Relooking at the 5 steps

The five steps of salvation are a nice, easy little memory tool to help us learn God's plan for salvation. The problem with reducing the great truth of God’s salvation to just five simple words takes away from that dynamic transformation that needs to occur in every believer’s life. While the idea of hear, believe, repent, confess, and be baptized are all found in scripture, they fall flat when we exclude Jesus Christ from the process and when we take that most passive definition of each word because when we do that, we minimize the gift that God is giving us. Over my following few blogs, I want us to explore those five words because, in those five words, there is a depth that we need to understand if we're going to allow God to take control of our lives and if we're going to allow God to use our lives for his glory. Our selfishness often gets in the way of our usefulness, and we need to understand that we have a purpose, and our goal is to glorify God, not to seek our comfort and not to seek our glory. Our aim is to figure out a way to hold God up to a world that desperately needs Him because our world is lost. Let's start with the word hear. To hear does not mean to acknowledge a sound. To hear means to be confronted with the truth being presented to you. You can't believe it unless you hear it. We are talking about that absolute truth that there is a God and that there is a maker, and if there is a God and there is a maker, then I am the created, and He is the one who has charge, and He is the one who is in control. Yes, He has given us free will. Yes, He has given us a choice, but I need to be confronted, I need to hear, I need to stand in front of that truth that's right there and acknowledge I am not all there is. There is one so much greater than I that I have difficulty comprehending His greatness and power. I have a purpose, and it is serving Him. When we talk about hearing, we're talking about being confronted with that truth and having to look at it in our uncleanness, being confronted with His Holiness. We must look at our inadequacy against His power. Then we can begin to understand when we hear that something is desperately wrong with the way we live our lives. There's something desperately wrong with how the world is living because when we hear the word of God and the creator of this universe, it throws us to our knees and causes us to begin searching for something greater. Too many times, Christians have lost the ability to hear. They listen to the noise. They can even repeat the words. They seldom take the time to meditate and contemplate God's profound nature and truth. When they talk about salvation, the beginning should always include there is a God, He is the creator, He is God, and I am not, and I need to listen, I need to hear, and I need to contemplate the holiness and truth that He gives to me. In Him J. Tom Washburn