Salvation Declared

Salvific faith is not a single prayer.  That is to say that limiting the gift of salvation to asserting a belief in Jesus as the Son of God one time is an insufficient measure of salvation.  There are many who proclaim that they have sincerely been a Christian but what was once an inferno of love for God has long since become a flickering candle flame.  God wants more.

Salvation, the belief that bears fruit, requires more than an intellectual ascension to a set of theological assertions.  Faith is an activator, it is an expression of a deep, heartfelt, all-encompassing love for God.  Just because we can retort all of the orthodoxy does not make us saved.  Even demons have the right theology (James 2:19)!

Instead, and this needs to be clear, salvation is a daily, moment-by-moment, denial of self to the exaltation of Christ.  Life eternal begins now!  We have the privilege to worship the Holy Lord Almighty and His Holy Son, Christ Jesus.  This reality should cause more in us than intellectual agreement to credal statements about theology; salvation is a full-person endeavor, God asks for all of us or none of us!  Worship is the response!

There are hundreds of relevant passages in Scripture that deal with this phenomena of people not bearing fruit but believing themselves truly saved (an oxymoronic impossibility).  Yet, for our purposes, Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, the Parable of the Sower seems a fitting and appropriate place to begin the quest.  In this parable there are four possible soils for the reception of the Word: rocky soil, shallow soil, thorny soil, and good soil.  Many Christians believe they are, obviously, the good soil.  Francis Chan, in his book Crazy Love, puts the relevant statement forth as sharply as possible:

Do not assume that You are good soil.


We need to continue to pursue God in love and passion not for the goal of salvation but for the goal of meeting God!  Let us cast aside every thorn of the world and its lures, every rock of sin that weighs us down, and every half-hearted lukewarm religious habit so that we may run with perseverance the race that is marked for us and draw closer to the Lord and His Son!