Having just returned from the Hillsong Conference in London feeling full of the Holy Spirit, being profoundly blessed in the company of so many wonderful brothers and sisters in Christ, and most importantly, witnessing many miraculous occurrences of salvation, I want to bring you a two-part message about finding salvation that you can send to all your non-Christian friends. I am sure we all have people in our world that we are praying for - those who have yet to know our Lord; so it is my hope that this two-part message will be a message that provides a clear and simple path to knowing God. 

 

There are seven areas of exploration that we can look at to help understand salvation….

 

The doctrine of salvation is very simple; because of God’s love for His creation He sent His Son Jesus Christ into the world to die on the cross and raised Him from the dead so that we could have salvation - that is, He took our punishment and brought forgiveness by bridging the gap between God and ourselves. By conquering death Jesus Christ has given everyone the opportunity for a relationship with Him; one that will give us a full life on earth and eternal blessings in Heaven.

 

In looking to the question of how to find salvation, the first thing we must admit is that there are many people that find the final step of making a commitment to Christ the most difficult of all. I remember believing all of the above to be true for some time before I became ready to surrender my life to God and make Christ the Lord of my life.

 

We have seen in my two series Objections to Christianity and The Crisis Within Atheism that there is every reason to believe Christianity is the truth, and we have also seen in my recent Visions of New Beginnings series that we are going to have, in the long run, a pretty hopeless existence if we live by our fancies rather than by what is ultimately true. 

 

Now this, to me, is largely what the final step consists of - letting go of the self and giving it to God. After we have done this we see that when we are in touch with the truth our real needs are, and always have been, in perfect harmony with the ultimate truth. Now, of course, if we surrender our hearts to Christ we are certain to find salvation. It is the point at which many of us see for the first time the ways in which God has been working in us long before we realised it. 

 

At the end of each sermon in Proclaimers Church, the speaker invites anyone that does not have a relationship with Jesus Christ to ask Him into their lives; and then, afterwards, we all say a prayer together asking Jesus into our lives. To some people this might sound like a strange thing to do - after all, why do those who already have Jesus in their lives need to ask Him in each week? But there are several reasons why I think it is a good idea. In the first place, it teaches us to remain humble; in fact, it is one of the most sobering things a man can do; that is, when a man asks Jesus into his life each week, he is constantly reminded of the grace that Christ bestows upon us in supplication. In the second place, it brings about a collective humility, both in the presence of Christ, and in the presence of each other. We ask because we know that the grace bestowed upon is undeserved; we ask so we can thank Him for His grace; we ask for a bit more of His wisdom in the hope that we can impact on those in our world, and that if possible and with the greatest humility we might reflect our Lord in everything we do and be a city on a hill (Matthew 5:14). Salvation is having a relationship with Christ - and a relationship with Christ (both for Christians and non-Christians) involves our connecting with Him.

 

In the Bible we are told that we can live ‘in’ Christ; and for that to be possible (bearing in mind that we are all created in God’s image) it means that the interconnection between every human being has inside of it such commonalties which can be instantly recognised by each individual - commonalties aside from those which are obvious to everyone. In other words we are all connected to absolute reality by a supernatural force, and when St Paul refers to us as ‘in’ Christ, he must be referring to a supernatural link between all of us; that is, a reality to which we can all be intimately connected. I do not mean that this is always tangible - but our job in all of this is to connect ourselves to it. And that is what we find in Christianity - we find a connection, a bit like a circuit board connection - we are connected by the natural commonality of having eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11) - we are all connected by Christ. Once you find yourself on the inside of the connection, it is quite easy to see what is happening here. Christ is working through us, joining and uniting together those who have realised that we are all connected by a supernatural force. When St Paul says we can be ‘in’ Christ, he means it in a much fuller sense than we perhaps realise.

 

One should not get confused within a hazy mist of supernaturalism; unity can only exist between things that are distinct from one another - and with this in mind we can see briefly God’s plan for all of us. He loves the individual that is you - He is very proud of His creation - but what we wants now is for the individual to be conjoined to the supernatural connection; He wants you to become a part of His ultimate plans for mankind. He wants you to start your own subsidiary transformation that can, eventually, become joined to the whole. That, by the way, is why we should not look at some Christians with contempt because they do not seem to have the personality that we think they should have. They can probably reach people that you and I cannot. 

 

I have said before that the self-surrender which is required of you is going to be costly at some basic level, but this should not be an impediment, for it is a cost that turns into the greatest blessing imaginable. We were all created to know God, to give ourselves to Him both intellectually and emotionally, and this is the first instance of the cost. You are giving to God what you have for so long thought was yours. Or if you knew all along that you were merely the leaseholder - you are attempting to give to God that which you have tried for so long to hold on to. Remember - To live is Christ and to die is gain (Philippians 1:21) - that is, to let go of those things which you have been claiming for yourself is to gain fresh things at every new level. 

