The Reason for Your Salvation

Good evening and welcome back to the Panhandle. Sorry I missed last week, It was our first week of school and being a bus driver I was doing my in service. It's good to see the kids again, I am, we are all praying that we will make it through the entire school year with out having to close down.

Several years back I started a series based on Charles Stanley's book Developing A Servant's Heart. Our Lord spoke of being a servant several times and on the night He was betrayed He took on the servant's role as He wash the feet of His disciples: Mark 9:35 ~ 35 Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, "If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all." and Mark 10:43 ~ 43 “Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,”

Tonight we are going to look at “The Reason for Your Salvation.” So let's start with a little quiz, don't worry it's not to hard.

How would you complete the following three statements?

1.  God saved me because

2.  God’s purpose for saving me was

3.   I am most like Jesus when I

The purpose for my opening this Bible study with a little quiz is not to put you on the spot, but, rather, to set the proper framework for our discussion of servanthood. The answers that I am seeking to these statements are these:

God Saved Me Because He Loves Me.

The sole reason that God sent His Son, Christ Jesus, to this world to die for your sins and mine was because He loves us. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16). God forgives us, grants us eternal life, and gives us the gift of His Holy Spirit out of His immeasurable love and grace. That is the whole reason, there is no other reason, no ulterior motive.

Many people seem to believe that God saves a man or woman because of the person’s good works or service. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There isn’t any amount or any type of service that can earn salvation. The apostle Paul made this very clear when he wrote to the Ephesians: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Even the faith by which God forgives us and saves us is a gift of God that flows from His love!

If God saved a person on the basis of works, each of us would have to ask ourselves, “How much good service is enough?” This question cannot be answered. Nor would there be security for the believer. Like the other world religions we would always be wondering if our good deeds out weighed our bad deeds. And if we did something bad just before we died well that's that – good deeds canceled out.

There is no amount of good service that can equal the shed blood of Christ Jesus. There is no way to quantify how much service is necessary for salvation or to qualify which types of service leads to salvation. The gospel is: Christ Jesus shed His blood on the cross of Calvary to purchase salvation for you and me. He did so voluntarily and willingly in obedience to His heavenly Father, who was completely and totally motivated by love when He sought your redemption and mine. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8).

Just as a person is not saved because of his or her past good works, neither is a person saved because he or she has potential for future good works. God does not look at one person and say, “You have the potential to be a preacher, so I am going to save you” and then look at another and say, “You aren’t worth much, so I won’t save you.” God’s gift of salvation is offered freely to all who will receive it. God created each one of us with a unique set of talents and traits that can be employed for His service as He wills. No person is without merit in God’s eyes; all are worthy of salvation.

Equally so, there is no inherent “goodness” in any person that warrants his or her salvation. No person has the privilege to stand before God Almighty and say, “I deserve to be saved.” Instead you and I must repent, we must acknowledge that we need to be saved. Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” All means all.

In January 1985, a large suitcase, unmarked and unclaimed, was discovered at a customs office at Los Angeles International Airport. When U.S. Customs agents opened the suitcase, they found the curled-up body of an unidentified young woman.

She had been dead for a few days, according to the county coroner. As the investigation continued, it was learned that the woman was the wife of a young Iranian living in the U.S. Unable to obtain a visa to enter the U.S. and join her husband, she took matters into her own hands and attempted to smuggle herself into America via an airplane’s cargo bay. While her plan seemed to her simple though risky, officials were hard-pressed to understand how such an attempt could ever succeed. Even if she survived the journey in the cargo bay, she would remain an illegal alien, having entered through improper channels.

Some people believe they’ll enter the kingdom of God on their own since they’ve been reasonably good citizens or church attenders. But entry plans of our own design prove not only foolish but fatal.

Developing a servant’s heart is something that we do in response to God’s gracious gifts of salvation, eternal life, and the Holy Spirit. It is never something that we do in order to earn—win, warrant, or put ourselves into a position to deserve—salvation.

Thanks for dropping by and I pray that the Lord will bless and keep you and yours.

Biblesurfer