Dec. 13: Salvation by Todd Vaughn
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (1 Romans 6:23)
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. (9 Titus 2:11-14)
My wife came to me the other day with some paperwork to sign in order to complete some transition/ transaction and she was honestly a bit frustrated that she went through all the work to set up the transaction, but could not finish it because the account was in my name. Her hard work resulted in me only having to sign a document. I thought about it some and realized that there are a lot of things that I do a small part of it to complete it while she has done the “heavy lifting”. I try to be better about acknowledging this and showing gratitude, but I still fall short. I’ll feel guilty and try to do little things here and there to show that I have some value around the house. Admittedly, sometimes I do this to try and assuage this sense of guilt. I may be doing the right things, but for the wrong reason.
Salvation is like this. God did all the work by sending His only son to earth, suffering as a mortal and dying a painful death on the cross. Then we just need to “sign off” on it by accepting Jesus Christ as our Savior. Some of us then just go through these motions and tuck that acceptance into our pocket as a sort of a “get out of Hell free” card. Others of us realize the cost that God paid for our salvation and feel pangs of guilt which prod us to do good works so that we can try and earn this salvation. Our pride prevents us from accepting salvation as the wonderful gift that it is and we think that we can earn it somehow.
If you’ve ever read through Leviticus or Numbers, it’s a hard read, full of rules, rituals, processes, and very inefficient repeats of all of these. All this outlines the sacrifices that Israelites were required to make to atone for their sins. Jesus has become all of those sacrifices for every sin we have committed or will ever commit. God has not forgiven us simply because he loves us. His covenant with us requires atonement for sin and if God simply forgave us, he would violate his own covenant with us. He would be a liar. God put in all the work, all the pain, and all the suffering through Christ being crucified so that he would become for us, that atonement that is required. God did all the heavy lifting, we simply need to sign off on it. This can be tough because we must set our pride aside and realize that we are not worthy of this salvation, yet we have it because of Christ crucified. This makes us not only worthy, but fully holy, fully clean and blameless in God’s eyes. We become pure.
There is no amount of good deeds that we can do to earn any part of this salvation. In fact, sometimes we do these good deeds and become like the Pharisees, smug in our showy displays of benevolence. Lording these over others as if we are somehow better than them. We are holy, just as they are. No better, no worse….just forgiven. Becoming a Christian is easy…that’s salvation. Becoming Christ-like is a journey that involves working that salvation out into sanctification so that we can truly be the hands and feet of God on this earth…in service to Him. We will then do good things, the right things, for the right reasons.
—Todd Vaughn