romans road: heaven as now

Romans 10:9-10 - “Because if you confess with your mouth “Jesus is Lord” and in your heart you have faith that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Trusting with the heart leads to righteousness, and confessing with the mouth leads to salvation.”

Flash back to the year 2011. I am 12 years old. My existence in this time was mostly a mixture of awkwardness and anxiousness. I was young and naive about so many things. There was so much about the world that I did not yet know.  

However, one of the few things I knew for sure: I was saved.

You see, I had been saved since I was 5 years old. I had said the sinner's prayer. I accepted Jesus into my heart. And so that meant I was certainly not going to burn in the pit of hell for eternity… Right?

That is what I thought until one night at youth group, my leader urged one of my peers who was not saved, “confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord,” so that she too may be saved from burning in the pit of hell for eternity. 

That was the moment that I first began to doubt what I thought I knew. I remember thinking: “Have I confessed with my mouth that Jesus is Lord? Well of course. I confess this everyday. That part is easy. Do I believe in my heart that Jesus is Lord? Do I actually believe in my heart, without a doubt, that this dude Jesus resurrected from the dead and somehow that makes it possible for me to go to heaven? It does all seem a bit ridiculous.” And in that moment I panicked:

Am I actually saved? 

Was I going to hell? What would eternal suffering even feel like? The thought of my salvation being a lie my whole life, was the worst thing I could imagine. This is what I would now call an existential crisis. 

But I caught myself. Once I finished spiraling, I managed to suppress the doubt, and assure myself that I did believe. I was saved. I was… Right?

Well I believed I was until my thirteenth year came around and I experienced depression for the first time. In that moment, I certainly did not believe that Jesus saved me. Honestly I believed I deserved hell anyway. I thought God probably wanted me to doubt in my heart, so that God did not have to save me.

But I caught myself again. It took a bit longer that time but I successfully suppressed the doubt again. I was assured that God had let me become depressed for a reason. I was going to be stronger because of it… Right?

My 14th year came around and I experienced my first heartbreak. The boy I had loved did not love me any longer, so how could God love me enough to save me from hell? And once again, I did not feel saved. The only thing that I felt was the depth of my sadness and my depleted self worth.

But I caught myself again, eventually. This time I took a while. Suppressing the doubt felt like a war within myself. Each time I would doubt, I would plead with myself, “Sydney, you have to believe in your heart, without a doubt, that Jesus saved you from all of this. If you do not believe, then you will surely not be saved.”

This cycle continued. This cycle of believing and doubting and confessing and believing and doubting, until I could not do it anymore. How was I ever supposed to believe in my heart, without a doubt, regardless of all the hurt that I would continue to experience, that Jesus saved me? As time went on, it just kept getting harder and harder to believe that the resurrection meant anything for my eternal salvation.

This was so toxic for me for so long. I wanted to give up on my faith in Jesus all together. Why could I not stop doubting? What was the point in trying so hard if I was just going to go to hell anyway?

But then I had an epiphany in the year 2017, that it was actually an option to just stop believing in hell.

Actually, this epiphany was not about believing in hell or not, it was about believing that God’s love and grace are enough for me. I began to believe so much in God’s love, that I began to know that God would never allow me to spend the rest of eternity separated from Godself. Then all of a sudden, all of this unnecessary pressure to never doubt God fell away. Some days I felt confident in the realness of the story of Jesus, but other days I gave myself permission to just doubt. Some days I still believed in hell, but other days I gave myself permission to just not. I gave myself permission to stop caring so much about the implications of the story of Jesus for my afterlife - and I started thinking more about its implications on the life I was living right now.

And in this, I realized that its implications on my life were far more powerful than I would have ever known if all I ever did was focus on its implications on my death. Confessing with my mouth and believing in my heart, as best as I could, that God raised Jesus from the dead began to save me from things in my everyday life. 

When I feel overwhelmed by loneliness, confessing with my mouth that Jesus is Lord becomes confessing to the people around me that I need help in my hard times. When I feel crushed by meaninglessness, confessing that Jesus is Lord becomes telling my story and valuing it. When I am overcome by hopelessness, believing in my heart that Jesus raised from the dead becomes believing that God is too raising me from the dead. When I cannot see the good in my circumstances, believing in the story of Jesus becomes believing that I must persist because good things are to come for my life. 

So now, I am not merely confessing and believing this story so that Jesus might save me from the hell in my afterlife, I am confessing and believing so that I may be saved from the loneliness, from the meaninglessness, and from the hopelessness that tries to steal from my life now. I am confessing and believing so that I may experience the righteousness and the restoration and the connectedness that God’s grace and love can transform my life into right now.

Am I prepared to have a deep theological conversation about if I now believe that hell exists or not, or who I believe is or is not going to hell? Absolutely not. But that is okay, because what I have found on my journey is that what is more important to me is the effect that my beliefs have on my now. And I first and foremost believe in the love and grace that is found in the story of Jesus. In fact, I believe in this so much that I am more certain than I have ever been before that I am saved.