The biggest and most dramatic need of mankind is to become
right with God. To become right with God is to become saved from
God's wrath and be renewed by the Holy Spirit and be given
eternal life (Matthew 25:46). This is called salvation. What is
salvation, and how can one become saved?
The moment of salvation is the moment of truth, when we take off
our rose-colored glasses through which we thought that somehow
all would be well with us, and we stop kidding ourselves that we
are really rather fine people. The moment of truth is when we
take our heads out of the sand and face the truth about
ourselves.
One truth that we learn from the Scriptures is that we are
desperately wicked. The Bible declares in Jeremiah 17:9, "The
heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who
can know it?"
The Bible says in Romans 3:10-18:
As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not
one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh
after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together
become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have
used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth
is full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed
blood: Destruction and misery are in their ways: And the way of
peace have they not known: There is no fear of God before their
eyes.
These verses tell us of a horrible truth that we must honestly
and frankly face. God is telling us that we are like poisonous
snakes. God is telling us that we are altogether rebellious
against Him in every fibre of our beings. All the good things
that we have been doing are not at all pleasing to God; we do
them for our own selfish reasons or because we think that through
them, God will look with favor upon our spiritual corpses in
which we have no life. Moreover, we are enslaved to Satan, who is
our master if we are unsaved (Ephesians 2:1-3).
Another truth that we must face is that because of our sins, we
are under the wrath of God. God's Word declares in Romans 6:23, "the
wages of sin is death." The death that God has
in view is not merely physical death but it is spiritual death.
That is, God declares that because of our sins, we must be
eternally in hell under the wrath of God, paying for our sins.
God created us good and after His image; therefore, we are
accountable to Him for our actions.
God says in Matthew 12:36, "But I say unto you,
That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give
account thereof in the day of judgment." Our
thoughts, words, and deeds, when viewed in the light of the
perfection of the law of God, will prove beyond a doubt that we
are sinners. To pay for these sins, we must be cast into hell and
suffer eternal damnation. What a heartbreaking, impossible future
there is for us if we are unsaved. We might have thought we were
good people with the best still to come in our lives, and now we
discover the awful fact that we are corrupt sinners subject to
the eternal wrath of God. Can there be salvation? Can there be a
way of escape from this horrible predicament?
Another truth that we must face is that God has provided a
marvelous, glorious, wonderful way of escape from our sins and
the wrath of God, and that way is through the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Bible tells us to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ (John
3:16). God so loved the world that He not only provided for the
redemption of the universe, but He also provided for the
redemption of those who recognize their bankrupt spiritual
condition and cast themselves on the mercy of God. For these
people, Christ became sin (II Corinthians 5:21), that is, Christ
took all their sins upon Himself. As our substitute, He was
judged by God as He stood before the Roman governor, Pilate.
Christ was found guilty for these sins, and God poured out His
wrath on Him as He, as our substitute, paid for these sins.
Wonderfully, we do not have to understand how all this happened.
However, it is imperative that we recognize the truth that in
Christ and only in Christ is there salvation. Somehow, through
Christ, God's wrath has been satisfied, and we are no longer
under condemnation before God. The Bible declares in Romans 8:1, "There
is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ
Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit."
Those who have placed their trust in Christ have realized their
hopelessly sinful and lost condition. They realize that their
sins were sending them to hell; they have begun to see the
terrible nature of sin, and within their lives, there is a
tremendous desire to turn from their sins. They know that Christ
must be Lord of their lives. Because Christ is God who has given
us His Word, the Bible, they begin to have an ongoing desire to
know more and more about His Word. As they learn from God's Word,
they want increasingly to be obedient to all that they find
there.
The Bible declares in I John 1:9, "If we confess
our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to
cleanse us from all unrighteousness." This
verse teaches us that somehow through Christ, those who trust God
will have their sins forgiven. This is what salvation is -- to be
saved from the wrath of God, which we otherwise deserve because
of our sins. Salvation is to abandon ourselves to Christ as our
only Lord and Savior.
Before we are saved, both in body and soul, we are spiritually
dead; we lust after sin. We are in rebellion against God and we
are slaves of Satan. By God's mercy, He reaches down into our
lives and begins to open our spiritual eyes and spiritual ears so
that we see our utter sinfulness, and we begin to hear from God's
Word the importance of turning to Christ as our only Savior, the
only Way by which we can be reconciled to God the Father. As God
works within our hearts, we begin to more and more sense our
terrible predicament. We realize that we are only a breath away
from eternity; and if we die without the Savior, we will
eternally be in hell. In our uneasiness, we begin to cry to God
for help. As the publican of old, we pray, "God
be merciful to me a sinner" (Luke
18:13).
At some point, unknown to us, God gives us brand new souls. The
soul is the spirit essence of man. The soul is the part of man
that leaves the body at death. If we are saved, it is in our
souls that we go to live and reign with Christ in heaven. It is
in our souls that we experience eternal life. It is in our souls
that we become born again. It is in our souls that we are new
creatures. It is in our souls that we have been raised with
Christ, that is, we have experienced the resurrection. It is in
our souls that we never wish to sin again. It is in our saved
souls that we have an ongoing, never-ending desire to be obedient
to God's Word.
Because our souls are brand new after we are saved, our lives are
quite different from what they were before salvation. It is true
that in our bodies, we still lust after sin. Our bodies have not
yet experienced the resurrection. But because we have received
our new souls, we feel terrible when we sin. In our new souls, we
feel violated by our sin. Therefore, we find true happiness only
as we live obediently before God. Increasingly, then, we deny the
lusts of the sin which our bodies crave, and we focus on the Lord
Jesus Christ, whom we earnestly love and who has become the Lord
of our lives.
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