Today we’re going to talk about salvation. What is it, and how do you get it? Spurgeon said,
Salvation is, in short, deliverance from sin, deliverance from the guilt of it, from the punishment of it, from the power of it.
Sin is like going to war with God. And God’s response, somewhat bafflingly, is adoption. God has chosen you, not because you earned it, but because he loves you.
JI Packer wrote that a “a Christian is someone who has God as father.”
Not only did He adopt us, but Paul writes that he predestined that adoption “before the foundation of the world.”
Predestination is a difficult topic, because it’s rubs up against our free will. We make choices every day, and get offended when those choices are taken away. But our few will is subject to, even a slave to our nature. Think about a lion – lions can, to some degree, make choices. But a lion won’t ever choose salad over meat, no matter how well we make the case.
And our nature is to sin. Calvin writes
…all of us tend to evil, and we are not only inclined to it, but we are, as it were, boiling hot with it.
It often doesn’t seem like we are totally depraved. We all know atheists who do good and love people – this also comes from God, a result of Common Grace. “The rain falls on the righteous and unrighteous.”
But ultimately, we cannot make it to even a decision for God on our own. Calvin writes that the faith that brings us to salvation itself is the fruit of the election, the choice of God. And that faith itself is the evidence of that election.
And that election was in place before the foundation of the world – just as Christ is called the “lamb who was slain before the foundation of the world.” And God didn’t look ahead and see that we would choose Him.
Why does God choose some and not others? Why does God not choose everyone? These things have not been revealed. These are among the “secret things” described in Deuteronomy 29:29.
Another thing revealed in this passage is that we have been chosen for a purpose – to be holy and blameless in love. The verse in Ephesians mirrors 1 Thessalonians 3:12-13. How are these concepts of being holy and blameless and of love connected? In God, they are inseparable. Too often we try to pry them apart, loving without seeking holiness or seeking holiness without love. But in reality at cannot separate them in ourselves or we will fail at both.
So we are saved in and for holiness and love, for and in “the Beloved” – Christ Himself. We are made to be monuments to the glorious grace of God in, for and through Christ.
So how do we respond? “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the patterns of your former ignorance,” writes Peter. We must look at how we act, speak and think. What in there mars our role as monuments to the grace of God? We should seek towards the holiness that God has already declared in us. God Himself will keep us from stumbling.
– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, July 19, 2020