THE *PROCESS* OF SALVATION: by Malcolm Smith Ministries

[Randy L. Hunt]

**This teaching is brought to you by Malcolm Smith Ministries. Malcolm **
**Smith, the author, is an internationally respected Bible teacher with a **
**special gift of helping others understand the love of God. If you **
**are interested in learning more about this ministry you can contact **
**them at the following address: **

Malcolm Smith Ministries Toll free #: 1-800-533-8338
P.O. Box 29747 (RLH/CLP)
San Antonio, Texas 78229

**THIS MATERIAL IS COPYRIGHTED BY MALCOLM SMITH MINISTRIES, but posting here
**constitutes permission for this teaching to be distributed freely, as long
**as it is distributed in it`s entirety (in context). The ministry has many
**excellent teachings available via books, audiocassettes, etc.

**P.S.**: If you enjoyed this teaching, please let me (Randy Hunt) know by
Emailing me at rlh...@hou.amoco.com. It would be a great
encouragement for me to know you have been helped by it.

THE PROCESS OF SALVATION
by Malcolm Smith

Do you know that Jesus came to begin a process of renewal in you...a process
which will continue throughout your life? If you don't, you have fallen prey to
an insidious evil which is permeating the Church today, and one which is leading
you into condemnation.

Over the last century, *the crisis* of salvation, that moment when we enter into
union with Christ, has been increasingly exaggerated. Yet, we have overlooked
*the process* of salvation in which, year after year, we are made whole. This
distorted view of the Gospel is born out of the idea that when we come to Christ
and pray a "sinner's prayer," we are suddenly whole persons with no more pain,
no more hurt, and, in fact, are taken totally out of this world.
This exaggeration of the Gospel was one of the greatest hindrances in my early
Christian life. I believed that, having received Christ, I should suddenly and
miraculously find myself perfect. I heard it from preachers again and again:
"Come to Jesus and the old habits and sins will pass away.You will have a new
set of desires!" THEREFORE, IF ANY MAN IS IN CHRIST, HE IS A NEW
CREATURE...(2 CORINTHIANS 5:17).

It didn't take me too long to realize that all things had not instantly become
new! I still sinned, and I found that my old desires were still very much alive
and well. My response to my inability to live as a perfect new creation was to
wallow in guilt and condemnation, questioning whether I had really committed my
life to God at all. Each day I lived with my eye on my performance...to see
whether I was good enough for God to love. I rededicated my life to Christ on a
regular basis, hoping each time I would somehow stumble into the perfect life.
Some of my friends went through the ritual of accepting Christ every week: they
looked at their lives and decided that they didn't look like new creations and so
must try to get saved properly this week!

In the early days of my Christian life, my concept of sin was almost completely
limited to the sins that were connected with the body: smoking, drinking, and, of
course, anything that was remotely connected with sex.... Women bore the
additional sins of wearing makeup and clothes which the leadership deemed
indecent.

Today great emphasis is still placed on the sins of the body: addictions to
everything from drugs and nicotine to food and buying clothes! I find the
evangelical church at the end of the twentieth century is obsessed with"body
sins." Becoming a believer, a new creation, is primarily understood as being
delivered from sins that fall into this category. Anyone who has been delivered
from cocaine upon coming to Christ is given high profile, and will be whisked
from meeting to meeting to be paraded as living proof of their becoming a new
creation. Do not misunderstand me--we live in a society of people who are
searching for meaning to their futile existence in these very areas. People are
destroying themselves and everyone they touch. Yes, Jesus does deliver from
every physical addiction. But, although I rejoice when anyone is instantly
delivered from any addiction, I believe that sometirnes Jesus gets such things
quickly out of the way in order to get down to the real business of His
salvation...which is healing the inner person. The fact that we were delivered
from some subculture lifestyle or from an enslaving habit is dealt with aLmost as
a postscript by Paul with the words,.. AND SUCH WERE SOME OF YOU (1
CORINTHIANS 6:11).