 

The pride of the self has to be broken; not too dissimilar to the way a rebellious and egotistical child’s pride has to broken if he is to be given an education. You cannot educate a boy properly while he is still preoccupied with how big his talents are. Only when he thinks less about his abilities will he start to discover what they really are. It is going to hurt him to know that he is not as funny or talented as his showing off would have you believe, but by helping him remove some of his constricting pride you will have done a good thing for him.

 

In the same way, people will very rarely search for God while they feel completely happy with their set-up, for there is nothing the Devil likes more than inert comfort zones; there is nowhere else he is less conspicuous. And in the brief moments when a man thinks there might be something worth exploring outside of his comfort zone, the invisible demon whispers to him that his self-surrender won’t really produce anything very different to what he is feeling now. The Devil then tries to bury our errors and character flaws deeper and deeper until we are hardly aware of their existence. It is not so difficult to realise, after all, we do the same with our beloved too - when it suits, we overlook his or her faults, almost to the point of denial - it is denial for the purposes of comforting pleasure. But in our quest for salvation, just as in our relationships, we really know deep down the truth about the situation in hand. 

 

The moral law can also help us to salvation (if we are in the right frame of mind) by showing us how our perpetual sinning is, deep down, an outrage on the conscience - it gives us awareness of what is right and wrong, what is just, what is beneficial, and how we can become better people. That we sometimes choose to ignore it is perfectly obvious, but we know deep down what pertains to this supernatural connection because we know that in Christ we have the perfect embodiment of goodness and thus the exemplification of everything we should strive to be. 

 

And if you think that absolute moral awareness is escapable, try to escape it for a moment and you will see it is impossible - the knowledge is part of who we are. I remember at school two twins (I have forgotten their names) who were, in all honesty, not the brightest two people in the school. One day they were quarreling and one punched the other one on the arm. After more quarreling they seemed to conclude that the one who threw the punch had been in the wrong all along. The one who had been punched insisted that his brother kept still while he punched him back with equal strength and velocity - to ‘even it up’. Even these boys, who could barely string a cogent sentence together, knew the difference between right and wrong; they knew what a fair outcome would be. The ultimate laws that will lead us there are already indelibly stamped within us.

 

Sometimes, in certain areas of life, there is a real lack of true and false awareness in the world - in fact, instead of a real true and false awareness - things are sub-divided into categories like ‘satisfactory’ and ‘unsatisfactory’, ‘agreeable’ and ‘disagreeable’, ‘clever’ and ‘stupid’, ‘a good idea’ and ’a bad idea’. But all this is only good on a secondary level. First, some sort of truth is going to have to be established otherwise the journey will be hazy with no real goals to aim for. When Christ died on the cross and rose again He offered us a certainty that anyone can find through petition and supplication - "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” Matthew 7:7.

 

In order to discover the clarity necessary to become a Christian, we must get used to thinking beyond this world; we must start building for our eternal future by preparing ourselves for servitude. I know it is quite difficult for non-Christians to do, for they are used to seeing the earth as an ultimate end, and therefore if faith is merely a means to that particular end, they think they can gain nothing from faith that they would not gain from having no faith. But of course, the earth is not the end - it is just the beginning. The spiritual part of us belongs in something transcendent of this world, but the non-spiritual part of us belongs to transience, of which there are a multitude of things currently directing our passions. 

 

There is another aspect to servitude which can be seen as paradoxical if it not understood properly. It happens just as the servitude starts to subvert the belief foundations. If you enter into Christianity with this already in place, it is going to be difficult to harmonise faith with reason. When I say that the servitude subverts, I mean that a man carries on serving regardless of whether his rationale has been tested or when all traces of God seem absent. This might sound like a great and admirable faith but it is not. If you let it continue you are in danger of blocking out the light; that is, you might end up believing things which stand counter to your own analysis. When you go into this, you should always make sure that you only believe things which your reason tells you are correct and justified. Do not do anything simply for the sake of Christianity because there will come a time when you are going to have to call on resources that may have been cast aside due to a misguided notion of what servitude really is. God does not expect us to carry on blithely - He likes it when we demand reasons for our faith, for as Tennyson once said,

 

 

In the search for God, I cannot recommend highly enough the benefits of solitude for those precious moments when absorption and impartation is required. This is where your most lucid thinking will usually be done. It has not always been noticed that we have this hesitant sense for ultimate actuality that, when we are thinking of ‘everyday things’, turns into our ultimate shield against the anomalies of known rationale. And notice how it contrasts with what you can really feel (if this is suspended) in times alone. You are aware of a third thing that lives outside of ‘everyday observations’ and your cognition. Try to locate it in times of solitude, pray, and then go outside back to ‘everyday life’ - to the bus or the shops or the pub - and you will feel differently, you will feel that you were created to know the ‘thing’ which lives outside of the other ‘things’; and if the feeling intensifies, you will feel that you were, in fact, made for another world. As Byron rightly said -Solitude is when we are least alone. And I will add to that - it is when we are least alone because our solitude is when God best has our attention.

