In the light of the fact that salvation is something Jesus accomplished for all humanity almost 2000 years ago, although not everyone realises this and therefore not everyone benefits from it to the same degree, I need to re-write much of this page, although I have decided to leave this here while I do so.

What is salvation?

I've seen a couple of items telling people how to get saved and I thought I should throw my two bits in somewhere on my web site.

Salvation comes from a Greek word with a root meaning of to make whole, and being made whole is what it's all about (originally the New Testament was written in Greek while the Old Testament was mostly written in Hebrew). This wholeness involves having close relationships with God and people and results in eternal life.

Yes you've heard all those deals about becoming a millionaire if you only go to their seminar, buy their books, buy and sell their products, and/or invest in their company, but now you can have eternal life and treasure in heaven as a free gift paid for by the son of God, Jesus the Christ!

BTW, Christ is a Greek word meaning annointed one of God which is the same as the Hebrew word Messiah.

But wait! There's more! Salvation is, to borrow the word's of a friend of mine, not only pie in the sky when we die by and by, but cake on our plate while we wait! That is, not only do we get eternal life and and intimate relationship with God and treasure in heaven but it greatly affects and improves our relationships here on earth (or at least it will if we cooperate with God). It also lifts shame, brings freedom, forgiveness, releases us from the power of sin (see below), transforms our hearts, gives us a unique relationship with God and provides meaning and purpose for our lives.

So what is this treasure in heaven you mentioned?

Actually the bible is not totally clear on this but it would seem to include the character of God as we can see in Jesus the Christ and relationships with those people we assist into the kingdom of heaven amongst other things as well as eternal life, hope and a future.

Why do I need salvation?

What's this sin thing I keep hearing?

Sin is anything that damages our relationships, particularly with God. If we do things to damage our relationships with each other we also damage our relationship with God. To lose your relationship with someone is to die to them, and losing your relationship with God is generally what is meant by death in the bible, although it is also used for physical death which is when we lose our relationships with the people in our lives.

How did this happen?

God is love. That God is in more than one person had to be since love must have an object. So this God, who created everything, who is in more than one person, decided to create everything that he would one day have his creation join to himself in the same amazing unity he experiences. These parts of God are the Father in heaven, also known by various other names such as Yahweh and generally what is meant by 'God;' the Annointed One (Messiah in Hebrew or Christ in Greek), also known as the word, who became the man Jesus around 7BC (8BC - 4BC); and the Holy Spirit, referred to in the King James bible and by people who still use Shakespearean English as the Holy Ghost.

For this to happen one part of himself is going to become part of the creation, become a human being, surrendering any uniquely divine powers (hence able to have that moment of trepidation in the garden of Gethsemene, although I don't pretend to fully understand the incarnation or the trinity), take into himself everything that causes seperation between himself and his creation, die (which is seperation, the bible uses the term 'death' to indicate something seperated, so someone physically dead is seperated from us who are physically still here although they may be alive to God, while some who are physically alive are dead to God) physically and to the Father part of God (be seperated from the Father for the first time in history), then rise from the dead as the first human being to overcome death, the first of many who will have complete unity with God. This gives the opportunity for whoever wants it to receive the Holy Spirit, which seems to be the spirit of Jesus, for the beginning of a process which will result in complete unity with God.

For this to happen humanity must require a saviour. What made this neccessary is described in Genesis chapter 3, often called The Fall. In these events humanity obeyed Satan (which means 'accuser' in Hebrew, 'devil' means 'accuser' in Greek) and disobeyed God placing themselves and hence the earth (since we had been given dominion over it) uder Satan's authority. This broke our relationship with God which has caused broken relationships with one another ever since.

Some people see the events portrayed in Genesis 3 as being just a literal description. Large parts of the bible are written in an allegorical style (certainly most of Psalms, Proverbs and the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos....[through the rest of the minor prophets to] Micah, and Revelation), and although God is not beyond doing literally what he wants people to understand as an allegorical lesson (the biblical history of Israel is a real history of a people but it is also full of allegory for people who will see it), I think there is an allegorical lesson in these chapters of Genesis that is the point, whether it is a literal description of events or not. Personally I don't claim to know whether it is meant to be taken literally or not. Either way I think it is interesting in the light of biblical stories that scientists have discovered a DNA marker in women that investigation revealed all women in the world descended from one woman (or one tribe for those scientists who couldn't believe it was from one woman), the story of which is in the Anthropologolical section of the Australian Museum of Natural History, Sydney (there's a big display with a couple of cave people and the information is in a voice over, or it used to be, it's been a few years since I listened to it).

