Dear Joshua,
I am so glad to have met you and happy that you were open enough to ask me about my faith. You have
raised a few excellent questions. I thought of writing this letter to you as a way to answer, at least in part,
the questions you have.
I do understand where you come from with regards to questioning the meaning of salvation itself. I am
sure your question would pertain to its context in Christianity. As I should, I will start from the beginning
– of mankind itself. When God created man (the name of the first man God created was Adam, then Eve
came along as Adam’s companion or wife), Things were good, well, because God created everything. At
one point, unfortunately due to temptation, Adam committed sin, and from then, mankind was headed
for death, for by God’s law, the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).
In order to understand salvation, we need to understand what we need to be saved from; and that, my
friend, is sin. Sin is basically an act of rebellion against the will of God (1 John 3:4). So, God tells us not to
kill, but we kill – we rebelled against Him – we sin. God tells us to be kind to another person, but we
don’t – we rebel against Him, thus we sin. Since Adam sinned, we are all born in sin (Romans 5:12), and
our punishment is death; not the physical death, but eternally dead. Now, knowing we are in serious
trouble, we need to be saved – we need salvation. Therefore in the context of Christianity, salvation is an
“escape”, that is, to be saved from having to go through what we should have been headed to, which is
eternal death.
This brings me to the next question on why does one need to be saved. Further to what I mentioned
earlier, we have to recognize one of God’s characteristic, that He is just, and by extension, His laws are
just. When God says the wages of sin is death, then there is no way around it. At the end of this life, we
will all face God for Him to deliver His judgement. This is when God decides where we will spend our
eternity, either with Him in heaven or in torment in hell (John 5:27–30).
I hope this point would suffice to persuade you to make a decision to receive the gift of salvation that
only Jesus can offer. In order to be saved, you would first need to believe that Jesus is God, only then
would you believe in His Word; and His Word says that you need to repent, be baptized in the name of
Jesus and receive the infilling of the Holy Ghost (Acts 2:38). Essentially, we were born in the flesh, thus is
subjected to sin, so we need to first die to our sins, and have a new birth experience to be born of the
Spirit (John 3:6). To be a child of God, and God is Spirit, we need to be “born again” in the Spirit and
newness in the resurrection power of Christ and we will be new creatures in Him (2 Corinthians 5:17).
However, please do not think of this as a magic formula as essentially, you are saved by having faith in
Jesus, and being baptized of water and Spirit is the active representation of that faith. Faith is placing our
trust and hope into someone or something in spite of not personally seeing a physical manifestation in it
(Hebrews 11:1). For example, if I board an aircraft, I have faith (trusting with my life) that the airline
hired a qualified, well-trained pilot who has had enough rest and is capable of flying the plane, even
though I have not seen the airline’s hiring guidelines, the pilot’s qualification, or their face for that
matter.
If you are wondering how do you stay saved, all we need to do is try our best to be obedient to God.
Remember, we are saved only by the grace of God, not in what we do. So from the moment we are born
again, we are in this sanctification or “cleaning” process where we submit ourselves (including all our
fleshly desires) to God and allow Him to mould us to be who He wants us to be (1 Thessalonians 4:3). By
no means is this easy, but we are in this race together, and our brothers and sisters in Christ are here to
help each other especially in moments of weakness.
What then happens if we are not saved? As mentioned, the wages of sin is (eternal) death. Someone has
to die for our sin. That is God’s law. However God is gracious enough to come in the from of a man to
take our place and die for our sins in stead of us. When we accept Jesus and received His gift of salvation,
we essentially surrendered ourselves (including our sins) to him and He brought it to the cross so we can
live. However, if we do not receive His gift, it is then status quo – we are not taking up His offer to take
away our sins, and we have to die. That means our eternity is heading for damnation.
With that said, please assured that Jesus came not to condemn us, but to give us eternal life to whoever
believes in Him (John 3:17) Therefore with all I have said in this letter, I hope I gave some light to the
questions you have about my faith.
Thank you.
