Lord, will only a few people be saved? Luke 13:22
The Catholic writer, Flannery O’ Connor, in one of her great stories, entitled “Revelation,” describes a woman who takes great satisfaction in feeling superior to other people. Her smugness eventually falls apart when an ugly young woman, taunted to the breaking point, wrestles her to the floor in a doctor’s office, screaming, “Go straight to hell, you old warthog!”
Embarrassed, resentful and angry, she goes home to pout over the injustice done to her. Once home, she has a dream about heaven being filled with crowds of dancing sinners, “poor white trash” as she calls them, people she had scorned all her life. In the vision, she also sees herself bringing up the rear of the motley crowd.
In the passage cited above, Jesus was making his way through some towns and villages on his way to Jerusalem, when someone along the way, with the mindset of the woman in O’Connor’s “Revelation,” asked him this question: “Will only a few be saved?” From the tone of the question, I am sure the questioner was implying, “Besides me and you, will only a few be saved?”
Are you saved? If you died tonight, would you get into heaven? If so, why? If not, why not? Is it up to God or is it up to you? Do you even know?
1. God wants everybody to be saved — everybody! Regardless of how many religions like to claim that they are God’s favorites, the fact remains that God loves all of us. He willed that all of us should be saved.
2. God not only wants us to respond to his invitation to be in a loving relationship with him, now and for all eternity, he has also bent over backwards to reach out to us and show us his love. Time and time again we have let God down, but God has never quit loving us, even when we killed his only Son. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
3. We don’t have to do anything to earn salvation. His invitation to salvation is free for the taking. All we have to do is accept our free invitation and live like a child of God.
4. If we do accept his invitation to salvation, then what we do for God will not be done to earn his salvation, but a grateful response to his saving
grace.
5. God is patient, but there does come a time when we have to “lay the egg or get off the nest.” We have to accept or reject God’s invitation.
6. Last of all, there are going to be some huge surprises in heaven. “The first will be last and the last will be first.” Some of those we would least expect will be there, while some of those we most expect may be missing. “People look at externals, but only God can see into people’s hearts.”
Just say “yes!”
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Father J. Ronald Knott
