There is a drastic difference between the salvation that God provides and the salvation of men. Men provide a temporary, insufficient salvation that is more like a cowering hiding from the threats of life. The salvation of God is a whole salvation. Through sanctification we are transformed into His likeness and thereby accept the fullness of our salvation. At the new birth, we are made into a new creation by the uniting of our spirit with the Spirit of Resurrection. Our spirit, then, is made whole – this is the salvation of the spirit. When the Lord returns we will be raptured to meet Christ in the air, while we are being drawn up to Him we will receive our resurrected bodies – this is the salvation of our bodies. The salvation of our souls is accomplished by the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, but it takes the days of our lives to work that salvation into us like yeast into dough. The salvation of God is the combination of these three.
When God saves, He saves fully. He loves the human body and proves this by pouring out healings as an act of love. A woman touched Jesus’ prayer shawl because she knew that if she only touched it she would be healed. The word used for “healed” or “made well” is the word ‘sodzo’, which means “salvation”. This woman had been sick with her condition for over a decade and as soon as she touched the Messiah’s tassels she was completely healed. All it takes is one touch of the supernatural and all of a sudden we are holy, wholly holy. It is not a matter of getting holy, fixing ourselves so that God will speak to us or be with us. That is man’s salvation, works. And it does not work
What Jesus said was that we were made clean by the word that He had spoken. We have had it all backwards! He speaks and we are clean. We have been taught a doctrine of demons that we must be clean for Him to speak to us. What we do does not affect our salvation or our cleanliness before God. When John recorded what Jesus said in John 15:3, he used the word for clean that implies ceremonial cleanliness, perfection with regard to the Law. That is great news because Jesus said that unless we have a righteousness that surpasses the most lawfully righteous people group of His time, we have no way of coming to God. But relationship with God does not depend on lawful righteousness, for if righteous came through the Law, Jesus died for nothing at all.
That old law is powerless, glory-less, and only good for establishing that men cannot escape eternal condemnation but by eternal sacrifice. Moses was the high priest of the law, but he died and when the high priest dies there is a change in the law. Our High Priest, however, died and came back to life and was therefore given the right to judge the living and the dead. He is the High Priest of the New Covenant which is powerful, glorious and effective in releasing men from bondage into freedom to walk in the power of the age to come. If we are in any capacity ministering from the old covenant, we are ministering death and not life and will receive judgment for doing so.
If for some reason the Law still stands authoritatively in our lives, we have not opened the door for grace to enter in and fully set us free. And grace is not merely “unmerited favor”, it is the “empowering presence of the Holy Spirit”. This is why we say things like “she has a real grace for intercession”. It isn’t favor that helps you pray long ours, it is an empowered presence of the Spirit that makes laboring for breakthrough easy and restful. It is foolish to try to save ourselves, attempting to earn what is being handed to us freely. An heir does not worry about their inheritance, but rather thinks daily about when they will be able to fully access the inheritance authoritatively.
*Jesus, we accept Your sacrifice and Your resurrection power. Hosanna. Amen*
