Day 1 

Be Saved

 

   Life with God begins when a person realizes his deep need of God, understands the inescapable reality of the magnitude, power, and consequences of sin, looks to Jesus for the miracle of grace in redemption, and asks the Lord to come into his heart and save him.

   The request must be heartfelt and unconditional.  Nothing can be held back. 

   With that said, it is possible for a person to be saved by a process and not an event.  One might have been raised as a Christian, having always genuinely accepted and owned his or her living faith, but cannot point to a particular moment when he or she  became a Christian.  The conversion by process is genuine so long as this person can honestly and intently look at his or her life at present and say, “I know beyond all doubt that I am saved by grace and my life is fully committed to Christ.”

   The invitation is to come to Christ and die to self.  If you do not come to die, then don’t bother coming at all.  Not yet.  Do not make the ascension of Mt. Calvary to perceive and receive the glorious suffering and redemption there having not even removed your sandals to tread on such holy ground.  Wait until you are ready.  Wait until you are prepared to cut out your heart as well as discard your shoes.

   There Jesus died in your place, paying the penalty for your sins.  You ought to weep for such a love as this.  Behold His sufferings; they should have been yours and mine.  But this was the only way to satisfy justice and still preserve us.  The Son of God had to come and take our place as a substitute. 

   You must see your desperate need and the necessity of His sacrifice.

   If you take it lightly, your Christian faith will forever lack weight.

   The great theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us that the grace of God is free, but it is not cheap.  He said in his classic, The Cost of Discipleship, “Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church.  We are fighting today for costly grace…Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.  Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

   Today is, indeed, the day of salvation, but salvation cannot be rushed along by fear of suffering or hell and a lip service commitment as sanctuary from misery’s flames.  The heart cannot be hurried.  A false conversion today can lead to an unredeemed life, giving worthless assurance with very tragic consequences of cosmic proportion.

   Mere confession that is not heartfelt is not sufficient to save.  The heart must be changed.  The mark of the Christian covenant with God is a circumcised heart.

   As Jesus said, no man who puts his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of God. 

   Let the dead bury their dead, come and follow Jesus, and go and preach the Kingdom of God.  Leave your fishing nets, drop everything, and run after Him.  Never stop.  Shadow Him forever.

   Until you are ready for such surrender and submission, such complete commitment, your heart is not ready for salvation. 

   The churches are full of the incompletely committed.  It has cheapened our witness to the world and done the Church immeasurable harm.

   The church is wrongly viewed as a place of sanctuary and preservation of our lives.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The church by the wayside should be viewed with awe and trepidation as a very dangerous house of power.  People go in and come out radically changed.  They are never the same again.  The church is a place to die and live again.  You go to church to die out to self, not preserve yourself.

   People may say, “Such a standard is too high.”  But Jesus set such a standard.

   When I was young, I was a pole vaulter.  I found that if in practice I would set the bar much higher than what I had formerly cleared, I would make greater progress.  If daily I stretched and reached to go a foot higher than my personal best, in meets I could easily go a couple of inches higher than in prior competition.  In time, I attained the ambitious extra foot of height. 

   Then I set the bar another foot higher.

   I kept setting it far above my previous “ceiling”. 

   If the standard is high, and we yearn to achieve it, our performance will improve.  We perform according to our standards.

   Set the standard above all reasonable expectation.  Jesus did not shrink from it.

   To use a modern pop culture illustration, think of the movie Forrest Gump from a few years back.  If you saw it, recall that Forrest suddenly began running across America.  He crossed it several times.  After awhile, he attracted followers who ran with him.  Forrest was indifferent to their presence.  He was fully committed to his consuming compulsion to simply go; he didn’t know how far.  He had dropped everything in a moment to run his odyssey.  His followers had to do the same. 

   One day in the desert, Forrest stopped.  He suddenly announced, “I’m tired.  I’m going home now.”  At this proclamation, his followers asked, “Now what are we supposed to do?”

   Like Forrest, they had no idea why they were running.  He just seemed to have a point to his life and knew where he was going.  Alas, he was all too human.

   They were used to following him.  They couldn’t just go back to their meaningless lives.  In all their miles of following him, they had learned nothing of finding meaning for themselves. 

   Fortunately, unlike Forrest, Jesus won’t quit and go home.  He is still here, running impossible distances in the person of His Holy Spirit.  He truly knows where He is going and why.  And we must run with Him.  He will help us achieve the impossible time and again.

