The Tenpenny Files with Bob Sjogren

I was once struck by a question from a good friend: What if becoming a Christian is not the finish line? What if being saved by the blood of Jesus is not the final chapter in our lives?

That question stayed with me.

Because you can believe in God. You can go to church, pray, read your Bible and know that you are saved. But Bob Sjogren introduced me to a distinction years ago that changed the way I understood my own faith: having a relationship with God and living in fellowship with Him are not necessarily the same thing.

What does God expect from us after we believe?

Bob returns to The Tenpenny Files with his Wilson’s Wisdom series, where he uses stories to explore some of the theological questions Christians may not think much about until suddenly they become very personal.

The first book begins with a pastor whose unmarried 22-year-old daughter becomes pregnant. Her boyfriend walks away, and her father responds by throwing her out of the house. Suddenly, everything he believes about sin, grace, forgiveness and fellowship with God has entered his own home.

Through that story, Bob introduces the difference he sees between our relationship with God and our fellowship with Him. He believes our relationship with God is secure, but our fellowship can be broken. He identifies four ways he believes Scripture describes that happening and explains how fellowship can be restored.

But I had another question for Bob, and this one came directly from my own life.

What happens when you pray about a decision, believe God is leading you, and then watch everything fall into place? The right people appear. The money is there. The opportunities open up. You move forward believing you are doing exactly what God asked you to do, and then the whole venture fails.

I’ve lived that, and I have struggled to understand it.

Did I misunderstand God? Did I mistake my own thoughts for His direction? If God really led me there, why would He allow it to fail?

Bob’s response was simple: “It failed, but your life didn’t fail.”

He points to Jeremiah and explains why obedience to God does not guarantee the outcome we expected. Sometimes what God is developing in us may be more important than whether the thing we built, started or pursued ultimately succeeds.

That leads into one of the larger questions behind Wilson’s Wisdom. Bob makes a distinction between being a child of God and becoming a disciple of Christ. Salvation, he says, is received through grace and faith. What we do after that is where discipleship, obedience and spiritual maturity enter the conversation.

We also talk about eternal rewards and a question I don’t hear discussed nearly enough: If our works do not earn our salvation, what does Scripture mean when it talks about being rewarded for what we do after we are saved?

These are the kinds of questions Bob has built into Wilson’s Wisdom. The series explores relationship and fellowship with God, discipleship, the glory of God, grace, works, forgiveness, obedience and spiritual maturity through characters who are forced to live these questions rather than simply discuss them.

Bob said something near the end of our conversation that brings us right back to where we started: Don’t be satisfied with simply being a Christian.

Maybe that question my friend asked me years ago is one every Christian should ask.

What if becoming a Christian really isn’t the finish line?

Meet our Guest

Bob Sjogren is president of Unveiling Glory, a ministry focused on challenging what he describes as self-centered Christianity and helping believers understand the larger purposes of God. He is also a co-founder of Frontiers, a mission agency to the Muslim world.

Bob has trained pastors and Christian leaders in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, Africa, South America and throughout the United States.

He and his wife, Debbie, have been married for 40 years. They homeschooled their four children for 20 years using the Bible curriculum they developed, Cat and Dog Theology, and today have four children and ten grandchildren.

Bob’s teaching and writing focus heavily on discipleship, fellowship with God, spiritual maturity and living for the glory of God. His Wilson’s Wisdom series brings those theological questions into fictional stories where the characters have to work through them in their families, marriages, churches and personal lives.

Website

TheMaturingTheBride.com

Homeschool Bible curriculum at CatAndDogTheology.org