This week I’ve been working on a theology project about salvation and its implications. What I have concluded is that salvation is a multifaceted, intricate, complicated, and yet excruciatingly simple truth. I would try to boil down salvation to one sentence, but every time I attempted to do so I was lead to continue describing it. One explanatory only led me to another, and to another, because there’s just so many different ways to look at it. I am hesitant to even try to get into it because I get so buried in information. We are all sinners, and slaves to our sin. God sent his perfect son Jesus to pay for our sins with His own life. This has vast implications for the whole world. God’s plan seems to be and alway shave been to restore the world to himself. Even from the very beginning of earth He talked about Jesus and how he would kill sin. The salvation and redemption of the whole world has always been on his mind. Amazing! It also has vast implications for each individuals inner being. God chooses us for salvation. Strangely enough, it is also up to us in our free will to choose salvation. Mysterious, no? For some there is a dramatic experience of release from bondage, and for others like myself salvation is a slow development over the course of our lives. I became a Christian when I was very young, so I didn’t have a great weight of sins to be rescued from. So my salvation experience is a process that I’m still growing through. One thing that I have struggled with is the fact that I have been made clean. I always feel that I need to strive and strive and strive towards God’s grace and love, and I feel incredibly dirty when I sin. I feel as if I am unclean until I repent anew. What I am realizing now is that salvation was not MY idea. It was not from my work that I was saved! It was God who chose me and keeps me clean out of his own initiative. It is important to repent, but I must not think that my “savedness” relies on my latest sins being repented of. I am CLEAN! I am new – the old me died. I need not give in to the desires of my flesh. The Spirit of God lives within me! I can rest in the assurance of His love. And maybe, just maybe that’s the solution to overcoming my flesh. Abiding in the Love of God.
There is so much more to be said on this subject… Pages and pages and books and series of books couldn’t begin to describe the amazing grace of my God. He is just. that. amazing.
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