Jesus can deliver us from the habits of the flesh in a moment of time, but total
renovation of the life that produced those habits takes longer. And it takes longer
yet to learn to live out Christ in our everyday lives and to love one another as He
has loved us. This is the process of discovering what being a real person is all
about. It is in working out our union with Christ that we become the whole
persons God intended when He designed us.

Jesus announced His agenda in the synagogue
in Nazareth: THE SCROLL OF THE PROPHET ISAIAH WAS HANDED TO HIM.
UNROLLING IT, HE FOUND THE PLACE WHERE IT IS WRITTEN: "THE
SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS ON ME, BECAUSE HE HAS ANOINTED ME TO
PREACH GOOD NEWS TO THE POOR. HE HAS SENT ME TO PROCLAIM
FREEDOM FOR THE PRISONERS AND RECOVERY OF SIGHT FOR THE
BLIND, TO RELEASE THE OPPRESSED, TO PROCLAIM THE YEAR OF
THE LORD'S FAVOR."
LUKE 4:17-19 (NIV)

A stunned audience first heard those words. They were a people just like we are,
living out their existence in loneliness, imprisoned in invisible chains from
which they were unable to free themselves. They were broken, agonizing in
waves of self-hatred and rejection...feeling unlovable and unwanted. In their
homes, mini-wars raged; resentment and hatred lingered in the atmosphere. Jesus
announced to them, and to us, that He has called us out of the hell of our
dysfunctional past, out of the lostness of our self-centered existence, to become
whole persons. He came that we might be raised from the dead now, in every
part of our personality--not merely to stagger into heaven when we die.

In accepting Christ, we do become new creations; Christ himself becomes our
life. The law of God is written on our hearts, but it is not instantly written
into our minds and bodies. When we receive Christ, we find ourselves plunged
into conflict. We are now torn between our true selves, united with Christ who
lives in us by the Holy Spirit, and the flesh, with its long-established patterns
of selfish thinking, its distorted thinking about God, and its unloving handling
of fellow humans.

Not only does Jesus give pardon for sin...He himself is the source of our new
life and the resident Teacher who calls us to discover who we really are, our
true personhood in union with Him:
COME TO ME, ALL WHO ARE WEARY AND HEAVY-LADEN, AND I
WILL GIVE YOU REST. TAKE MY YOKE UPON YOU, AND LEARN
FROM ME, FOR I AM GENTLE AND HUMBLE IN HEART; AND YOU
SHALL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. FOR MY YOKE IS EASY, AND
MY LOAD IS LIGHT.
MATTHEW 11:28-30

These words are among the most important Jesus ever spoke. In a sense, the
whole New Testament is contained in them. I visit many homes where part of
these words hang on a kitchen wall, COME UNTO ME...I WILL GIVE YOU
REST. That is only part of what Jesus said; the basic truth of the words is in the
second part, TAKE MY YOKE UPON YOU AND LEARN FROM ME.

You will find three relationships to Jesus in this verse. Flrst, there is
*coming* to Him, and, second, in coming, a *taking of His yoke*. "To take the
yoke" was an expression the Pharisees used when initiating someone into their
religious order. It meant to take upon oneself the burden, or yoke, of the Law
of Moses contained in the first five books of the Bible, and to dedicate oneself
to keeping it. Jesus makes an incredible claim here. He says that He himself is
the New Law, and the weary and heavy-laden are to come to Him to be initiated...
His very life shall the yoke they take up. He demonstrated this yoke in His own
life. "Take My yoke" spoke of a yoke that was already His, that He was already
carrying. It meant a total dependence on the Father for the whole of life: the
words He spoke and tbe works that He did. Jesus calls us to Himself so that we
can partake of His life, which is dependent upon the Father for life. He testifies
that this will not be a struggle to keep a list of rules and conunands, but is to
be "easy" and "light." When we come to him for salvation, we unite with His life;
we are yoked to him by the Holy Spirit.

