Terminal Salvation

Making the good news of Jesus Christ part of your life story is very simple. Here’s how I see it:

I was born with sin (original, hereditary condition) into a broken world. Jesus came to set me free from both of these. I agree to lay down my life at the feet of Jesus, ask him for his perfect and sinless life.

I agree to receive all the benefits of his finished work on the cross. I pledge to consider all the claims of divine justice against me satisfied through Jesus, from my birth until forever.

I am now born from above. This means that the old me is now dead and doesn’t exist. It’s gone forever. I now consider Christ as being alive in me and living through me.

My first and foremost goal in life is to be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ in my thoughts and deeds. I can not do it on my own.

So I ask God for the gift of the Holy Spirit. I believe I receive it for the asking. I now pledge to trust and rely on the Holy Spirit of God who now lives in me to empower me for character transformation, and for the works of service to humankind.

My main motive is now to be love. My mission in life is to love others as God has loved me. I choose to see God’s precious creation in every person, no matter how crooked or vile. My goal is to help them see it too.

I now have to power to lay hands on the sick and see them recover. My thoughts and words now have power. I choose to think, speak, and act as a son of the benevolent King of the universe.

I am God’s ambassador to humankind. Through my ambassadorship, I am part of the system of divine governance, whose goal is to see God’s kingdom realized on earth.

You see, the Gospel is called the Good News for a reason. Believing it is actually quite easy. It’s the religiously and the secularly indoctrinated people who make it hard. Tell this to a child, he’s believe it right away.

Does it take effort to live out the Gospel? Well, if you weren’t taught this during your formative years – then you bet it does. Real effort too, and real commitment. Everything does, and this does too. Try to learn playing piano without a real commitment, and see how far it gets you.

Remember, we give up all of us, and Jesus becomes our Lord, and so we get all of him. It’s hard only when we hold something back, usually because we don’t fully trust God’s goodness. But Christ’s yoke is easy, and his burden is light. If it’s not easy and light, we are carrying someone else’s yoke and burden, not Christ’s. That extra yoke needs to be identified, and thrown off as the false idol that it is.

And that’s what we are called to do – love one another, walk as Christ did, and rule the earth through Christ. And by ruling I mean getting together with like-minded people geographically or by other criteria (in this digital age we don’t all have to live next to each other), and setting up sustainable systems of manifesting God’s love and lordship on this earth. It may or may not be a religious organization, that really doesn’t matter, as long as Christ is in it and the job gets done. Here’s what it would look like: heal the sick, comfort the brokenhearted, restore broken families, feed the hungry. See people transformed from prostitutes to those who rescue girls from sex slavery, from slum lords to those who build and run affordable housing for the poor, from extortioners to faith healers (real ones I mean), from evil fuhrers to world-traveling evangelists.

Today, the love and the power of God is on the rise all across the world. Regular men and women with regular jobs go out every day, love on their neighbors wherever they are, and help each other grow to the full stature of the sons of God. People band together through Facebook and go to serve the poor in their areas, go out to heal the sick locally, and go on self-funded mission trips all over the world. Jesus is finally being released from the four walls of the institutional church into the world, where he belongs. And power and authority of God is no longer exclusively in the hands of the religious elite. The same exact power is the hands of average joes, where it should have always been for the past two thousand or so years.

Jesus didn’t just come to give us a little chicken soup for our weary souls. My Jesus shall have the government of this world on his shoulders, and the increase of his government, peace and prosperity shall be without end (Isaiah 9:6-7). And we are his shoulders, we are his hands and feet, we are his mouthpiece, we are the body of Christ.

So, there’s a better way. We just need to be willing to take a red pill to see it. And it’s not always easy. But it’s definitely worth it.