67 thoughts on ““Gloriously Saved””

  3. I was just “saved.” Pity that I’ll never have a “good” “testimony.” 😳

  7. Maybe it depends on how sinful your life was before you got saved. If you don’t have that bad of a past, you only got saved. But if you were a drug addict, prostitute, pimp, etc, then you’re gloriously saved, because you can use that for a testimony. I remember once hearing a woman’s testimony about coming out of a life of prostitution. The testimony lasted one hour, 55 minutes of which was her sinful life before meeting Jesus, and 5 minutes her life after meeting Him. I thought something was seriously wrong with this. 😕 😡 🙁

    2. “…but the thing that got the most attention was when she talked about her love life. And started naming names!”

      Was there a squirrel involved at any point? 😛

      (Please tell me that someone gets that joke!)

        1. Yup, that’s the one! I actually knew Sister Bertha Better-Than-You personally. She took me aside nearly every week to give me advice on being a godly young lady. Did you know that boys don’t have any respect for girls who show off their bosoms and talk about football? 😆

        2. I did not know that, but I wish there were more girls that were willing to lose my respect if that’s how you do it! 🙂

      4. I not only get it, that line has run through my mind during a few bragamonies I mean testimonies over the years, even while still a strong fundy.

      5. We have actually had a squrril in our church basement. It decided to make an appearance during our after school program. We caught it with a live trap after blocking it in the kitchen.

        I tried to get our pastor use this song as the special number that week, but she wasn’t in favor of it.

    3. Not just “how sinful,” but “what kind of sinful.” There’s a hidden line drawn there.

      I’ve seen this before, but there’s a world of difference in beginning a testimony with “I used to be so drunk that I…” as opposed to “I used to be so gay that I…”

      1. You are right about that. There is a double standard at work as well. Men are allowed much more leeway to be “sinful” before they get saved than women. A man can sleep with every woman in a five county radius but once he gets saved noone will hold that against him. A woman who has multiple male sexual partners will always be quietly thought of as a tramp, no matter how many times she gets saved and baptized.

        1. Speaking from personal experience, the “tramp” label applies to any woman who is even *thought* to have had sex with *one* guy, much less multiple guys. I was a frequent subject of those sorts of rumors in high school just because nearly all of my friends were male.

        2. There are most certainly double standards when it comes to men and women in the IFB, but to be totally honest double standards still exist even in the secular world for men and women and most probably they will always be. Just think of how people don’t give a lot of thought to a single mother having sole custody of their child/ren but when a single father does, everyone thinks it’s so heroic of him and people, especially women fall over themselves to help with free babysitting etc whereas single moms don’t get too much of that at all. And as far as the testimony thing goes, my former bju’ish IFB church didn’t want people to tell all of their testimony if they had “a past” because they like to pretend they are all perfect. I remember commenting to a married couple at the church while we were volunteering for NBT (my first time) how the story the evangelist told about a kid smoking pot and being all crabby and violent wasn’t accurate because pot doesn’t make people violent but melo. They virtually never made eye contact nor talked to me after that like well if she knows what pot does to people then she has a past and we don’t want anything to do with her. 🙄

        4. but to be fair, they were probably just scandalized that anyone would question what came from the pulpit.

        5. I , well, let’s just say had a lot of occasions to be around people under the influence of it and personally was under the influence of it many years and I never saw anyone be agressive or yucky in any way while under the influence of pot. Never. Maybe if they smoked something soaked in some horrible chemical or something but then that is different. All I ever saw was lots of hysterical laughing, wonderful munching out sessions and let’s just say aphrodesiac effects and maybe people getting sleepy, Oh yeah, and lots of forgetting what I was going to say…. 😉

        6. Of course, I’m going to come off as argumentative and I don’t intend to, but it really does cause aggressive behavior in those with certain mental disorders or in some (not all or even most) people who have used it long term or extremely heavily. I don’t for a second doubt the particular anecdote told was a straight up lie but did want to clarify that it can and does cause aggression in some instances.

