How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard [him]; [Heb. 2:3]
It has been on my mind for days on end just what it means to walk in an “accomplished salvation”. Hebrews describes this salvation as pertaining to a company of people birthed into a new creation who shall have dominion over the world that is to come. That is to say, they do not have dominion over the world as it now stands, but they will have dominion over that which is coming after.
Many believe they should have dominion over the world that presently is — or that they soon will have it as they exercise faith and spiritual authority. Some believe that the lack of dominion comes from not exercising faith. They must take back the world for God through various means — prayer, miraculous words, subversion of wicked public policies and flooding key systems of the world with Christians who will gain the power to enforce righteousness.
Next to all this are the trials that believers go through privately. How does one take back the world for Christ while fighting tremendous private battles? Still, many go through — and even overcome — great evil, believing that God is training them for something bigger. It’s always around the corner. Eventually, they will have that ministry or will step into some role. And then they die anyway before seeing that accomplished. I have witnessed this too much with my own eyes. Their deaths resolve little about what God’s goal was in their lives.
It would seem that the trials we go through are mostly no different than what the world goes through. Many of us believe these are “special” trials in our case. Numbers of us testify in public gatherings of what we have escaped, creating ministries based on our personal trials. Those outside of Christ maybe don’t laugh, but they say, “What’s the big deal? We go through these same things and live to tell about it, too!” Paul even said:
There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. (1 Cor. 10:13)
The difference between one inside of Christ and one outside of Christ is that the former is inclined to conquer some rebellious part of himself and come into a place of peace. The nonbeliever goes from trial to trial and comes out no better for it. Nothing is accomplished for all that.
And yet, what is accomplished practically for the believer if he only enters into a place of peace? I have just said that many go from trial to trial expecting to be trained for something but never seem to grasp exactly what that “something” is.
We have had unmistakable encounters with evil and seen the power of prayer. We have heard distinctly the inner voice of the Lord and avoided obstacles or even overcome them by obeying the speaking. Yet for all that, we pick up the everyday thread of life the same as our nonbelieving friends and endure similar day-to-day trials. So let me pose one alternative of what it means to walk in an “accomplished salvation”.
As believers living in the world that occupies time and space now, many of the trials we encounter (particularly the spiritual kinds) are the result of a clash between two worlds — the Kingdom of God within us and the present world without. The meeting of these two worlds automatically creates conflict. I believe this conflict is back of many trials that we experience both in the fully spiritual realm and in the war we have between our spirit and flesh.
Our salvation has already been accomplished. The conflict arises because of that accomplished salvation greeting the world on God’s behalf through our mortal bodies. We are not at home in this world. We are, in fact, alien creatures not callibrated to the rhythms of the times and seasons of this world.
Rather than looking on all trials as a neverending “training”, I am starting to see that they are the normal combustion of an accomplished salvation encountering the darkness in the world. Darkness must react to us until the day we die (unless we desire to join it once more). We have the choice to meet all things in the spirit or in our flesh. This is the normal Christian life. Once we understand that, there is no whining that we may have missed God’s direction in our lives.
This is not about winning a few souls to Christ so He’ll give us a mission field or getting more faith to accomplish healing so he’ll give us a healing ministry. No, this is every day life lived out as it will be until the day we all die. When we consider every trial a tool by which God accomplishes a fuller salvation in us and in the lives of those we touch, we will feel confident that we belong in the place He has us at any time. Every day and every way we are choosing Him and overcoming within so that we may participate in the world that is to come as fully qualified sons of God. If there’s a training, that’s what it’s for.
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
June 2, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Alex
Kat,
This is a profound statement:
“Our salvation has already been accomplished. The conflict arises because of that accomplished salvation greeting the world on God’s behalf through our mortal bodies.”
I want to comment more, but have been quite busy with my business.
Alex
June 2, 2009 at 7:06 pm
saltsister
Well, I hope you get back soon. I need all the help I can get with this topic.
June 4, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Melville
There’s nothing much I can think to add to this, because it is brilliant and truly discerning, and so well written, except a couple of sidetracks that arise. I quote:
“Next to all this are the trials that believers go through privately. How does one take back the world for Christ while fighting tremendous private battles? Still, many go through — and even overcome — great evil, believing that God is training them for something bigger. It’s always around the corner. Eventually, they will have that ministry or will step into some role. And then they die anyway before seeing that accomplished. I have witnessed this too much with my own eyes. Their deaths resolve little about what God’s goal was in their lives.”
The thing that caught me on this was that things Christian people go through somehow ends up in a need to make a ministry of it. I mean a publicized one. This has been pounded into people, over and over in certain quarters. One has got to have an identifiable “ministry” or else she is a no-account.
