Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Th. 5:23 NASB)
(Phil. 2:12–13 NASB)
Salvation is also translated “being made whole”. So what we are looking at when we speak of salvation is fixing something that’s broken. Man is a three-part being. Body, soul and spirit. The spirit is the part that corresponds to God. When man was created we are told God breathed into. Him the spirit and he became a living soul. When man fell in the garden his soul died. You can think of it as atrophied. This is the first thing that is restored when a man is born again, born of the Spirit. So that happens at the moment we are saved, when we believe in Jesus Christ. But if you’ve noticed there are still problems. We have problems in our mind. Our old man seems to fight with the new leanings of the Spirit of God in us. That is a process which the Bible calls being renewed in the spirit of your mind. This is when sin no longer has power over you. It means that you can choose to do the right thing. Before you really couldn’t choose. You were a slave to sin. The third part of man is his body. And that is still broken and eventually it will fail and will go into the ground. However the bible teaches that in the future we will be saved from the very presence of sin. So there are two fixed moments, one when we were born again and when our body dies and we receive a new body in heaven. If you look on a grave we see the day a person is born and the day he dies. In between that is the dash. That is what we are living in at the present time. We need to be saved every moment from the power of sin in our mind. The Bible calls that sanctification that is being made holy, that is changing our thinking to align with the spirit. So what we find is that we are being changed every moment. That is something we must cooperate with. We must listen to the spirit within and change our thinking. That is what Paul was talking about when he said work out your salvation with fear and trembling because it is God who is at work within you both to do and to work according to his good pleasure. The Lord has a plan for us. He wants us to become someone he can live with forever!So that is what we mean when we say present salvation.Listen to the podcast for more.
