Salvation According to Christ

All right!  So it's the start of a new month, so it's as good a time as any to get this blog rolling!

I'm not sure what really makes a good first blog post, but I though I would just share something that I took away from worship tonight.  Here's some context:  I am a member of the Geneseo Intervarsity Christian Fellowship chapter, and every Friday night we get together to worship and grow closer to God.  Tonight was a little different in that instead of a message, we did a manuscript study.  We studied Luke 7:36-50.  If you're not familiar with it, check it out here.

In summary, Jesus is invited to dine with Simon, one of the Pharisees.  While he is there, the meal is interrupted by a "woman of the city" (a euphemism for prostitute) who cries on Jesus's feet, wipes the tears away with her hair, and anoints his feet with expensive ointment from an alabaster jar.  The visitors of the meal are upset and appalled that this 'sinner' would disturb them, but Christ asks through a parable if a person with a larger or a smaller debt would love the one who forgives the debt mroe.  The consensus is that the person who had the larger debt loves the one who forgave him more.  Christ informs the dinner party that this woman, whose sinners were many, is forgiven because of the great love that she demonstrated.

As part of the manuscript study, we tried to find the main point of the passage.  I was paired up with my friend Bailey, and we were trying to condense down the huge concept to something simple.  It turns out that she and I are very similar (I'll probably blog more about that at another time).  We are both visual people, so we were trying to come up with a diagram that demonstrated the passage in simple terms.  It took several tries until we came up with one that worked.  This was my first try:

 

 Bailey didn't seem to think that quite did it, which stumped me because I (naturally) thought I had it down.  She pointed out that the passage at hand didn't say anything about repentance.  Christ tells the woman that her love and faith has saved her.  In this passage, the woman does nothing to repent of her many sins; she just showers Christ in the love of which He is worthy.  It turns out that the model above is really a model of our modern conception of salvation.  It was the first thing that came to mind for me because that's what I've always been taught.  You have to repent of your sins in order to receive salvation.  But Christ doesn't seem to say that in Luke 7:35-50!  What does that say about our modern-day model of salvation?

We played around with the model a little bit more, and after a few more tries we finally came up with a new version.  It looks like this:
  

It looks a little more complicated because it's not a nice, neat circle.  But it's really a far more Biblical way of looking at the salvation process.  Let me break it down.

Step 1 - LOVE:  Love comes from God because God is love.  Therefore, love is the first step in salvation.  This holds true in the Old Model as well, but it has an even more important role in this model.  Here at Step 1, Average Joe (A.J.), an unsaved person, discovers the love of God and begins to love God in return.  According to Luke 7, faith and love is all that is needed for salvation to take place.

Step 2 - FORGIVENESS:  Because A.J. loves God and has accepted God's love for Him, He is granted the salvation that Christ bought by dying on the cross.  He receives the Holy Spirit and becomes a new creation.

Step 3 - LOVE:  A.J. has been given new sight and freedom from the bondage of sin.  He has received Christ's mercy even though he has done nothing to deserve it.  This increases the love that he has for God and for Christ's sacrifice.

Step 4 - REPENTANCE:  Because A.J. now has the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of him, he can begin to see his own iniquities.  He becomes aware of the things in his life that  are ungodly.  He starts to turn away from them and draw closer to God.

Step 5 - FORGIVENESS:  Christ's forgiveness doesn't stop when we say the prayer.  His death covers all of our sins forever, and this is an active process.  For every sin that A.J. may commit as he struggles to live a godly life, Christ's blood erases it.  A.J. may struggle with bitterness, the remnants of addiction, or other fragments of sin left in his heart, but Christ is always taking those things away.

Lather, rinse, repeat.  If this cycle continues, A.J. is even more in love with God for the forgiveness he continually demonstrates.  As he continues down his spiritual walk, he will repent of things and surrender them to God, and Christ will always forgive them.  With every new God Moment like this, A.J. loves God more.  It's an endless, beautiful, incredible cycle.

I have never understood salvation this way before.  But as I grow in Christ every day, I'm putting away childish things that I learned in Sunday School as a child.  These things were great then; imagine trying to explain this New Model to a hyper five-year-old.  Now that I am older, though, I need to dig into the Word and really learn what God has to say about concepts that I think I know everything about.  I might be really "familiar" with the Bible, but that does not exclude me from its study.

I will close with a quote a friend posted on Facebook earlier:  "When it comes to the Bible, we must be careful to not let familiarity cause complacency. Even if we’ve heard it a thousand times, every verse in the Bible is full of wisdom and power from the Holy Spirit."  -Aaron Gray

To God be the Glory,
Sarah