WHAT IS MEANT BY BEING SAVED, OR SALVATION?

Well, it’s Sunday once again, so I decided to write about Salvation from my perspective as  Christian.  So let me lay a Biblical foundation for my beliefs.  Tomorrow, since I am in the Jewelry business, I’m going to talk about How to Buy a Diamond, so make sure you check it out.

Okay, now let’s begin by first laying a Biblical foundation for what I am about to say.  As you may know in the beginning, almighty God created the entire universe, including the little speck in the cosmos we know as Planet Earth.  (Genesis 1:1). God was surrounded by angelic creatures who worshiped Him because it was their nature to do so.  However, He wanted entities who would love Him because they wanted to, not because they had to. So, human beings were created for the express purpose of worshipping God.  If fact, we were created in the spiritual image of God so He could have someone to talk to. (Genesis 1:27).

A challenge for many of us, however, is that God deliberately created us with something many preachers and theologians refer to as “free moral choice.”  This means we could worship God because we wanted to.  It also means we could reject God if we wanted to. The penalty for disobeying God and breaking His laws was death.  Not just death in the physical sense, but death as eternal separation from God.  (Genesis 2:17). Our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, broke God’s law and incurred the death penalty for their sin by eating the forbidden fruit.  (Genesis 3:6). (In spite of what you my have heard, there is no Biblical evidence that the fruit was an apple.) ” However, God had mercy, and didn’t impose eternal separation from Him immediately.  Instead, He set up a system of sacrifice where animals would die on the altar for our sins.  From the time of Moses until Jesus was born, animals died on the altar of God so humans wouldn’t have to die for their sins.  (Leviticus 1:4). But animal death was only a temporary system of salvation.  The ultimate sacrifice was to be His own Son, Jesus Christ:  The Lamb of God.  God was willing to send His only Son to Earth as the supreme sin sacrifice.  Jesus was willing to undertake this mission and was born in a barn as the Lamb of God.  What better place for a Lamb to be born than in a barn? (Luke 2:6, John 1:29, Revelation 5:6). When Jesus died on that Roman cross, He paid the death penalty for all of us who accept Him.  Everyone from Adam to the thief on the cross who had watched in faith as animals died on the altar of God as their sin sacrifice was saved by the blood of Jesus on the cross.  And, all of us who look back to the cross and accept Jesus as our personal savior are saved by His blood, also.  (Acts 4:12).  So if all of this is true, what, then, must we do to be saved?  I’m glad you asked.

Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  So maybe you don’t commit sins of the worst kind.  Many good people haven’t.  But if we have thought one bad thought, said one bad word of left one good deed undone, we have sinned, and a perfect God will not have any sin at all in His perfect heaven.  We must realize sinners are condemned to death, spiritual death.  Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death.”  That means death is the penalty for any sin, small as it may seem.  (There are no big sins or little sins; sin is sin is sin.) We must realize, too, that we don’t get a second chance as in reincarnation.  Hebrews 9:27 says, “It is appointed unto man once to die, and after that the judgement.”  Our life on this earth is the only chance we will get to make that choice. Now God loved us so much that He sent His only Son, Jesus, into this life on earth, to live here and to die here, for us, in our place, so we can live in heaven after we die.  John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”  As I mentioned previously, God had a plan in the Old Testament, that in order to pay for sins, blood had to be shed.  The customs in the Old Testament used a lamb without spot or blemish to die – shedding it’s blood – for a person’s sins.  The lamb took away the sins of a person.  When Jesus died, He took our sins on Himself; He was the perfect Lamb, without spot or blemish because He was the only person to ever life a sinless life.  The reason He could live a sinless life is because He is God.  2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “He made Him, who knew no sin, to be sin for us, that we might be made righteous.” And what’s more, He died for us while we were still sinning!  Oh, how He must love us!  Romans 5:8 says, “But God commendeth His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

So how do I get saved, you might ask?  That’s what the Phillipian jailer asked Paul and Silas in Acts 16:30-31:  “Sirs, what must I do to be saved? An d they said, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall saved.” Acts 17:30 says, “God commands all men everywhere to repent.”  Repent means to turn around, to do things differently.  Phillipians 2:13 tells us when we are saved, God is a work in us helping us to please Him and also helping us to want to please Him.  So all it takes is a simple acknowledgement like the following:

 THE SINNERS PRAYER

Dear Lord Jesus, I know I am a sinner and I am sorry that I have sinned against you. I believe that you are the Son of God, that you died for my sins that I would have eternal life.  I invite you now to come into my life as my Lord and Savior.  Amen.

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