Being saved and tested on judgement day

The passage from Sunday night (1 Corinthians 3) has raised some interesting discussion around what happens on judgement day. So one 645er asks "1 Corinthians 3:15 says 'he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through flames'. Does this imply that in spite of being 'worldly' or only building with 'hay', these people will still be saved purely on the foundation of Jesus? If so, what does the 'testing' achieve?"

It's a good question, making us grapple with the text. Verse 15 is very clear the person who has built badly on the foundation of Jesus Christ 'will be saved'. We are saved because of Jesus not anything we have done. Remember 1 Corinthians 1:30-31, we are in Christ because of what God has done for us. Christ is our wisdom - bringing us righteousness, holiness and redemption. So we boast not in ourselves but in God.

The testing is not about whether we're saved or not. The testing is of how we lived our Christian life. We can fool ourselves and other people that we're serious about Jesus and we love our brothers and sisters. A church can look polished, spectacular and sharp. But the day of judgement will reveal whether our lives, whether our church has really lived cross shaped life. This is the difference between building a church with wood, straw and hay or building with gold, silver and costly stones. Have we lived cross shaped lives and built a cross shaped church?

The day of judgement will test which one it is, like fire will test a building. The testing is not about whether we get into heaven but it's the exposure, revealing and disclosure of what you/we actually did with the opportunities God gave us. If we have built a church full of people living cross shaped lives then like gold, silver and costly stones it will survive - we will 'receive a reward'. My understanding is that this is referring to the joy of seeing all those people we prayed for, served, encouraged in Christ standing there with us praising God. It's the joy of seeing that everything we did for Jesus and for his people really was worth it. In fact it was worth more than anything in the world. The Apostle Paul speaks of this in 1 Thessalonians 2:17-20. We hear God say 'Well done good and faithful servant'.

The other outcome of the testing is that we did the Christian life and built a church that was full of people who weren't actually followers of Jesus. Sure they might have used the jargon and hung around Christian things but they weren't actually followers of Jesus. So they don't make it into heaven. So we suffer 'loss'. We see everything we thought we'd built for the kingdom disappear. We're saved but with the picture of one dashing through flames to safety. My understanding is that the loss is getting an awful horrific reality check that we wasted the opportunities God gave us. We may even have been part of people turning away from the offer of salvation because we allowed hypocrisy, laziness, ungodliness to define and shape our church.

So the testing of 1 Corinthians 3:15 is not about salvation it's about seeing what our Christian life together produced - lives captured for Jesus or lives lived for the world.

James Lewis