The third relationship described in the verse is that of teacher. As disciples, we
learn of Him. We unlearn the world's lifestyle and its way of thinking...not only
the world of those who are openly rebellious, but, more importantly, the
religious world. The rebellious know that their way of life is wrong, and they
believe they should become what religion has depicted a Christian to be. We are
not mindlessly performing a list of religious rules, but are working out a real
relationship with the living Jesus. He speaks His Word into our inner person.
opening our long-blinded eyes to truth and empowering us to live it. We live
with His life. We become the expression of the love of God in this bent and
perverse generation! And so, Jesus is calling us first to a crisis in which we
come to Him, followed by a process of taking His yoke and learning of Him.
The end result: rest for our souls.

We are experts in preaching and testifying about the crucial moments, the
turning points of life, being born-again, or filled with the Holy Spirit. But,
we have little or no concept that we have been initiated into an ongoing process
in which the salvation we received is worked out in our lives, making us into
the persons we were intended to be. We must understand that the event of being
filled with the Spirit is not a monument to be erected over a blessing in the
past. It is the daily empowering, the source of a lifestyle of love...which is
life for our inner person and for our mental and emotional health.
The New Testarnent is more concemed with the process of working out our
salvation than with the crisis of entering it. The gospels and letters of the
New Testament were written to educate us about what we have already received.
They are the Spirit empowered call to increasingly leave behind the darkness
we once called life, and to become who we are in union with Christ, the very
habitations of God on earth. The burden of the New Testament is summed up
well in Philippians 2:12b-13,...WORK OUT YOUR SALVATION WITH FEAR
AND TREMBLING; FOR IT IS GOD WHO IS AT WORK IN YOU, BOTH TO
WILL AND TO WORK FOR HIS GOOD PLEASURE.

Jesus promised that the one who came to Him to begin such a relationship would
find rest for their soul. The word "rest" was used to describe holiday time, a
vacation. But the only holidays the Israelites had in Jesus' days were linked to
religious festivals, holy days, which all revolved around the Sabbath principle.
The Sabbath rest in Scripture refers to God resting on the seventh day (Genesis
1)--not as a lethargic God, exhausted from a week of creating, Who is now
sleeping through Saturday!--rather, it is the rest of the Artist who, having
completed His picture, stands back in the total satisfaction that not another
brush stroke can be added. The work is as He first saw it in His mind when He
began the task. It means the rest that the world lay in on that seventh day,
the rest of completion and the peace of God, for the creation shares in the rest
of the Creator. We are all restless, weary, and heavy-laden, having rejected our
Creator. Jesus says that to enter into this relationship with Him, we must leave
behind the restlessness of our fragmented lives and the many faces of our
disintegrated selves, and be formed and recreated in Him.
We must have a renewal of our minds in which we come to understand who God
is, who we are. and how to relate to our fellow humans on the planet. We all
came to Christ with a belief system, a way of looking at things, that was wrong.
I say that so blatantly because,if Jesus is the Truth, then all the explanations
and systems by which we try to make sense out of life are wrong. Now that we have
come to Jesus, how we have understood God and ourselves in the past and all of
our philosophies by which we have tried to make sense of our existence must be
dismantled. A totally new structure of thinking must be put together in light of
the revelation of God's love in Christ.

Do not misunderstand me. You cannot learn your way into salvation! You are
not saved by acquiring knowledge. You are saved by coming to Him and calling
helplessly upon Him. But, if you come to Him an then do not listen to His
healing word in your spirit, the rest He promises does not actually become yours.
Instead, you find yourself, as I did, on a religious treadmill... trying to make
the new life work within the old thinking processes. We want Jesus to bless our
dysfunctional way of thinking! We hear of "the rest" and keep trying to make it
happen often by attempting to come to Him again and again, instead o#
submitting to Him as he speaks within us by His Spirit. Now that we have come
to Him and are reborn, the spirit says: ....DO NOT BE CONFORMED TO THIS
WORLD, BUT BE TRANSFORMED BY THE RENEWING OF YOUR
MIND...
ROMANS 12:2

