WHAT DOES IT MEAN...TO BE SAVED?

What does it mean to be saved? - Jesus is not only Savior but Lord!!

It is more than "head knowledge" akin to "believing" that Christopher Columbus lived and discovered America, or George Washington lived and was our first President.

It is believing Jesus, who is The WORD, is truly The Son of God:  "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"  John 1:1  and that He came to earth as man, born of a Virgin, to be the sacrifice for our sins.  The act that restored the relationship with God & man as it was before Adam and Eve sinned in The Garden.  "And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world."  1 John 2:2  (Propitiation is an action meant to regain someone's favor or make up for something you did wrong.)

Salvation is not only escape from punishment for our sins, it is deliverance from sin.  While salvation is an immediate, instantaneous birth or act, we are not at that moment made perfect in purity. Just as we are born, in the flesh as a small, helpless infant and then grow into adulthood and maturity, we obtain pardon from our sin and grow in purity by the working of His indwelling Holy Spirit. This is a long, arduous, progressive work. 

Salvation is conformity to Jesus, as well as faith, trust and reliance upon Him. It is a change of heart, a changing of character, a whole new view of who He is and who we are because He is in us.  It is the manifestation of the nine gifts of the Spirit:  "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith. meekness, temperance:  against such there is no law."  Galatians 5:22-23  

Quoting Newman Hall: "It is the humbling of pride, the curbing of the passions, the destruction of self-will.  It is the undoing the work of all former years, the untwisting the coils which the devil had long been winding round us, and the training us to new habits of thought and action."

We serve God not out of fear of punishment but out of our love for Him.  Our changed heart transforms us and gives us a new life. We not only avoid sin, but we begin to hate it.

"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature:  old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.  And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation."  II Corinthian 5:17-19 

Be sure Jesus is your LORD

and not just your fire escape.

     

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