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Transcript 114A — After I'm Saved, Then What?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Good evening. I'd like to ask a question. First of all, I just became a Christian. Some people say that they're filled with the Holy Spirit. But I just feel like there's something missing. I've accepted Christ as my Savior but I guess the joy, or something, is missing. It's just not quite right. I was wondering if you knew.
HC: What do you think it means to accept Christ as your Savior?
CALLER: Well, it means that I know that He died for me, for my sins, on the cross.
HC: Okay. What else does it mean?
CALLER: It means eternal life.
HC: Yes. You see, to become born again means that we have entrusted our life to Christ as our Savior, and we have repented of our sins. We have turned away from our sins. We have come face to face with the ugly fact that we're sinners, we're under the wrath of God, we're going to hell because of our sins, and we've had it up to here. We don't want to sin anymore. And in desperation we cry out to God, "Oh Lord, have mercy on me." We discover that Christ made provision for our sins if we'll only trust in Him, and so we go to Him and turn our lives over to Him. This is what salvation is all about.
Now when we know that our sins have been forgiven, when we know that we have become a child of God, now let's think about this a little bit. Before I was saved, I was headed for hell. I was under the wrath of God. I was in deep and terrible trouble. Man, if I would have died tonight, what a terrible thing! I'd spend an eternity in hell. But now, praise God! He saved me. He made me His child. I don't have to face hell anymore.
Do you think that's going to make you very joyful? Do you think that's going to make you very joyful? If you knew that you would have to spend the rest of your natural days in jail, and you knew this absolutely, and there was no way of escape, and you'd been fussing with this for days and days and days, and weeping about it, and grieved about it, "Come November 1 I've got to go to jail," and it's a terrible jail, no one ever came out of there alive, and then an hour before you went to jail you got a pardon, and you didn't have to go, do you think you'd be happy?
Okay. You see, that's the joy, that's the joy that comes to us when we are born again believers. Now there are lots of people who are talking about some kind of activity that's going to go on after we're saved. After we're saved, we're going to be filled with the Holy Spirit, or after we're saved the Holy Spirit is going to start doing things in our life, and so on. That isn't what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that the whole transaction is wrapped up in salvation. That's the big deal, that I've been taken out of Satan's dominion, and I've been transferred into the kingdom of Christ, that I've become born again, that I have eternal life, that I know that I'm never going to have to face God for my sins. That's salvation. And there's nothing more, except the resurrection of my body, and I can't have that until the Last Day. But that also is guaranteed to be given to me. And the day will come when I will receive my resurrected body, and I can rejoice in the Lord, too, that that's going to be coming.
But now I've got to get busy and walk by faith. Now a lot of books that we read today, a lot of pastors that are preaching today, they make you uneasy. They give you the idea that once you're saved then glorious things are going to be happening in your life. You're going to have this experience and that experience, you're going to be realizing this gift, that gift, and so on, and so on. And when this doesn't happen, we feel like we're second rate Christians. We feel like somehow we've been shortchanged.
But I don't know what kind of a salvation they're talking about. They're not talking about the salvation of the Bible. The Bible teaches that we walk by faith, not by sight. The Bible says, "The just shall live by faith," just trusting that everything we read in the Bible is true. And we walk that way. We walk not seeing Jesus Christ visibly, not seeing signs and wonders. We walk with the sure knowledge that we have experienced the miracle of regeneration, because the Bible says so. We walk with the sure knowledge that we are a child of God because the Bible says so. We walk with the sure knowledge that our sins have all been forgiven, because the Bible says so.
And so now our task is to go out and be a witness. And God qualifies us at the time we are saved by filling us with the Holy Spirit. We're not filled again and again. The language of being filled with the Holy Spirit has to do with being qualified to be a witness.
We are to be busy exercising control over our bodies that are still subject to sin, growing in sanctification, that is, becoming more and more holy by letting Christ's will be seen in our lives. That's the walk of the Christian.
CALLER: Thank you very much.
HC: You're welcome.