        7. Well then, I learned something I didn’t know and am most grateful that I never seemed to have smoked pot with someone with those certain mental disorders, that certainly would have been a buzz kill. :mrgreen:

  8. Sounds like Stick Jr just realized he’s not cut out for ministry having just been saved, and not gloriously so. 🙂

  9. Fundies raise their children extremely sheltered, making listening to the wrong radio station be as much of a sin as robbing a bank, but they praise people saved out of lives of deepest depravity. It can give some kids a load of hopeless guilt because you feel like you’re never good enough to please your parents but you’re never bad enough to have an interesting testimony.

    1. What I heard a lot was some young person saying their testimony was boring because they were saved as a child and had never been involved in “deep sin.” They grew up always being taught how wicked smoking, drugs, drinking, sex before marriage, etc was, so they never did any of those things. But they envied those who did have a testimony like that. Some even apologized for their testimony not being more exciting. I thought this was sad. They were better off in some ways I thought, if they never smoked or drank they didn’t have the scars of those who had serious addictions, or the temptation to return to it. 😛

      1. Sounds like my cousin. Was a “good” missionary kid, but had a stack of porn in his closet, partied, had a different girlfriend every other week ( his philosophy was get out of them what you can then dump them). His whole point was so he could become a great evangelist, with a great story. He never made it, got killed in a car accident on his way home from his girlfriends house when he was 16.

  10. And don’t forget, if those things change, it most likely means that you really didn’t get gloriously saved, so you have to go get the procedure done again and hope it sticks. 😉

  11. maybe “gloriously saved” is the first time the mog trips your tear ducts, but “just saved” is each subsequent time you make that trip to lay your knees on red carpeted glory in front of the white piano and the man of gawad 😈

  12. had to say gawad instead of god because mog’s down here in texas make god a 2 syllable word for some reason

  14. This is an example of hyperbole that falls into the same category as referring to Christ as “The Lovely Lord Jesus”. Nothing wrong with calling Him that, but to use it over and over makes it sound trite.

  15. Oh, my word! How true!

    There was a man in my home church who got saved one Sunday morning. But, he kept asking questions and just wouldn’t submit to the authority of the Pastor or the Bible. I later found out that he was also a huge science fiction fan (which our new Pastor says is a direct link to atheism). He left after two weeks to go to a Presbyterian church. Not the liberal kind, but the kind that still has a catechism but aren’t Catholic. Another lady was saved at 4 years old but had never given her testimony in church because she said she’d never done anything worth hearing about. I completely understand that feeling!!

  16. I wonder how many kids, true believers, went off to fundy summer camp, fundy school chapel, and revival meetings, and came home confused about salvation because they never saw “the new creature” emerge. I remember wondering if I were really saved since I had never had a great change wrought about in me that other people could see and know “he’s a new man!”

    There just weren’t a lot of mass murdering, druggie, drunk, perverted 11 year old kids around to lead me astray so I could be gloriously saved.

    I did learn that there was a change in me, and that I was just as sinful as the braggart, as well as just as saved, and have worked hard to help the “good” kids as well as the “bad” kids I have worked with to understand that “all have sinned…”

    1. I try not to get too serious, but Darrell and you guys keep rubbing nerves still raw from poor Bible teaching.

    3. I went down the aisle as a young child and “got saved” and I am not sure how I believe about that event. I know that my life didn’t change, I know someone prayed with me, and I probably understood it, I also know I was one of those kids who “rededicated” or “got saved again” at camp or during the revival meetings because I knew something was amiss. It wasn’t until I was OUT of the fundy teaching and had a chance to experience Jesus’ love and the Holy Spirit that I got EXCITED about Spiritual things and started to in just a tiny way understand what it was all about. Now when people ask me for my testimony, I don’t know if I was saved as a kid, or if I wasn’t really saved until I was an adult. So I just say that I was saved “Before the foundations of the earth” and leave it at that. (And a lot of the reason fundy kids’ testimonies sound so tame is because they are afraid to admit what-all they did and do.)

