Don’t get me wrong! Please don’t get me wrong. I have no problems with Christians saying, “Jesus came to save me.” I fully agree with that. Even Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, writes, “The Son of God… loved me and gave himself for me.”

But does Jesus have no purpose for which he has saved me? Is my salvation an end in itself? Or has he saved me with a purpose? Too often in Christian circles, we do not talk about this. We think of salvation as an end in itself. And quite erroneously we conceive of salvation as being a one-way ticket to heaven or something like that.

But God’s original purpose in creating humans was so that he would have regents to take care of his creation. Ever since Adam and Eve tried to shrug off that vocation, humans have done a pretty poor job of tending for creation. And our ability for doing a poor job of it has only increased with time. Then does this mean that God’s original purpose for creating humans has failed utterly because of our rejection of the divine vocation?

If we conceive of Jesus’ work as being solely to save us – presumably for some sort of existence in ‘heaven’ – then this purpose would have failed. Then there would be no purpose for saving us other than as a rescue from condemnation and damnation.

But that would also mean that our sinfulness has thwarted God’s original plans for our salvation, in this scheme of things, does not involve anything more than our getting to ‘heaven’. Is our sinfulness then more powerful than God’s providence? Can we so easily refuse and reject the divine vocation?

But God’s purpose is not to simply save us from condemnation and damnation, but to also save us for fulfilling the divine vocation. When Jesus saves us, he saves us so that we can renew the task of fulfilling the vocation for which God created us. When Jesus saves us, he does this so that we can once again tend for his creation – the current one now and the new creation whenever God reveals it to us.

So if we keep harping on, “Jesus came to save me” without at least implicitly including the renewed vocation for which he has saved us we have a truncated gospel. In fact, then it is no gospel at all for then it would mean that God failed in the face of our sinfulness. I’d much rather have the real gospel, the good news that God has, in Christ reconciled the world to himself, with me being a small part of that reconciliation.