Matt Friedeman
Professor, pastor, author, dad
May 2010 – E. Stanley Jones, long-time missionary to India, once told of a Brahman he met.
“As Jesus has saved you, so Krishna has saved me,” the man said. Jones didn’t argue, but later asked the Brahman if he would like to come with Jones and others to minister to the city’s outcasts.
“Ah,” said the Brahman, “I am saved, but I am not saved that far.”
How saved are we? Not a bad question.
Saved enough to take our talents to the “gates of hell?” My son Elijah found himself at a MercyMe concert not long ago singing a hymn with the amassed crowd, standing and raising hands in praise to God. Suddenly, Elijah began thinking that he had recently sung the same hymn in quite a different context. That very Friday morning he had stood outside the entrance to an abortion clinic, singing that same song with two other young men with no accompaniment, no hopes of sounding very good and certainly not with the lift of hundreds with their heads tilted heavenward.
But the thought struck him: How many of these with outstretched arms had ever taken their voices and energy to life’s “gates of hell” to sing God’s praises?
How saved are we? Enough to appreciate the “smell of Jesus?” A student of mine got a job at a Salvation Army center. The facility was new – the whole place just gleamed with hope.
During my young friend’s first night on the job, a man came in, threw up and then defecated on the new carpet. A supervisor looked over and said, “Get used to it, the smell of Jesus.” As he was on his knees cleaning the floor, this student wondered if Christ might not have added to the challenges in Matthew 25: “I was hungry, you fed me… thirsty, you gave me drink… imprisoned, you came to me, and … when I soiled your new carpet, you cleaned up after me, then tucked me in for the night with the possibility of a brighter future.
“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine you did for Me.”
How saved are we? Enough to twist our lives for the gospel’s sake? Years ago I was zooming down the interstate listening to AFR. James Dobson was reading from a book by Richard Selzer, a former surgeon. Dr. Dobson read this story from Selzer:
I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. … [T]o remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.
Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together, they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private….
The young woman speaks. “Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, “it will. It is because the nerve was cut.” She nods and is silent.
But the young man smiles. “I like it,” he says. “It’s kind of cute.”
… Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and twists his own lips to accommodate hers, to show her that their kiss still works.
How saved are we? Enough to sing at the gates of hell? To love the smell of Jesus? To twist our lives for the Great Commission?
My constant prayer for my family is that we will love the Lord and be willing to go wherever God wants us to go, do whatever He wants us to do, give everything He wants us to give, be whomever He wants us to be. My prayer is that we will love Him that much. That we are, indeed, that saved. 
Matt Friedeman, Ph.D., host of the Matt Friedeman Show on American Family Radio, is also professor of evangelism and discipleship at Wesley Biblical Seminary, pastor of DaySpring Community Church, husband to Mary, dad to six growing children and co-author of Life Changing Bible Study.