    4. No worries Uncle Wilver, we may laugh a lot at SFL but serious comments and discussions are always welcome. Like you I spent a lot of time worrying I might not actually be saved since my life was and always has been downright boring, not much contrast between the before and after when you’re saved at age nine. And when all the signs of being a depraved sinner are things you were never allowed to do anyway. . . The IFB focus on sin as an external contaminate really misses the mark 😛

      And Sims, I know what you mean, discovering what God’s grace really means and leaving fundyland has resulted in a time of significant spiritual growth. I may steal your “from the foundations of the world” line.

    3. I got to tour the Pacific Garden Mission a few years ago and watch a taping of “Unshackled”. That is a pretty amazing ministry, and I’m not sure I would label them fundy in the sense of the background I left, but definitely fundamental in what I consider a good sense. Biblical, not Pharisaical.

  18. The really neat thing about being “gloriously saved” was that it could change all those other things without you actually needing to be “saved”

    It also was very handy for avoiding spankings in christian school…long story

    1. Not for everyone it didn’t. I will never forget the story of a missionary lady who got saved at her Christian school when her teacher took her out to the hall for a spanking and first led her to the Lord. She got “gloriously saved” and still got the spanking anyway! :mrgreen:

  19. “A 10-year-old from one of our long-time church families was saved in Sunday School this morning, but a serial-killing-drug-dealer-with-long-hair was GLORIOUSLY SAVED during Tuesday visitation!” 🙄 Not all fundies are like this, to be fair. I have one fundy preacher in mind who refered to all salvations as “glorious.”

    For some, though, being dubbed “gloriously saved” seems to be more of a pride issue for them instead of actual praise to God for saving them. At my fundy U, there were a couple of students I knew personally that had been saved out of particularly sinful lives (which is wonderful, BTW, not trying to cheapen that at all). One of those students, though, would say often how she was “not proud of her life before Christ found her” while at the same time looking down on those of us who were raised in Christian families and saved at a young age. Yeah, clearly not proud at all.

    That’s why that phrase, used as it normally is, really annoys me. Though God can use past experience, even past sin, so that a Christian can be a help to someone going through the same struggles, past sin should NEVER be a point of pride. Yet this kind of thinking encourages it. 😥

    1. Maybe they get this idea from that one parable where one person owed a whole lot of money and the other only owed a little, but the person they owed it to forgave them both (or cancelled the debt) of both of them, so which one will love him more? The one who he forgave the most. They may be taking this to mean that if you haven’t been saved out of a life of deep sin, but either as a child or teen who has not done anything “really bad” you won’t love Jesus as much as the one who’s been saved out of a life of very deep sin. So the prostitute or drug addict will love Jesus more because He had more to forgive them for than that child of 10 who hasn’t done anything “really bad.” I don’t think that’s necessarily so, since all of us are bound for the same hell without Jesus whether our sins be little white lies or murder. We each need Jesus’ blood to cover our sins no matter how many or how few they are, or how big or little. So the person who hasn’t done anything “really bad” can love Jesus every bit as much as the one who’s done “really bad” things. That’s my opinion anyway. 😀

      1. I had been clean for 6 years with the help of 12 step programs before I got saved. I think that you guys might be getting this wrong. I always think of the fundy distinction of “gloriously” saved as meaning how fundy you look and act after you got saved since that is what they care about. I have no problem seeing the sins of all the church raised people, they are just as horrible as mine, I certainly have never thought of my salvation as any more glorious than someone who grew up in the church, what I have seen/experienced is that sometimes people who grew up in a christian family doubt their salvation, that is something I have never experienced.

        1. I agree, fundies do tend to view “gloriously saved” as a measure of how fundy the convert becomes immediately after being saved. I just mean that, among the ranks of the fundy “gloriously saved” , there are those who wear their past life as a badge of pride instead of rejoicing in their new life in Christ. It isn’t that their sins were worst or they were harder to save. The problem is that some of them seem to think that their “more interesting” testimony makes them better then those Christians who were saved younger or under less extreme circumstances.

