Photo Credit: Cori Kindred
I fear that we have forgotten the greatness of salvation.
It is easy to speak of salvation in terms of life-change. We speak of a person coming to Jesus and then making better decisions or converting to Christianity and going to church instead of bars. While it is quite true that we made a choice to follow Jesus, we run the risk of cheapening the miracle of regeneration (being made spiritually alive) when we speak merely of decisions.
The truth is that we didn't merely "convert" to Christianity; we were raised from the dead.
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience...But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved. --Ephesians 2:1-2,4-5
We were born more than broken; we were born dead. We walked about in bodies made for spiritual life as well as physical, but in the absence of spiritual life we were but hollow vessels. Absent of the life we were meant for, we sought after the only pleasures we could feel (Ephesians 2:3). The dead don't know they are dead. When all you know of yourself is flesh, your flesh is all you know to please. For the person without spiritual life, it is hard to imagine that something more exists...until the Spirit awakens us to the reality of our own death.
The call of God is more than a comforting promise of a better life; it is God's offer to bring you to life. The life that God created you for, the life He planned for you before He spoke the starts into existence, the life that you didn't know existed before is available to you now. All that is required of you is to accept it. God doesn't just want to make you a better person; he wants to make you into a whole person. He wants to bring to life the part of you that you didn't even know existed. He wants to open up the tomb of your heart and breath life into the corpse that hides within it.
When God brings you to life it is with all the crashing realization of your own sin along with the pride-crushing magnificence of God's holiness, grace, and love. You are at once alive and in communion with the God who made you. Everything changes.
Tomorrow at restoration we will speak of what it means that we have been made alive as we study Ephesians 2:1-10.
Join us.