I was born in El Salvador, at the beginning of a civil war,
a war that in the following years would turn very, very ugly. A poor female in a war torn country
with little to no family support does not have the brightest future. Maybe no future. But I was saved.
Twice.
As family folklore goes, my father was at work when my
mother got the call from the adoption caseworker, asking “we’ve got a four day
old baby girl, do you want her?”
Thankfully, the answer was a resounding yes and a few months later they flew
into hell to get me. At four
months old I weighed nine pounds, was covered in sores, and didn’t respond to
sounds. Mom fixed the first two
problems, and a few days in a nice, quiet hotel room fixed the last one (the
doctors said I was so used to crying babies that I had turned my hearing
off).
Mom and Dad carried me home
to a town full of aunts and uncles and the like who couldn’t wait to have their
turn fattening me up. They gave me
life. This was the first time I was saved.
When I was around eight yrs old I came home from church and
felt a tugging on my heart that I can’t explain. All I knew was that I had a choice to make. That the real God was asking me to
follow Him. To believe that his
son Jesus Christ lived, died, and wanted to forgive me for everything I’d ever
done wrong. Granted at age eight
that wasn’t much, but the guilt of sin is overwhelming no matter how small the deed. And so I prayed and told God
that I believed Jesus died instead of me and that I wanted to follow his path for the rest of
my life. This was the second time
I was saved.
In El Salvador my hell was a too-full orphanage and too
little food. But there is much
worse hell. A place of torment and punishment. There is still
life after we die, and God says that everyone who doesn’t follow him will be in
hell for eternity. Forever. But you can be saved from this hell,
simply by believing what Jesus did and following God. Don’t take it from me though. Here’s what God says in his word, the Bible:
There’s nobody living right, not even one,
nobody who
knows the score, nobody alert for God. They’ve all taken the wrong
turn;
they’ve all wandered down blind alleys.
You know the story of how Adam landed us in the
dilemma we’re in—first sin, then death, and no one exempt from either sin or
death. So death, this huge abyss separating us from God, dominated the
landscape from Adam to Moses. Even those who didn’t sin precisely as Adam did
by disobeying a specific command of God still had to experience this
termination of life, this separation from God.
As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God,
you didn’t have to bother with right thinking or right living, or
right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you
get out of it? Nothing you’re proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end.
Since we’ve compiled this long and sorry record as sinners
(both us and them) and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the
glorious lives God wills for us, God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he
put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess
we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by
means of Jesus Christ.
God put the world square with himself through the Messiah,
giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. (Traci writing: God had to punish somebody
for your sins. And so instead of
punishing you he punished Jesus his son.
By killing him on a cross.)
Your life is a journey you must travel with a deep
consciousness of God. It cost God plenty to get you out of that dead-end,
empty-headed life you grew up in. He paid with Christ’s sacred blood, you know.
He died like an unblemished, sacrificial lamb.
Christ … didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He
presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too
weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we
hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway.
The word that saves
is right here, as near as the tongue in your mouth, as close as the heart
in your chest.
It’s the word of faith that welcomes God to go to work and
set things right for us. This is the core of our preaching. Say the welcoming word to God—“Jesus is my
Master”—embracing, body and soul, God’s work of doing in us what he did in
raising Jesus from the dead. That’s it. You’re not “doing” anything; you’re
simply calling out to God, trusting him to do it for you. That’s salvation.
With your whole being you embrace God setting things right, and then you say
it, right out loud: “God has set everything right between him and me!”
Scripture reassures us, “No one who trusts God like
this—heart and soul—will ever regret it.” It’s exactly the same no matter what
a person’s religious background may be: the same God for all of us, acting the
same incredibly generous way to everyone who calls out for help. “Everyone who
calls, ‘Help, God!’ gets help.”
Now that we are set right with God by means of this
sacrificial death, the consummate blood sacrifice, there is no longer a
question of being at odds with God in any way. Now that we have actually
received this amazing friendship with God, we are no longer content to
simply say it in plodding prose. We sing and shout our praises to God through
Jesus, the Messiah!
The above verses are from the Bible, the Message
translation. Mostly from
Romans. Read it for yourself here:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+1&version=MSG. I pray you'll be saved too.
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