   When we are saved, our lives are no longer our own.  We run until we die. 

   Do not turn back to your former so-called life.

   Lot’s wife looked back as she was being saved out of wickedness and she turned into a pillar of salt.

   To be saved, you must want Jesus as Lord as well as Savior.  To be saved means giving up all control of your life to God. 

   This is the new birth.

   The question of the ages was uttered by those who heard Jesus say that it was easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.  Astonished, they asked, “Who, then, can be saved?”

   Jesus plainly and simply answered, “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”

   On another occasion, He explained further to a Pharisee named Nicodemus, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.  That which is born of the flesh is flesh.  That which is born of the spirit is spirit.”

   No man can save himself from sin.  The attempt is hopeless if reliance rests completely upon human finitude. 

   But the classic hymn by Horatio G. Spafford, It is Well with My Soul, sets forth the miraculous gospel hope:  “Let this blest assurance control, that Christ has regarded my helpless estate and has shed His own Blood for my soul.” 

   As the Word declares, it is by grace through faith that a person is saved.  It is not of works lest anyone should boast.

   Building a tower to Heaven has been tried in Babel.  It failed.  That proud edifice is no more.  Its attempted construction resulted only in confusion, division, and disappointment.

   Seek to ascend no ladders to Heaven.  Jesus has descended to you.

   The problem at Babel is the problem that has persisted in human relations with God since the very beginning.  That problem is sin.  Its presence ruins all efforts at entering a relationship with God on the basis of our own strength and righteousness.

   The word “sin” is a military word.  The ancient Romans used it in archery practice.  If an archer’s arrow landed anywhere outside of the bull’s-eye, the instructor would shout “Sin!”   The shot was outside of the center.

   Sin is missing the mark, the center of God’s will.

   We are outside of Christ, the center, and need to get in.

   As the Word declares, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

   And again, “There is none righteous; no, not one.”

   Since God is perfectly holy and Heaven is a place of perfection, who can enter paradise with the taint of sin?  And who can remove its stain?

   No mortal man can.

   That is why we must be saved by grace through faith.  The Word says that salvation is not of ourselves.  It is the gift of God.

   God foreordained from the foundation of the world that any that would come to Christ with repentant hearts full of faith would be saved.  God would draw them to Himself.  He refuses none of these.  This was God’s predestined plan for His elect. 

   In the fullness of time, God sent His Son Jesus, the Christ, to die on the cross for the sins of the world.  Jesus knew that this was His mission.  When he talked to Nicodemus, He uttered the famous and immortal words, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life.”

   Whosoever.   That means you.  That means me.

   His shed Blood on the cross made possible the cleansing of the stain of sin.  Nothing else can wash it away.

   The nail scarred hand of Christ plucked your arrow from outside the center and planted it forever in the bull’s-eye.

   You didn’t do it.

   He did it for you.

   But you must believe it.

   That you must do.

   To be saved, you must realize that all of your sins were nailed to the cross.  Jesus died in your place.  He took the judgment and punishment for your sins.

   And there is more.

   After realization must come dedication and perpetration.

   What you must do is to be willing to die to self and sin and turn your life completely over to Jesus.  That is what belief entails. 

   Only believe and lose all to gain Christ.

   Your old, sinful self must be crucified with Christ.

   And yet, you will live. 

   In reality, you were never spiritually alive before.  As the Word says, you were “dead in your trespasses and sins.”  Christ has made you alive in Him through His death and resurrection.

   You live because you are born again as a new person in Christ.

   As the Word declares, “Behold, all things have become new.”  The old things have passed away.

   Bury them quickly and never return to the grave.  Do not allow rottenness to lie about your clean spiritual house.  Do not carry around the old corpse in a bag.  Throw these horrors out.  Put them far from you, lest they defile again what Christ has made pure.

   You are a new creature in Christ.  You are a new creation.  You are a son or daughter of God.  You are a high priest and king.  You are an inheritor of all that belongs to Christ.  All of these things the Word declares of you.

   The born again believer, you see, is radically changed by his salvation.

   That is why being born again requires a radical decision.  For those who have been saved by a life process rather than an event, it requires a radical, present reality of their commitment to Christ.  A lukewarm salvation is no salvation at all.

   The Word declares that God will spew the lukewarm from His mouth.

   That is why Jesus spoke of the road being straight and narrow that leads to life.  Broad is the way, He said, that leads to destruction.