What is lacking in that is the eternal goal, which is the internal transformation into a new kind of human being, which is what the issue of those private battles is about. I’m thinking also that the Christian religious system, on both sides, and of any persuasion, high or low church, puts burdens on people to think they have private battles that aren’t even their real ones. In church people’s true inner battles are typically hidden from others, and if they are revealed they may be either considered inconsequential to what is called the true work of ministry. Or the preacher may set an artificial and unbiblical standard of behavior, where conformity to which is a prerequisite for being qualified to participate in this visible ministry. People are bombarded with sermons week after week, years after years, which neither set people free, shed light on actual conditions in an individual or household, nor mark a real path to get to the object. It’s a self perpetuating system that keeps folks coming back for more, frequently with no end realized, and the objective is vague.
Never ending training to an unclearly specified end? That might be putting it too strongly as a generalization but it does characterize a great deal of church experience. On the other hand there are some general goals in the regular appeals from the pulpit. There is a call to get people into service, whether in terms of community action for social justice from the religious left or appeals to get people involved with missionary activity from the evangelical right. There are words of Jesus that can be taken as a basis for urging people to get to work either of these directions. But these are all external things. Service becomes the end in itself, or rather the means whereby one achieves a heavenly reward. I’ve heard preachers raise a standard of having a life of service to present before the Lord after they die, which is easily taken to be measured in these outward terms. It becomes a question of quantity.
Except that side by side with this one also is presented with another standard, that of becoming Christlike. What would Jesus do? How would He respond in a situation? Am I being Christlike? In this context also comes a typically external measure, which among fundamentalists is largely legal in nature- following rules. On the left it’s more about tolerance for fellow sinners like us all.
In all of this that one has heard from the various segments of Christianity over the years, one scarcely hears much about “Christ IN you”, which Paul kept referring to. Overall, that is a tiny subset, if it’s mentioned at all, of the rest of the standards held over people’s heads to get people motivated to take part in Christian service, instead of the other way around. It is my belief that, with our accomplished salvation, all the rest, all the outer things are a subset of Christ in us, for all the virtues belong to Him and it’s only through Him that we can manifest them. The whole thing ends up looking like it’s all been backwards, with the emphasis on the outward over the inward. But we only get the really spiritually valuable outward acts and expression though from inward, from what we are, from what we have become, from what God has built and formed in us in our real lives.
That is a result of training and discipline, but it is God’s training and discipline, not man’s. It does take a process to deal with a person’s selfish nature to allow Christ in us to be manifested. But there is no seminar or program on earth one can take to accomplish that. It is the Cross worked into a person to produce that circumcision of the heart, where when under pressure it isn’t self that comes out but the new creation, the spirit of life.
Is this training perpetual? Maybe no and yes. We are surely always learning, but not perpetual students who never graduate into real life, spiritually speaking. There’s a point when what we are going through and overcoming through Christ in hidden ways has eternal consequence.
“. . . in order that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenlies, according to the eternal purpose [purpose of the ages] which he carried out in Christ Jesus our lord”. Eph. 3:10-11
Not to make to much of him, but it was through T. Austin-Sparks that I heard a word about the significance of our lives that should give much comfort and hope. It’s that we really don’t know or see what’s happening behind the ultimate scenes of our lives. We think the “regular” things of our lives are too mundane to matter. This is maybe a result of humility and our awareness of our frailty and “screw ups”. It could simultaneously be driven by the focus on external things that comes from the religious system, where men and women leaders and exciting exploits or terrific endurances are elevated. But I want to say that there is very likely a whole lot more resulting from our walking in the spirit, in that inner trust and faith and obedience, than we see results from now in any theatrical or dramatic way.
So this wasn’t short after all. It’s a short idea that I take too long to get out. Yes. We may well be overcoming right now and accomplishing things of consequence while no one around us takes notice. And that’s OK.
June 4, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Alex
This is heady stuff, Kat and Mel. What Mel has said is the experience of all believers in the U.S. who have participated in the church culture for any length of time. It is a struggle from the external compounded by the work of the Spirit on the internal. Melville made the comment that discipleship is a yes no perpetuity. I suspect that the work of discipleship would be better understood as the work of purging the pollution from our hearts. So how long that would take may be related to how long one has been polluted. For me it was 32 years before the accomplished work of salvation was made manifest to my consciousness in the new birth. The accomplished work is all that Jesus is, and that has been given to us freely by Him. But the working out of our salvation in fear and trembling is the purging work that both we, as the children do consciously in our minds, and our Father does subconsciously in our hearts.
To believe that God saved us so that we would be his servants is to ignore His original intent with the Garden of Eden. This is what Frank Viola camps on, and he admits his influence from T Austin Sparks and Vernon DeFromke. I agree with their point of view. God created Adam, and mankind, both to be His incarnated life on Earth and His family. Work was a secondary issue. This diametric tension of our cooperating with God as He works in our lives is aggravated by the misunderstandings of the works and religious mentalities.
This topic has much room for further exploration.