 

And if you want even more clarity regarding this ‘thing’, this ‘presence’, you can find it by ignoring it and going straight back to everyday things. Not only will you feel the sheer disappointment of tantalisation - as you do when the thing tantalising you is taken away - but you will also have been given, by God, your first real hints of what an ultimate culmination in the Devil’s hands will be like. The full heartache of being stuck with the Bad One rather than with your Creator is shown in your earthly time as a mere dilutive of things to come - for it only really occurs on the threshold of human aspiration. And if you think for a second you will have no trouble locating earthly examples of what I am referring to - admittedly they are only shadows of the supernatural dichotomy (the dichotomy between God and the Devil), but they do, nonetheless, provide adequate examples. It occurs when, say, the joy of being pregnant turns into the horror of a broken relationship and the spectre of being a single mother. And just when that spectre has done its worst, along comes the full realisation that this interminable poverty, loss of freedom, loss of innocence and loss of self-respect has caused bitterness and rage toward the little one who was so delightfully conceived. 

 

It occurs in the big areas of life, such as relationships - when the honeymoon period grinds to a halt; and equally, it occurs in very small pockets, such as the different feelings between eating a nice meal in a good restaurant and trying to justify the expenditure in the grocery store the next day. In every area of life it demarcates the distinction between Heavenly longing and travailing uncertainties. This is why our Lord stressed the importance of ‘choosing Life’ in the book of Deuteronomy - for all along He wants us to have the kind of life which recognises our Heavenly longings and uses them to seek out a relationship with Christ. And as regards the other religions, this shows perfectly why so many of their adherents exude such dissatisfaction and unfulfilment, for they are disappointed by the results of how the Bad One has twisted their faith in ‘a god’ into something very distinct from true faith in The God - The One and Only God.

 

This conversion that I said is going to be necessary - it is, at first, very different to what it will turn out to be a bit later. The difference is a little like this. When you first decide to seek Him, when you first go to Him with all your sins, not in a Catholic confessional sense, but when you realise that your rejection of Him is your biggest solecism, you will not be giving Him fully, what it seems like you are giving Him. In other words, all your cries of penitence will really be a little disingenuous - that is, you will not usually feel yourself as bad as you are claiming. There will be an element of your surrender that really thinks such a surrender should not be necessary at all. But then later you will come to realise that this element was really a reflection of your old self, or more accurately, a gentle reminder of how different the new self is going to be to your old self. Once the surrender has occurred, God will then start to teach you how to really be yourself - thus you will see that your real self was that which was in you all along trying so desperately hard to be released into His presence.

 

Having been through the seven points, one can begin to piece them all together and search for Christ through prayer and petition - for revelation is promised to all who are ready to surrender themselves to our Lord. Christianity is good news for anyone that does not reject Christ’s grace, but you should be warned that in this contemporary age a real atheist antipathy has formed which makes big attempts to pull you in the other direction. Everyone should know that if Christianity is true, it is never going to go away. If you disregard, through reluctance, all the stages of growth, you might be lucky enough to reach a stage when the reluctance is obliterated by some personal realisation which brings about a real desire for change. If you disregard them through pride you will, week by week, be cut off from a real and genuine chance of earthly contentment. And as pride turns from gratification to stultification it will dilute the pleasures until they are mere vapour, for things that you have always done out of habit will eventually become such a central part of you that you will scarcely be able to recognise yourself outside of them. If you disregard them through fear, He usually has mercy - enough to start you on your journey towards improving little things that will help you to realise that you were only really afraid because of those things left behind; things that you were trying to keep as part of you. His love, grace and mercy far supersedes our insecurities.

 

When searching for God, everyone should keep thinking about ultimate truths and ultimate realities. Leave behind all that silly nonsense about his or her truth being different to mine; it will not work. There will be days when you feel good and days when you feel bad. There will be days when you feel healthy and days when you feel rough. And of course, there are various antidotes, medicines and methods of putting yourself right. But whatever you do, don’t confuse them with the elixir of life. You will be left chasing shadows. God loves you. He wants to reveal Himself to you. He wants you to come knocking at the door. And because of this supernatural connection that I told you about, we are all able to have unique communication if we tune in to the right frequency. 

 

We should always try to locate that which God desires for us, and that is what the Bible is for - it tells us all the initial things that we need to know to find Him. We have responsibility to work many things out for ourselves - but the Bible lays down the platforms for this. Christ died so that we could know Him, and when we think of the cross, we should think, not just of His dying, but of our living, for then we will be on the right road to the self-surrender that is necessary for salvation.

 

 

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. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.