What is salvation anyway?

Underlying many different Christian theologies is a common message: Trust and obey God to get something from Him.

The moral guidelines of purity culture imply that if you remain sexually pure, God will provide you with a spouse and a great sex life. Prosperity teachings often assure us that living a holy life will yield some version of health and wealth. Many popular Christian parenting programs suggest that if you raise your children according to the right principles, your kids will be well-­behaved and grow up to make good choices.

We often embrace these formulas in good faith, from a desire to honor God and to make sense of the world. But insofar as these maxims shape our motivations, they cheapen our obedience by tying it to desired outcomes. They teach us to treat God like a divine vending machine, inserting whatever religious currency is required to buy the blessings we seek. Unwittingly, we often reduce the Christian life to a series of spiritual negotiations.

When I began pulling on the thread of my own transactional framework for faith, I was surprised to realize how deeply embedded it was. Permeating my understanding of the Gospel itself was an exchange of goods: give Jesus your heart, and he will give you a ticket to Heaven. As a child, I was deeply motivated by the get-­out-­of-­jail-­free theology that characterized my evangelical culture. Today, I still see truth in it. Jesus died to forgive us from sin. I want my children to believe this. But I don’t want them to turn to Jesus for what they can get out of it. In other words, I want them to want Heaven because he is there, not the other way around.

When my dad was sick with cancer during my childhood, our faith community sought to secure his healing through whatever forms of obedience God might require. In addition to pursuing medical treatment, we attended church faithfully and prayed fervently. Pastors anointed him. Our Christian friends all did their part to give my dad the best chance at survival. The first two years of his illness were marked by enthusiasm for the fight against cancer. In the latter half of the battle, however, we grew weary. Hope for healing turned to plans for dying. Optimism gave way to grief and a slowly spoken goodbye. In the wake of his death, I felt confused and even angry at God for not giving us what we wanted. We had asked in faith. We had not cursed his name. We’d even planned to give God the glory for our happy ending. As a grieving fourteen-year-old, I blamed God for not holding up his end of the bargain.

But my disillusionment was undermined by another dynamic at work in my family’s story. As I’d watched my dad’s health decline over the last four years of his life, I watched his faith grow. His pursuit of God, initially catalyzed by crisis, eventually became an end in itself. Even though God wasn’t answering his prayers in the way he wanted, my dad came to value prayer for other reasons. Somehow, even as his hope for healing waned, his hope in God deepened. After he’d been sick for a while, he wrote this prayer in his journal: “Lord, I seek intimacy with you over healing — over anything in this life. Please teach me ... Lord, I seek you because you are worthy of my seeking. I do not seek you because of what you can do for me.”

In the absence of God’s “stuff,” namely, the gift of healing, my dad had become captivated by God himself. For his tombstone, he chose Job 1:21: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

In my work as a pastor, I hear many stories of longing and loss. A young couple is trying desperately to conceive a child. A man is praying for redemption in his marriage. A celibate friend is wrestling with loneliness. A woman is grieving her adult son’s addiction. These stories can’t be reduced to platitudes, and the hopes they represent shouldn’t be dismissed as unspiritual or selfish. In the Bible, God invites us to ask sincerely for what we want. Suppressing our desire — or even our disappointment with God — doesn’t make us more holy; it only makes us less honest. But in all our longing, the challenge of faith is not to conflate the gifts with the giver.

The Christian story, made tangible by a God who took on human flesh and lived among us, reminds us: The greatest gift God can give us is himself. His good news for the world is not an abstract message about salvation, the distribution of blessings, or even the offer of forgiveness. His good news is his promise to be with us forever. Our forgiveness, though important, is in service of a greater end; it is the means through which we can experience union with God. Ultimately, our faith is not ordered toward the transaction of goods but toward the communion of persons.

We rehearse this truth in our worship when we gather for the Lord’s Supper. We come, hopeful or hurting, holding the unanswered questions of our stories in open hands. And in response, Jesus offers us himself. When I welcome the members of my congregation to receive the bread and the wine, I look in their eyes and think of all the assurances I want to give them — that their conflicts will be resolved, that their bodies will be healed, that their families will be restored in the ways they hope. I can’t promise them these things. But I can give them something far greater: “the body of Christ, given for you.”

A pastor of mine used to say, “The Christian life is one of ongoing conversion.” At first, this irked me. But eventually I understood that ongoing conversion is less about assurance of salvation than it is about a deeper, more holistic experience of salvation. In addition to our thoughts and beliefs, the Holy Spirit converts our loves so that we learn to desire God above all things. This is a life-long process.

We might initially be drawn to God because of what we believe he can give us — a ticket to Heaven, a moral framework for life, a sense of community and belonging in the Church. But over time, as we focus our gaze on Him, we realize that He alone is the true object of our longing. “Man is a hungry being,” wrote Alexander Schmemann. “But he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger of our life is God. All desire is finally a desire for Him.”

In fellowship with Jesus, we taste salvation. When Jesus returns, our union with him will be complete, and our hunger will finally be fully satisfied. Until then, our faith can feel like an ache and a fulfillment all at once. We have found the one we desire — or rather, He has found us. Even so, we pray, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”

Taken from Feasting on Hope by Hannah Miller King. Copyright (c) 2026 by Hannah Miller King. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com