Already, but not yet.
With the initial belief and profession, I am His. Justified. Professed with my mouth and believed in my heart - Savior and Lord. Adopted. In God's sight, made right. By the blood of Christ my freedom paid for. His death taking the place of my deserved punishment. I am saved.
Yet, the transformation of my heart of stone to one of flesh is not complete. I still struggle and wrestle with temptation and, more often than I care to admit, succumb to it. Many times, over and over again the same sin will trip me up. I am learning daily what it means to be a "little Christ," a Christian. He is my Lord and I desperately desire to obey, to make Him proud, to glorify Him -But- like Paul writes, I do the things I don't want to do. And, the things I do want to do, I find myself not doing them.
I have come a long way. I have learned a great deal. I still have a tremendous journey ahead of me. I am being made like Christ, I am in a state of sanctification. I am still being saved.
Ah! But the promise I hold to, the thing I know most assuredly, that was proven by Christ's own resurrection and is my victory to claim as well - God will finish the work He has begun in me. Every promise of the Bible is mine to own, to know as truth and to live out.
The day will come when I no longer have to battle my selfish, prideful, sin nature. This dark world, groaning now, will be completely new. No more war. No more pain. No more tears. It will be as He intended it to be when He created it in the first place. This place will be finally redeemed.
In the new heaven and on the new earth, where the old will be completely gone and the new wholly established, I will be too. I will be finished. I will be just like Jesus. I will be just as He is. Glorified. My salvation will be done.
Notice that in this three part salvation, NONE of it is up to me.
I could not start the process. Jesus did that. While I was still a sinner, dead in my sin, He came and humbled Himself to die in my place. The faith to believe, the circumstances of my place and time of birth, the parents who took me to church, none of these contributing factors and more were up to me to decide. It was all a gift of His amazing grace.
Once the process was initiated, God placed a piece of Himself- the third part of the Trinity, within my heart. The Holy Spirit working from within, revealing the scriptures, convicting me of my sin, teaching me the way to live, and supernaturally enabling me to do what I can not do on my own. Without His intimate and active involvement, even though I am "saved," I still cannot meet God's standard of Holiness. I NEED Him to live as I am called to live.
The longer I walk with God, the closer we become, the more I know that only He can rectify all that has gone wrong with His creation. I see and experience how He keeps His word and, as a result, that Jesus alone, when He returns, can fully banish Satan from this realm. When that happens, every knee will in FACT bow and every tongue WILL confess that HE is Savior and Lord. What a day that will be!
I am saved. I am being saved. I will be completely saved - but none of it, my life with all it's trials, is about me, the one being rescued.
My life and, more importantly, my salvation, this three part process, is all about the ONE who is doing the saving.
Why did I write all this out here, in this forum for ministers' wives? Ladies! Too many of us don't understand this. We are striving to achieve a salvation on our own by serving and doing. Too many of our church members view their faith as a series of check lists of things they can and cannot, should and shouldn't do. My heart is to teach and encourage Christians to know these things and to live them.
Let's stop striving for our salvation and start resting in it . . .
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