The Five Glorious Truths -3
SALVATION IS A GOD INITIATED, MAN RESPONDING PROJECT!
The classical way the institutional church presents the gospel is that you seek for God and when you have made sufficient effort in going to church, praying and doing many good works, you will find Him. This notion arises from a false interpretation of Jeremiah 29:13.
It is important that when we preach or teach, we do not just hurl at people any word that comes into our mind. Preaching and teaching the Word of God is a very serious business that transacts with the eternal souls of people.
The least we owe those who hear or read us is to be sure we are telling them the truth of the Word of God, not our personal preferences or interpretations.
Secondly, we need the illumination and power of the Holy Spirit to rest upon the words that we speak so that they become spirit and life which minister grace to the people rather than death. When the Holy Spirit energises the truth, the outcome is conviction in the hearts of the recipients.
The Pauline epistles make it clear that Salvation is a God initiated project. No one ever stumbles into salvation. Long before any of us were born, God manifested His love for fallen humanity by the ultimate sacrifice of the ages - the Incarnation, humanity and death of Jesus Christ.
Jesus was not just a good man, great teacher or prophet. This was God made flesh - Emmanuel - a project of salvation which is so vast, so deep and unfathomable that many intellectuals stumble at the very concept of God becoming a human being! The Father released the Son for an assignment that no angel or human could have conceived as feasible!
Yet, that is precisely the meat of Salvation - that we are delivered from the power of Satan, Sin and Death not by the blood of animals or birds but by the Blood of the God-Man, Yeshua the Messiah, translated from the Greek by the English to be Jesus Christ! A more detailed explanation of the issues involved will be made in this course.
Before you were born, God had paid the price for your salvation! Not only that, God used various ways to ensure that the gospel was preached for you to hear and supplied grace for you to believe and respond by faith. If you look back at your life, you will recoil with shock to know that the providence of God was involved all the way till the very moment you finally embraced His love!
Salvation truly is a God initiated and God executed project for bringing many sons to glory and enlarging the population of His Kingdom. It is on this basis that those who reject the manifest love of God or resist the truth of His word, preferring to abide in darkness will have an eternity of damnation as just reward!
John 3:16-19 King James Version (KJV) 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
Excerpts of GSoM Course 104: The Five Fundamental Glorious Truths published today on face book by Global School of Ministry www.globalschoolofministry.com |
