”

I had no idea church parking lots could be so perilous.  I leapt from my seat and ran down the aisle, filled out a three by five card with one of those tiny pencils made for golfers and six year-olds, and I wrote alI I could think to write, “I NEED JESUS!” And for the next fifty-seven stanzas of Just As I Am and I Surrender All I just kept adding exclamation marks as if to make the point clearer, “I’M NOT JOKING, I’M SCARED OF TRUCKS, I”M SCARED OF HELL, PLEASE HELP ME!”

And when the music finally stopped the sweaty revival preacher took my card from me and read it to the crowd saying, “This young man has joined the family of God today.” And Amens and MmmHmms washed over me, soothing away my fear of trucks and hell. He invited everyone to come meet me afterwards and welcome me into the family.  Eighty and ninety year-old grandmothers, about fifty of them it seemed, stroked my hands and squeezed my cheeks and kissed me, which scared me almost as much as trucks and Hell.  And then my family took me to Western Sizzler.

I had a steak.

I got saved.

I got saved the way so many of us in America do.  I came to Jesus to get out of Hell, to avoid being squashed by demonic forms of transportation and sent to the bad place where I’d be forced to wear drab clothing and chains for all of eternity.  I repeated a prayer after a pastor and “invited Jesus into my heart” and asked him to be my “personal Lord and savior” – my personal bodyguard saving me from harm and hell.

I had no idea that what I should fear the most, what Jesus saved me from first, was neither trucks nor hell but me.

The thing Jesus wanted his Jewish audience gathered on a hillside two-thousand years ago to understand first about His brand of salvation had little to do with hell and nothing to do with trucks. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus announced.

“God loves you and has a plan for your life” the tracts left on urinals sometimes read. And that is true: God loves us no matter how messed up we are.  But what Jesus wants us to understand first is just how messed up we are.  Poor in spirit.

Jesus saves first and foremost not from external dangers but from internal demise.  He saves first not from future torment but from today’s depravity.  He saves me first not from trucks and hell but from myself.

When that naked couple back in Eden had fruit for dessert in hopes of becoming like God they messed us all up; they bent the human core’s DNA so that every one of their offspring since has been born with a defect of the worst kind (Ecclesiastes 7:20, Psalm 53:1-3).

Our intellect is darkened (Romans 1:21). Our emotions can’t be trusted to steer us right (Titus 3:3). Our will is selfish (Isaiah 53:6, Romans 3:10-12)

No, we’re not all chilling human heads in our freezers like Dahmer or gassing thousands like Hitler but all of us, usually around age two I think, begin producing outward evidence of our internal birth defect.  Sometimes our busted insides don’t display noticeable symptoms that make headlines.  But even when there isn’t an obvious specific infraction to point to and label “sin” we still sense a general taintedness in everything our human hands get a finger on don’t we?  Two year olds yell, “Mine!” Governments war.  Cameras film child pornography. Talent warps perspective and boosts egos.  Enterprise contaminates the environment and tramples the weak.  Beauty snubs the ugly.  Caretakers abuse.  And all this while our bodies decay, become diseased, grow weak and incapacitated.

Everything is busted.  And we must know it somehow.  We must recognize this to some extent.  We just don’t realize, perhaps, the scope of the problem.  We don’t understand we’re so hung over from Eden that we’re helpless to fix our brokenness.  We’re drunks fumbling with our keys trying to open the gates to utopia again.

And on and on we fumble.  Generation after generation.  We toil on an earth capable of growing enough food to fill every stomach, yet starvation has never died.  It barely wanes.  We hold enough wealth in the West to clothe and educate the entire globe, yet children beg naked and unable to write or read.  There are enough adults in the world to put orphanages out of business, yet millions grow up with no one to call Daddy.  We have enough spy satellites, schools of political science, ethicists, diplomats, armaments and historical data to bring peace to the nations, yet in four thousand years of recorded history only four hundred have been remotely warless.  And my nation, America, has been at war somewhere in the world since World War I in pursuit of peace.

Much of our intellect, good intentions, talent, money, fame and strategy have been put to the task of ridding the world of all need and malice since the day Adam left the garden eons ago.  Yet none of these tools have successfully built paradise on earth, not even a square mile of it.  And no tool in the future ever will – not if it’s wielded by human hands guided by the urges of the defective human core.

No politician, petition, or program will ever stop the contamination seeping from the human heart across the breadth of geography of history.  Nothing can penetrate our flesh and repair the wound itself: our corrupted middle.

Only Jesus saves.  He saves us from the natural disaster of sin within the human heart.  He provides the only hope of healing with one act of sacrifice two thousand years ago outside Jerusalem’s gates (Romans 5:12-15).  Jesus saves from the thing more menacing than trucks waiting outside and hell up ahead.  He saves from the source of all that has gone wrong and is going wrong everywhere and with everyone: misguided emotions, corrupt minds and selfish wills.

Jesus saves.

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