A PROGRESSIVE SALVATION

A Christian’s salvation is truly progressive and at once already perfected.  We have been saved, we are being saved and we shall be saved, but we presently live and walk as though our salvation is already complete, for that which has been promised of God is as good as finished.

We have been saved!  We have been born again of an incorruptible Seed by the Word of God.  We have been saved from God’s wrath by His imputed righteousness for

our faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, which faith constantly undergoes fiery trial, but is yet deemed more precious than gold.  He has created anew in us a clean heart of the very Substance of Himself, which Substance will due season transform our entire being. 

We are being saved!  We have been baptized, immersed into Jesus’ name for the remission of our sins; we have received an impartation of His divine nature.  We are dead and our lives are hidden with Christ in God.  We have received the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, who will never leave us nor forsake us, but will teach us, guide us and secure us by our Father’s Eternal Word.  By the practice of such Word we are continually saving ourselves from this perverted generation, a process by which we die daily, yet we live, though not we ourselves, but Christ the Word lives in, through, by and as us.  This Word is effecting a process, a salvation, not realized in hearing only, but in the doing daily of the precepts and principles we are taught of Him privately and in our local churches, the embassies of our Lord’s Kingdom. 

We shall be saved!  We forsake not the gathering of ourselves together as ambassadors of Christ, for in our assembling we are encouraged and provoked to continue our pursuit of personal and corporate transfiguration until the day we shall yet be saved, that day when we shall find our complete rest at the last enemy’s destruction, the day of our adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

 

We live in the present as saved already to the fullest!  We are new creatures, Kings and Priests unto our God, each with a new vocation: Go and preach by precept and example this Gospel of the Kingdom to every creature till all creation’s earnest expectation receives satisfaction in its deliverance from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the sons of God.

Repeating:

1          We have been saved from God’s wrath against all unrighteousness

2          We are being saved from this perverted generation by our practice of those “many other words” of God which carry us far beyond the common salvation by our forgetting those things behind us, by our looking unto that salvation set before us, and by our each day’s pressing toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus

3          We shall be saved from the last enemy (death) by the adoption, the redemption of our bodies, at the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ

4          We live as though already saved to the full, being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in us will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.