  20. Both my spouse & I were gloriously saved (in the true, miraculous sense of the phrase) as very young children. In college, we both lamented our “boring” testimonies. The Fundy “sin is without & must not be touched” viewpoint cheapens salvation for all but the most obvious offenders. The viewpoint of sin being within all & all being equally depraved brings the glory of salvation back. Now we are both thankful for our testimonies, b/c God kept us from many experiences that could have left permanent scars. 🙂

    1. well said, ’tis true.

      We were all destined for Hell anyway, regardless of the level of unrighteousness.
      Sin nature is sin nature whichever way you look at it!

  22. I weary of the apparent affectation in the use of adjectives by some preachers. Gloriously saved is one of them. Praying in “the matchless name of Jesus” is another. Anyone have any more??

    1. Offhand no, but I know what you mean. I weary of this kind of bloviating pompous nonsense. Our former pastor was a master of it. His motto ought to have been, “Why use only 5 words when you can use 20?” Sometimes I’d get so fed up with him taking a half hour to say what it would have taken someone else only 5 minutes to say speaking plainly. Isn’t there something in the Bible about using “plainness of speech”? Using high faluting language to show off how learned you are only bores people. In my case, I may understand what he said but I sure wish he’d put it down on the lower shelf so everyone could understand it. All those extra words only take up more time. 🙄

      Our new pastor isn’t like that. He speaks a lot more plainly, and is a lot more down to earth. 🙂

      1. “Why use only 5 words when you can use 20?”

        Sounds like a college freshman’s term paper. Anything to fill ten pages. I think some preachers do that because it is easier than real study.

    1. Senda, have you been riding around in cars with boys again? 😯 😉 😛

  24. I struggled how I could make a fascinating testimony, since I’d never done anything most people would consider “bad.” I quickly realized that though I became a believe when I was 8 years old, that my life since then has changed and I went through many periods of disbelief and questioning God and the reason for my life. I use what God has taught me about my life as a part of my testimony because I believe I can help people see how God is relevant in our every-day lives after salvation. My testimony is more of a post-salvation testimony rather than pre-salvation. Our lives are all different, so our testimonies will be too.

    1. That’s so true. And I love hearing testimonies that focus on spiritual growth after salvation, instead of life before salvation. I think we can learn more from a fellow Christian when they tell us about the struggles in their spiritual lives and how they overcame them, then from stories about how “bad” they were before. As someone who personally struggled with assurance of salvation for many years, I’ve learned a lot from testimonies of people who have had the same struggles.

  25. Fundies tend to divide their -and everybody else’s-lives into “Before I Got Saved” and “After I Got Saved” and to them there should be a distinct difference.
    My own jouney has been more complicated than that.
    I grew up in a Christian family and until I was 13 i thought I *was* a Christian (I did all the things that Christians were supposed to do and more importantly did ^not^ do any of the things Christians were ^not^ supposed to do) I made a mental assent to the need for personal salvation about a month after my 13th birthday but not much changed, really. I had a more profound experience when I was 20, but bot much changed even then except I got involved in a somewhat-Charismatic group which started off good but eventually went down some *really* strange rabbit holes. A lot of people got badly hurt, including, me. I got angry at God and rebelled against Him completely in my late 20’s . I ended up going through 8 years of pure Hell -most of it self-inflicted – and dragged everyone around me through Hell too. I hurt a lot of people in those dark years and almost killed myself on several occasions. It was after one of those occasions that I ended up in a church, after a Tuesday evening meeting, spilling my gut out to a wonderful Christian called Norman, who prayed with me and the journey back to Faith, back home, began. It was a long journey, often difficult and torturous,but along the way I began to understand something of the incredible Grace of God.
    That is my testimony, at least the potted version of it. I wonder what a lot of Fundies would make of it. My journey *after* I Got Saved has been longer, more complicated, interesting and messy than before I got saved.

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