The word "renewing" can be understood as "renovating," tearing down and
building up. Jesus desires to make us whole, to bring us to our fullest
potential, to remake us as persons. He will gently take away all our false masks
and call us out of our bunkers of lies, shining His light into our denials. He
will fill us with His love and empower us to forgive all who have hurt and
abused us. In a word, He will tear down all that we believed to be the meaning of
life in order to rebuild us on the foundation of the Truth that is in Him. When
Jesus becomes the new owner of our lives and begins the work of renovation...we
discover that what looked to us at first like a little job has become a lifetime
project of totally rebuilding us. This renewing of our understanding of life is
accomplished by Jesus himself. Christianity is not simply a knowledge of facts;
it is not something that one can acquire by going to a series of lectures on the
historical Jesus. It is a living and personal relationship! Only the creator knows
His creature, and He comes to us in the Lord Jesus and calls us to become the
persons He planned us to be. It is significant that the word "saved" also means
"healing" from sickness. After we have come to life in Jesus, we need to be
healed of the results of sin in our life. Jesus makes us whole, calling forth the
new person we have become in Him, giving definition to our new identity. Many of
us come to Christ and, instead of facing the hurts of the past and letting Him
heal us, we deny them or cover them with the bandaid of frantic religious activity.
The process of healing is, at best, retarded; most of the time it is totally
neglected, and our hurts fester underneath our religious work.

Tragically, all too often we become so involved in church work and religious
performance that we are made leaders. Some of us even enter the full-time
ministry, as I did. We preach of Jesus, while our own lives have never been
brought to the rest of wholeness and the discovery of who we really are in union
with Christ. While trying to build a church and heal the wounds of others, our
own lives cry out for the healing rest we should have received years before.
The Gospel is not primarily defined by its *ultimate concerns*; i.e., where we
will spend eternity. Shocking though it may sound to some ears, the witnessing
of the New Testament believers was not centered on, "Where will you spend
eternity?" It was consumed with the fact that Jesus was really alive, and we must
now enter into a relationship with Him. The questions asked were relational: our
coming to our fullest potential as persons in union with Christ. Paul asked, DID
YOU RECEIVE THE HOLY SPIRIT WHEN YOU BELIEVED? rather than
asking about their eternal destination (Acts 19:2).

This led at once to *immediate concerns*; i.e., if Jesus is alive and lives in me,
how do I now relate to my spouse and my neighbor? How does the resurrection
of Jesus affect the meaning of life, the way I look at my job, my goals for my
life? It is seen as Jesus saving us from this bent and twisted society based on
the original satanic lie, in order for us to be a part of His kingdom coming to
earth and for His will to be done here as it is in heaven. And this is not couched
in a dreary list of rules to keep. It is a participation in the life of the Lord
Jesus himself, made possible by the mighty power of the Holy Spirit He gives to
us. He said, LEARN OF ME, of His very Self, His own life united with our own.
His goal is that we live in the love of God and express that love in all we do
and say. In this we are made whole and we come to our fullest potential as
persons.

Paul saw his readers as being in the process of becoming the persons God
intended, as living only at half potential or less. In his letters, he told them
that he was praying for their eyes to be opened to see the hope to which they had
been called (Ephesians 1:18) or, again, that they might be filled with the
knowledge of God's plans for them (Colossians 1:9,10). They were only half
aware of what was theirs as believers. They had to be taught. Being born-again
and Spirit-filIed did not catapult them into everything God had planned for
them! Paul knew that ultimately Jesus himself must teach them, so he did not
suggest a book to read or a lecture to attend, but prayed that the Holy Spirit
would accomplish the work. There is a sense in which we are born into the
family of God very much like kittens, with our eyes closed! A kitten is a real
kitten, but it must have its eyes opened in order to begin functioning in its
kitten world. We are truly reborn authentic believers, but we must have our eyes
opened. We must be taught and only the Lord Jesus can do this.

Each of us must find our personhood and new identity from Him and in Him.
We can put away condemnation live joyfully in the process of salvation.