What is Salvation?

What is salvation? Many would say it is getting me out of earth and into Heaven, but that is not salvation. It may be one result of salvation, but it is not salvation. Salvation is not getting me out of earth and into Heaven; salvation is getting God out of Heaven and into me! God had to prepare me for His presence. When I was saved, I became the temple of the Holy Spirit. I came into union with Christ, and I became a son of God. Now, friends, that took some doing on God’s part! For Him to make me into something He could dwell in took a sacrifice beyond my comprehension but He did it! It is finished! “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” Paul says in Colossians 1:27.

What God had to do was radical. It was cataclysmic. He had to create something new. He had to create a new person who was a perfect dwelling place for His Spirit; and that is exactly what He did. He did not redo the old or remodel or tweak me here and there. I had to become a “new creation!” I had to be “born again.” I was dead in my sin and had to be raised to new life. My sin could not accompany me into God’s presence, and because God’s goal was union with me, He could not simply cover my sin as in the Old Covenant. He had to cleanse me of my sin. “Though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow” (Isa. 1:18).

I could not be conformed, I had to be transformed. “Conform” comes from the Greek word morph or morpha. It means to “shape into” or take the substance that is and shape it or mold it into some other form, but the substance remains the same. “Transform” comes from the Greek words meta morph from which we get the English “metamorphosis.” It means to be “changed over.” Not only is the form new, the substance is new also. Metamorphosis produces a new substance, a new thing, or a new being.

The old me could not be conformed to the likeness of Christ. All things must become new. That is precisely what Jesus accomplished in me, and in you if you are born again! All things new. I was dead in my sin but now I am alive in Christ. I was a slave, had no relationship with God, now I am a son—and if a son, an heir of God. I was a citizen of the kingdom of darkness, now I am a citizen of the Kingdom of God. I was born of the flesh but reborn of the Spirit. I was a stranger and an alien to God, now I draw close to Him and am already seated at His right hand with Christ. Radical change! Transformed! “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Cor. 5:17).