For me one way of looking at the events in the garden of eden is like teenagers who must individuate from their parents, they must go through a period of rebellion to become their own person, although that rebellion may only be small. If it's a big rebellion there way be serious consequences for that teenagers actions, but nevertheless individuation still must be gone through for that person to become their own person.

So what can I do about it?

The problem is we can't do anything about it because we are so affected by it that everything we do to try and fix things is in some way corrupt and fails. It's like trying to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Fear not! God deals with our sin! That's why Jesus had to die on the cross. He took our sin into himself, died with it and rose from the dead without it, so now he can live inside us by his spirit which saves us from the death sin would have brought upon us and he continues changing us from within.

How do I get salvation?

This all sounds great. So what do I do to get it?

In a strong sense there is nothing you can do, it is a gift to receive. Believe in Jesus the Christ, believe that he paid for you to have it, that his work on the cross gets rid of all your sin and that he will work in you to fulfill salvation. This isn't merely intellectual assent to a historical fact, it's receiving the spirit of Jesus called the Holy Spirit to work inside you and change you from the inside out. When we believe in Jesus we receive his spirit and he begins working in us even if we didn't realise this was going on. It's what Jesus was talking about when he said we must be born of the spirit in the gospel of John chapter 3. It means shifting your trust from yourself (or whatever you trust in to make things work) to Jesus.

It's been suggested I add a prayer in here as an example of what you might say, but I deliberately did not want to do this as prayer is communication between yourself and God and it is yours. God would much rather hear, Hey Dude, who the hell are you? straight from the heart than something couched in nice language that isn't you expressing yourself. In my case it went something like this:
So Jesus really is the son of God! Slight delay. I suppose I'd better do something about this. God, whatever it is I'm supposed to do about this, I want to do that. Actually I think I did throw in something about Jesus being in charge.
A good start is, Jesus, I accept you are my Lord.

What do I do with my salvation?

You'll notice that a lot of what I have been saying is about relationships, about our relationship with God and how it is affected by our relationship with each other, and in turn how our relationship with each other is then positively affected by our relationship with God. See my essay on 'relational theology' for more on this. This means that we are not meant to live out our lives in isolation. Think about how Jesus summed up living for God:

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, Of all the commandments, which is the most important?
The most important one, answered Jesus, is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' [Deut. 6:4,5] The second is this: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' [Lev. 19:18] There is no commandment greater than these.
(Mark 12:28-31 NIV).

And:

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35 NIV).

Don't worry if you don't know how to do that, it's God who teaches you:

We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19 NIV).

But the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. (John 14:26 NIV).

I should note here that the Holy Spirit often teaches us through one another. This verse and others like it aren't meant to make us think we shouldn't listen to anybody because all knowledge will somehow be supernaturally downloaded to us.

The point is that we need to be in a community with other believers in Jesus, meeting together for prayer and to encourage one another. Such a group is called a church, and although this is a dirty word to some people, there are a lot of churches out there so if you don't fit in in one place you may well fit in somewhere else.

So why am I a Christian?

All this is well and good, but it isn't why I became a Christian. I went through a process of seeing the world in terms of Newtonian Mechanics, then studying Quantum mechanics and relativity very superficially and finding out the world really is weird, then getting into astrology and later tarot cards, runes, palmistry, numerology and all that 'new age' stuff to see if there was anything in it, then getting into 'white magic' and a lot of weird stuff and basically coming to the conclusion that there was some kind of intelligence behind the universe and it had my interest at heart, then sharing a house with some Christian friends and seeing a love for one another that was different to what you could hype people into over the course of a weekend at some 'new age' course, then reading the bible and one day getting the conviction in my spirit that what it said about Jesus being Lord was true.
I've writen a more complete description of this process on my page about me.

That is not why I am a Christian today. Today if someone said they could prove Jesus didn't rise from the dead or that he wasn't God or some such thing it would affect me about as much as someone proving to me that my mum doesn't exist. It might be an interesting intellectual excercise but it doesn't cancel out 17 years of living with him, or in the case of my mum, close enough to forty years knowing her.

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