Salvation is a Person!

A fitting reminder from an amazing book ("Holiness" by J C Ryle):

I am afraid that many who profess Christ in our day have lost sight of our Lord’s person. They talk more about salvation than about their only Savior, and more about redemption than the one true Redeemer, and more about Christ’s work than Christ Himself. This is a great fault, one that accounts for the dry and shriveled spirit that infuses the religious lives of many who profess faith.

As ever you would grow in grace, and have joy and peace in believing, beware of falling into this error. Cease to regard the Gospel as a mere collection of dry doctrines. Look at it rather as the revelation of a mighty living Being in whose sight you are daily to live. Cease to regard it as a mere set of abstract propositions and abstruse principles and rules. Look at it as the introduction to a glorious personal Friend. This is the kind of Gospel that the apostles preached. They did not go about the world telling men of love and mercy and pardon in the abstract. The leading subject of all their sermons was the loving heart of an actual living Christ. This is the kind of Gospel which is most calculated to promote sanctification and fitness for glory. Nothing, surely, is so likely to prepare us for that heaven where Christ’s personal presence will be all, and that glory where we shall meet Christ face to face, as to realize communion with Christ, as an actual living Person here on earth. There is all the difference in the world between an idea and a person.

Or, as Paris Reidhead loves to put it:

You see, salvation is not in a plan. Salvation is not in scripture verses. Salvation is not in ordinances and all the scheme of theology. Salvation is not a decision. Salvation is not in the pronouncement of an evangelist, or a pastor, or a teacher.

Salvation is a Person!

This is the cardinal truth of our day. Salvation isn’t FROM a person only - it is - but salvation IS a person. David saw this in Psalm 27: “Jehovah is my light and my salvation.” Again we have it: “He that hath the Son hath life. Life is in the Son. He that hath not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth upon him.”

You understand, therefore, that salvation IS Christ. He is our light. He is our salvation. He didn’t die to send it, He died to become it, and He isn’t just some Saviour because He’s in heaven, it has to be in you. Now, Paul wrote to the church at Corinth in 2 Cor 13:5 and said: “Examine yourselves, whether you be in the faith: prove your own selves. Know you not your own selves, how that Christ be in you, except you be reprobates?”