Do You Know Why God Saved You? ~ blog

I think that is a pretty good question. Understanding that question, given the right information, I think helps us to live a more focused and purposeful life. It was the idea behind Rick Warren’s book The Purpose Driven Life which has only sold 12 million copies so it must be scratching some important itch Christians are having.

However, I am not thinking about what is God’s purpose in your life in terms of what does He want you to DO. I want us to consider who God wants us to BE. Once we are clear on who God wants us to be then what does He want us to do becomes much clearer into focus.

At some point in your life, if you consider yourself a Christian…or a follower of Christ you heard the gospel, understood you are a sinner who needs a Savior, and you placed your faith or believed in Jesus. You believed that He died on the cross for your sins and rose again from the dead…because He was God in the flesh and you want His death to pay the penalty for your sins.

At that moment you experienced what the Bible calls being born-again. We have all been born physically by our mothers, but this was a spiritual birth. We were born spiritually and given a new life…a spiritual life and became a member of God’s family. God has adopted you into His family and that free gift of salvation is an eternal event because once you are born again and have become one of His sons you are His forever.

Some view salvation as an agreement or like we are enrolling in God’s school and if we pass all our courses we get into heaven when we graduate from life. This would be a system I would call conditional salvation. You have been accepted into God’s University of Life and if you pass all your courses then when you die you graduate to heaven…if you have achieved a passing grade. That is essentially a “works salvation” and makes Christianity like every other world religion.

But that is not Christianity or salvation according to the Scriptures which simply and clearly says this in Ephesians 2…

“For by grace you have been saved through faith;

and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not a result of works,

so that no one may boast.”

It is a free gift. A gift cannot be earned. It is not a matter of are we good enough or have our good works outweighed our bad works. God has chosen you to be one of His children. He convicted you of your sinfulness and your need for a Savior and then He gave to you the faith to believe and you believed and became saved by His grace.

But the question still looms…WHY DID GOD DO THIS? Is there only something He wants me to do? Or, more importantly, is there someone He wants me to be? Life is a day-by-day process, and we are discovering more and more about who we are and what we are like. Unfortunately, we discover that we have a desire to want to do things that God tells us are harmful to us and some of those things are highly addictive.

Do you think that is who God wants you to be??? Of course not. However, life has a way that no matter how high we might climb on the success ladder of life we are only one slip away from falling a long way down. And some of us have fallen to rock bottom a number of times.

So…why did God save you? It is more than just the forgiveness of all our sins and the gift of eternal life. It is so that we can experience a life of being changed from who we were without Christ in our lives into becoming a person like Christ. We are to be becoming like Jesus.

Now here is the hard part we need to focus on because we have learned in life that…

If it is going to be…it’s up to ME!!!

Now that is only partially true. Because when it comes to spiritual life and becoming more like Christ there are things we must give ourselves to if a change is going to happen. And you have probably known what those things are for decades.

But what I want to focus on is not what we need to be doing but on what only God can do and wants to do in this process we call sanctification…or becoming more holy, more Christ-like.

That is who God wants us to be and that is why He saved us…so that we can become people conformed to the image of Christ.

Part of the problem is that may or may not be who we want to be. Our focus tends to be on earthly things. Being successful in our work. Accumulating all we need to provide for ourselves and our family. For our success to be known by others so they will be impressed by us. And as someone once said…when we reach the top of our ladder, we find it is leaning against the wrong wall.

All those things that we have been pursuing with all of our time and energy can become meaningless if we have become addicted to porn and sex and have been unfaithful to our wife and blown up our family. One may be sitting at the head of the corporate table as the CEO while at the same time relative to our family be sitting in the outhouse alone and smelling the stink we have produced.

What is more important to you? Success in life or becoming more like Jesus? Experiencing all the fame and fortune we can pile up on ourselves…or becoming a man who is caring and loving to others and able to help them in their struggles?

There is a word used in the New Testament that talks about this and it is the word transformation. Because the Christian life is not just us trying to make ourselves better…man I failed in that on a nuclear scale. Atomic bomb down the chimney of my life and everything and everyone blown to bits.

However, as God has been picking up the pieces putting Dumbty…emphasis on the Dumb I have learned about being transformed by the Spirit. That will be our focus as we learn that God saved us so that He could transform us into men and women being conformed into the image of Jesus.

More tomorrow…

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