Our Salvation--Yours and Mine

My wife reminded me the other day, of a verse of scripture that had come to mean a great deal to me in the early '90s at a time of great financial stress and lack of suitable employment. Without going into a lot of detail, suffice it to say the economy was nearly as bad in this area as it is now. The space shuttle Challenger had been lost in 1986 and the United States Congress had subsequently decided to shelve Space Launch Complex 6 at Vandenberg AFB which was to have been the West Coast Shuttle launch facility. Many people who had been working on the project found themselves unemployed by 1988 and were looking for any kind of employment so they could keep their homes and stay in the area. That was not the best time for us to have returned to Santa Maria, but we still feel it was the right time. We humans learn a lot from stress as we work our way through it and come out the other side in victory.


The verse she reminded me of is Isaiah 30:15, "...In returning and rest you shall be saved; In quietness and confidence shall be your strength..." Returning, of course, means coming back to the Lord. That does not necessarily mean we have turned away from God. It is any area in which we are not pressing in as we once had been. In our case it meant giving all our challenges and stresses over to God. We had been operating in our own strength, thinking we could solve those challenges on our own. Of course we knew better, but times of stress sometimes cause our emotions to take over for our good sense and keep us from hearing our spirit. The meaning of the word returning is to turn and go the opposite direction from that which we had been going, to repent. Rest is to rest in the Lord. Come back and rest He says. Give him the trials and challenges and rest in the assurance that He is handling them. The promise He gives when we do that is salvation. Turn from the way you have been going, handling things you cannot handle anyway, and give them over to Jesus. Trust Him to be Lord of your life. The result of that is salvation.

Salvation is so much more than being born again. In fact, being born again only gets us going the direction of salvation. We discussed this recently, but in case you missed it, the new birth is salvation from the guilt of sin. The process that begins there is called sanctification. That is the process of being made holy, having our sin fall away from us as we progressively walk with God and press into His way. It is the process of becoming free from the power of sin in our lives. Ultimately, salvation is being saved from the very presence of sin when our mortal bodies are miraculously changed and we go to live with God. Those are the things we are saved from, but even then we have only discussed part of salvation. The other side of salvation is what we are saved to. We are saved to having access to all the riches of God, all His power, and all His authority. It is true! God has placed all those things under mankind's authority on the earth. We live so far below His resources, most of us do not have a very good idea just how much more there is.

In one of his early books, perhaps even his first one, Prayer is Invading the Impossible, Dr. Jack Hayford had original quotes at the beginning of each chapter. The one I think I will never forget said, "When sub-normal is considered normal, then normal is thought to be abnormal." Normal for the Christian should be the envy of the world. We should be examples of love, happiness, security, fulfillment, and rest, just to mention a few. Our normal should look abnormal to the world.

When God handles things, they get handled. Sometimes we do not even understand how they got handled. It is almost like things just happened, almost as if miraculously. There are no miracles in heaven. Most people do not realize that. We rarely think about such things. God works in heaven. His works look like miracles to us because we do not know how they happened. Oh, sure, we might be able to follow the process from point to point to point. We know what happened, but we do not know how or why it happened. That is the work of God and it looks miraculous to us.

The reason we are telling you all this is because we are asking and believing God right now for something that will look like a miracle. (I almost made a BIG boo boo. I almost said it would look like a miracle if it happens.) It is going to happen. We are believing for a house where we can have a sort of on-site discipleship program. We expect people to come and live there for some period of time while they learn the lessons the Lord has for them to learn. After that, they will simply go wherever the Lord calls them to do whatever He tells them to do. We expect to have space available for itinerant ministers who need a place of rest or refreshing themselves. This has been a longtime vision that has looked more like a dream for years. Now the Lord is putting it together and it is exciting. In fact we already have a couple people interested in living with us and the Lord is speaking about some others as well. We will be interested to see how that all works out.


We already know where the house is. The problem is, we have no ability to possess it physically at this point. It is for sale so that is not the issue. The asking price is more than we have ever conceived of being able to spend for a house. Thankfully, the how to of the situation is not ours to worry about. We are working on possessing the house in the spirit and we know when we do that it will be ours in the physical realm.


What we are really asking you to do is to combine your faith and your prayers with ours. Looking at it naturally, we need to have the house by around the first of the year. Of course this is also one of those sooner is better things. That, of course, could cause us to take off in our own strength and really mess things up. We do have a considerable amount of experience in doing that. Please join your faith with ours and pray as the Lord directs. As always, let us know if you know something we need to know. God bless.