Salvation ! What is it? Both the American Heritage Dictionary and Merrim-Webster define salvation as:

Preservation or deliverance from destruction, difficulty, or evil.
A source, means, or cause of such preservation or deliverance.
Deliverance from the power of penalty of sin: redemption.
Merriam-Webser also has other definitions like Liberation from ignorance or illusion and deliverance from danger or difficulty.
But for the purpose of the writing I will be limiting the most popular definitions 1,2,and 3.

Each of the first three definitions use the word “deliverance”. What exactly does that mean? Dictionaries, again, give us a definition for this word:

The act of delivering or the condition of being delivered.
To be rescued from bondage or danger.
The act of setting free; release or rescue as from captivity, oppression, danger , or evil.

So when I speak of salvation, I mean deliverance or rescue. Rescue from what? My belief is that salvation is the rescue from the power of sin, it is rescue from the judgment or punishment that God says must happen because of our sin. Why must judgment happen? Because God created the world and everything in it to be beautiful and good I believe that he created us so that He could love us and not necessarily so that we would love Him. Don’t get me wrong, I believe His desire is for us to recognize His love and to thank and praise Him in all that we do.

I also believe that God loved us enough to not force his will upon us but to allow us the choice to love Him for his wonderful provision. He also did not originally create a world full of rules and regulations. At creation I believe He had only one rule and that was not to eat the fruit from the tree in the middle of the the Garden of Eden.

But the first of mankind disobeyed God and He called that Sin. The bible tells us that God is so good that He cannot even look upon sin or sinners. He turns his face from us when we sin.  Not that He becomes unaware of us, or that He no longer loves us, but we are unacceptable to Him for our sin.   Because he cannot even look upon us because of our sin, we need salvation. We need to be rescued/delivered from our own sin. To understand sin, we need to know that God does not grade sin.  I know that some people are very good and others are terribly evil.  For example, when we say something hurtful, or even just think saying it to another human, we have committed a sin. It is not a BIG sin, especially if we only think it but, it is still sin which, even though He does not desire to, it causes God want to turn his face away from us. You can see that none of us are perfect and pure and deserve God’s punishment. Sometimes we look at evil people and say that they really deserve God’s punishment. That is most likely true, but remember sin is sin, big or small; a little lie or taking something without permission is still sin.

So Salvation, (deliverance, rescue) where does it come from. It cannot be from Man because every man is a sinner. God has pointed that out when he says through Paul in Romans 3.23 ”for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. Salvation comes from God through Jesus Christ his son. It is His plan to rescue all who will come to Him and believe that He sent Jesus (his only son) to live a perfect life and then to be crucified for the world’s sin. That includes all of our sins. What we did, what we are doing, and what He knows we will do in the future. God took all of that sin and placed it on Jesus on the cross and sent Jesus to his death for those sins (yours and mine, past present and future). Remember the bible tells us the Jesus was not only human (born to a human woman) but he was also fully God which means He too is disgusted and horrified by any sin big and small and yet He was willing to accept all of that on His shoulders so that we might be rescued from our own sins. That sacrifice was not without the human struggle of fear and anxiety that He exhibited in the garden of Gethsemane in Mathew 26:36-45 nor the immense pain of having spikes driven through His wrists and feet. It was also not without the humiliation of being spit upon and called names by the witnesses of the cruxifiction.

So now we know that salvation is provided by God’s infinite grace because of His love for us. So how do we receive this great gift? Well for many years I was taught I needed to be good, I needed to do good works, I had to belong to a church and attend services whenever they were offered. Along with that I needed to ask for God’s forgiveness every time I fell short of the mark that was pretty much set for me by the church. Being good and attending church are great goals, and asking for forgiveness for falling short today is certainly very important but in my opinion, and what I have learned from God’s word is that none of those things will bring me salvation.

So how do we get salvation? How can we be rescued? Well it is so simple. For many years I heard or read about this promise in the bible. However, because of my early church years my heart kept saying that is too easy. If I know I am a sinner, I must have to do some kind of work, or penance, or something to be forgiven. But, what I was hearing and reading was telling me that I simply had to acknowledge that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and He died for my sins and then put my trust in that belief.

Now it is not like just saying I believe in Jesus.. It is more like believing in my heart that Jesus died for my own personal sins. That belief must be accompanied by trust.  In my heart I must trust that Jesus did this for me personally. The kind of trust I am talking about is like the kind of trust you put in a chair that you have never seen or sat in before.  But because you were told it was strong enough, you believed it would hold you. Therefore, you have faith in what you were told or what you have seen.  So you trust that it will support you when needed without ever having sat upon it. 

Our faith in Jesus means we trust what He said and what He did for us on the cross will allow us to stand before God fully forgiven of our sins and therfore have the knowledge that God the Father will be able to not only look upon us but will be able actually shower us with all of his love.

The bible tells us that, with this knowledge of salvation, we can look at the junk going on in the world today and not be anxious or worried about our future because we know where we are going to spend eternity without condemnation!