   Mere religiosity and inconsistent piety have no place with Christ.  His words do not support it.  His life does not support it.

   Being born again is a radical thing.  Nicodemus learned it.  Those who followed and heard Jesus learned it.  Jesus set the standard high.  We must learn that.

   Who, then, can be saved?  Those who respond to the attraction of the Holy Spirit to Christ and, by the grace of God, give their hearts and lives by faith wholly over to Jesus.

   Those who desperately and incessantly want Christ, the center.

   Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.

   Following Jesus is a radical adventure.  But grace will supply even the most rigorous demands of God upon our lives.

   Grace alone vaults you over the highest bar.

   God would have us either cold or hot.  The hardest people in the world to share the gospel with are those who feel that they are righteous in themselves.  Better to talk about Christ to the worst heathen who knows it than the self-righteous church member or secular saint who feels he is a good person and therefore worthy of God’s mercy and grace.

   Such a one has no real perceived need of Christ.

   God wants you hot in your humility before Him.  He wants you to be set aflame by your dependence upon His love.  You stand before Him like a living torch that cannot be consumed, a bonfire for all vanity.

   Humility is not servility.  Humility is not groveling like a worm in the dust.  Humility is obedience and surrender to God.

   Many was the time as a young man that I went forward in revival meetings to be saved.  I prayed the “Sinner’s Prayer” several times.  I swore rash, useless oaths, making many promises to God.

   But I always went back soon enough to sin and my old way of living.  Like Lot’s wife, I tried to flee the wrath of God and escape by His grace and guidance, but I looked back.  I became frozen in my sin, a pillar of salt half-way to Heaven, a warning and memorial to others along the Way of what happens to those who are double-minded.

   But one day, by the grace of God, I said with deep finality, “I am sick and tired of living like this.”  I got down on the floor and for four hours confessed my sin and need for God.  I truly and earnestly gave God my heart and life.

   You don’t necessarily need to pray for hours in order to be saved.  Lightning need not strike you and the thunder need not roll.  But they might.  The event of the reality of your salvation matters, not the experience.  People who chase experiences are not following Christ.  The point is that your soul needs to be prepared.  Be ready to let go of everything.  An old wineskin cannot hold new wine, as the Word declares.  It will burst.

   The old Methodists used to have Mourners’ Benches in the front of their sanctuaries back in the days when they were more intentional about revival.  There the new converts would come at the invitation of the Holy Spirit and pour out their souls to God, getting broken up so that God could rebuild. 

   Sadly, the only place you see the Mourners’ Benches nowadays are in antique stores.

   When I bowed down to receive the Lord, I was a sinner on the way to hell who had been a mere lip-service confessor of Christ.  There will be many in hell suffering its torments while still loving Jesus in a measure.  No doubt they will weep and howl in self-pity, perhaps feeling that God did them an injustice for rejecting their half-hearted devotion.  But their love was not sufficient to leave all to follow Him.

   Jesus said repeatedly to Peter, and to us, that if we love Him, we will feed His sheep.  The life of a shepherd is a difficult and dangerous one, leading the flock to new pastures and protecting them along the way.  It can be a lonely life, exposed to the elements and wild things while offering sparse food and few places of comfort for sleep.

   I bowed down a sinner who had lived entirely for himself, but who had finally recognized that life in Christ meant a life of service in the Kingdom of God.

   At last, my dedication and perpetration matched my realization. 

   Indeed, it could be well argued that our realization of our need of Christ is not what it should be until we are fully prepared to unreservedly commit our lives to Him.  Realization, dedication, and perpetration must all line up.

   I rose up a born again Christian having eternal and abundant life.  There was not one particle of my former self that deserved it.  Once my soul recognized that dark reality, that I was completely undone by my sin, I was ready for the Light of the gospel and salvation.  Once I threw down all of my absurd defenses and fully surrendered, I was ready for victory.

   I realized that my grand and unsinkable life had met the same fate as another proud luxury liner.

   So, I did more than rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and play “Nearer My God to Thee” while the ship sank.  It was not inevitable that I go to hell a half-Christian.  I finally abandoned ship, trusted my soul to the deep, icy blue, and joyfully caught hold of the lifeline Jesus threw my way.

   Unlike the Titanic of history, there are always sufficient gospel lifeboats.

