Are you Saved?
This is a question that can trip up a lot of Catholics. It usually comes from a Non-Catholic Christian who believes that literally the only thing needed to be saved is to believe in Jesus.
So, for them the question “Are you saved?” is the same as “Do you have faith in Jesus?”
But as Catholics, we believe there’s more to salvation than that.
We believe that we have to be in friendship with God in order to be saved. We also believe that it’s possible to go in and out of that friendship with God many times throughout our lives.
What do we have to do to be in friendship with God?
The first thing we need to do is put our faith in Jesus. Who He is, What He did, and His teachings.
The second thing we have to do is to turn from our sin. Sin is anything we do, or fail to do, that hurts our relationship with God and our neighbor.
And then the third thing we need to do is get baptized.
So, why Baptism?
Let me give you an analogy.
Imagine NASA invited you to take a trip to the moon, and you wanted to go. You wouldn’t just show up at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida wearing flip flops, shorts, a T-shirt and sunglasses and expect to go as you are.
You would need a spacesuit to provide you with oxygen, to keep you from getting too hot or too cold, and to protect you from radiation. Otherwise, you couldn’t survive.
It’s the same way with Heaven. God invites us into His Kingdom. The problem is that in our natural state, we don’t have what it takes to live there. We don’t love like God loves. We need special equipment to be able to do that, and that equipment is God Himself by way of Baptism. In Baptism, God washes away our sin, and infuses us with his very life — and that’s called “sanctifying grace.”
So it’s those 3 things — faith, repentance, Baptism, and boom!: we are in friendship with God, also known as “being in a state of grace.” We are saved from hell, for heaven.
Does that mean we’re good forever?
No, that just gets our foot in the door.
This friendship has to be lived out every day, and it has to bear fruit.
What do I mean by that? What kind of fruit? Well, God is love, and so if we want to stay in God’s friendship we have to love. And I’m not talking about sentimentality. I’m talking about action. To love someone is to want what’s good for them, and to make sacrifices for them to get it.
A great way to show love to our neighbor is to perform works of mercy. There are corporal works which help people out with their bodily needs like feeding the poor, donating clothes, giving someone a place to stay if they have nowhere to lay their head, visiting the sick or imprisoned, and then there are spiritual works of mercy which are for our neighbor’s spiritual wellbeing. If you ask me, announcing the Gospel is the greatest act of charity because if we don’t have Jesus, we don’t have anything and can’t do anything (John 14:6, 15:5).
In order to continue and grow in our friendship with God, we need more grace. So, Jesus gave us 6 other sacraments including the Bread of Life that we can receive at every Mass, and Confession for the forgiveness and healing of our sin after Baptism.
We have to make sure we put the grace we receive from God into action and get out there and love our neighbor. If we don’t, if we only worry about ourselves, we can lose our salvation.
Protestants often use St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians to show that we are saved by faith alone, and not our good works. This is what they’re famous for quoting:
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God— not because of works, lest any man should boast.
Ephesians 2:8-9 RSVCE
Adding the following verse should be one of our go-to passages for illustrating how salvation truly works:
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God— not because of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2:8-10 RSVCE
And then, we can add more context by quoting another of Paul’s letters:
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love.
Galatians 5:6 RSVCE
And again, we can quote the Gospel:
The King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’
Matthew 25:34-36 RSVCE
If the end of grace is not love, then we’re missing the point.
How is God calling you to love?
Beautifully and clearly explained!
Mr. Wilson, you did not explain the faith that God’s elect are saved thru. If you skip everything that the apostle Paul said before, you can be guilty of making faith what you want it to be.
Are you really evangelizing after the Gospel of Christ that Paul preached? I have yet to see Paul’s Gospel in any of SPSE’s writings.
Paul preached the full deliverance of all those God chose in Him before the foundation of the world when their sins were imputed to His account and when His earned righteousness (perfect works under the Law) were imputed to their accounts. At that moment in time God the Father declared all for whom Christ shed His perfect blood righteous, justified in His sight. That singular event was at the cross of Jesus Christ according to the apostle Paul (Rom 4:25; 5:1; 5:9).
The Gospel of Christ cannot be preached apart from God’s sovereign definite election of some out of the mass of fallen humanity to salvation (Eph 1:4).
Justification by “faith” is an invention of the Roman catholic church and was the sole soteriological doctrine accepted by Luther and Calvin and sanctioned by protestants to this day. Justification by so-called faith is THE universal doctrine of global chrisendom.
But that is not the soteriology of the Christ of the Scriptures. He alone by Himself justified and saved all the elect God chose in Him and no others. “I am praying for them; I am not praying for the world but for those whom thou hast given me, for they are thine;” [Jhn 17:9 RSV]
After I learned Paul’s true Gospel according to the Scriptures that salvation was in the obedience unto death of the Lord Jesus Christ alone, I was faced with a choice. Do I continue in the Roman catholic religion I was born into, baptized as an infant, catechized, partook of the eucharist, confessed my sins to the priest, was confirmed as a teen, was an altar server, received the sacrement of matrimony, building up work after work? Or do I believe the Gospel that Paul so eloquently, clearly, and plainly laid out in his letter to the elect at Rome that they were fully saved by Christ alone?
I am thankful to God that He enabled me to understand and embrace the scriptural Gospel of Christ that Paul declared. That Gospel of God’s sovereign grace in the justification and salvation of all the souls of His choosing at and by His cross alone.
Not the false gospel of salvation by faith plus works.
But faith and works because He saved me.
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” [Eph 2:10 RSV]
All of false christendom confounds Paul’s true point of cause and effect here.
Paul declared salvation by Christ alone as the cause.
Later His workmanship to good works. The effect of Christ’s finished work.
Mr. Baloga,
What you have shared is certainly a coherent way of interpreting the writings of St Paul. There are other ways of interpreting them, which (as I see it) better take into account everything that he says and the whole of Sacred Scripture. May the Lord bless you and lead you into all truth!
There’s a lot I might say to respond, but I’ll leave it at this for the time being: the Catholic teaching is not “salvation by faith plus works.” That would be a terribly inaccurate way to put it. It is not what Bob meant to convey when he wrote his post. The Catholic position is better expressed by saying that salvation is all by the blood of Christ, all by grace, all through faith, which is “working through love” (Gal 5:6). All that meant in such a way as not to undermine free will, and to preserve the idea that God desires all persons to be saved — though not all persons are saved. There are different ways that Catholics understand how free will and God’s grace interact, when theological attempts at explanation are made.
We too, in the Catholic understanding, can say with you, “faith and works because he saved me.” But there are other details which would divide us on how we understand that statement.
Again — may the Lord bless you and lead you into all truth!