   I cast myself over the rail while some, shaking their heads at my desperate leap, played on.  They would go down more serenely, they thought, to a common place with me in Davy Jones’ Locker.  Having a forlorn, mere hope of Heaven, they clung to the ship and those precious last seconds of life on earth.

   But my crazy leap of faith flung me instead into the vault of Heaven.  I clung to Christ and, certain that I would live, threw myself into certain death.

   It gave me more than a pious, religious, half-hearted hope of Heaven.  I needed more than hope.  I needed the assurance that only radical faith can bring.

   They died.  I lived.  I lived because I gave up hope and chose faith.

   Once I really gave God my heart, my life changed for good.  Jesus became the most important “thing” in my life.  I immediately began to bear fruit that bore witness to my repentance.  This time, I did not return to my folly, as the Word says, like a dog to its vomit.

   Certainly, though, I have sinned since the day I was born again.  My sins still mount up to Heaven, though not quite so fast.  The former ways try to come back.  Sometimes they succeed, even for a season. 

   But my attitude toward my sin changed.  I am persistently vigilant in my heart against it and sincere in my progress toward further maturity in my walk with Christ.

   No doubt, I continue to sin.  Since I was born again, though, I am no longer a sinner.  I am a son of God.  The Son of God gave me that status by grace through faith.  Though I am one who sins, don’t call me a “sinner” because the Word says that I have been set free from sin.

   What’s in a name?

   The summary of one’s life and being, that’s what.

   A person is defined by their greater aspects.  The redemptive grace of God at work in me is far greater than both the temptation to sin and the actuality of sin yet in my life.  I rightly refuse to be defined by my minor negative aspects.  I sensibly and honorably choose to be defined by the major positive that most powerfully shapes who I am and what I do. 

   No, at the end of the day, I am not a sinner.  I begin and end my days by grace.  Naming me a “sinner” is a verdict and label that is out of balance and touch with reality.  It is a narrow-minded, sin-obsessed slur.  It names my former state of shame and, by its continued usage, attempts to beat me down and keep me down, never allowing me to break free from its confinement.

   Like I said, then, don’t call me a sinner.  I am no longer a slave to sin.  That is the name of my former master and I have escaped to freedom under the mastery of grace. 

   What, then, shall I be called?

   I am the righteousness of God in Christ.  I have been made to be such---brought to that impossibly high and exalted state---by the grace of God.  I have left my slavery chains and rags far down below.  When God sees me now, He sees Christ in me.  I stand in the place of Christ, in His very footsteps before the Throne of God, because I belong to Him.  I am a son in the Son and God is proud of me.  Jesus, the High Priest who sits at the right hand of the Father, checks off on me.  I have divine favor.

   That’s why I do not grovel before God.  Though I often kneel before God in prayer to show my humility, worship, and desire of service to Him, in heavenly places I am standing straight up before His throne.  It was said of old in the Word that no man may see God and live.  But God has chosen to reveal Himself to me in Christ.  I can now look on His face without shame.  If I fall on my face before Him, it is in holy awe and adoration.  All terror has been taken away.

   Sin has no more power over me.  Jesus broke that power on the cross. 

   Again, I am no longer a slave to sin.

   Its death has no more dominion over me.

   I am no longer a child of the devil.  Jesus told some of those who heard Him that they were of their father, the devil.  So it is with all who are not saved.  They have not received liberation from sin, death, hell, and the devil.  They have not left their chains and rags far down below.

   In the Name of Jesus, I am a free man now.  I lack for nothing because God supplies all of my need.  I walk in life, not death.  I am in the Light, not the dark.  I am bound for Heaven, not hell.

   All of this benefit I gain because Jesus died and rose again for me.  He did it because of God’s love and mercy.

   He took my salvation seriously and made a serious choice, sacrificing all for me.

   Should I do less, hoping that a half-hearted faith will save me?

   God forbid!

   Let all who are drawn to Christ, who come to Him for salvation so full and free, fully and freely give their all to Him!

   Hold nothing back.  A bag of silver may hang you in the end.

   Being born again means radical change.

   It can be no other when the power of sin departs from a person.

   It can be no other when the glory of the Almighty enters into a person’s heart.

   All glory be to God, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who from first to last saves us by His grace. 

   Grace, you see, is the unmerited favor of God.

   It is by His grace, that wondrous favor and mercy, that we are sealed until the day of redemption in Heaven.  I cannot lose the great gift of salvation because it is not I who hold to God.

   It is God who holds me.