The other day at the Divisional meeting I mentioned to the pastors that I hoped to live another fifteen years. Jim Rich asked, "What do you want to do in that time?" I answered, "I have something I want to say to the Church."

After I got home I thought, "I know I want to say something but exactly what is it?"

The main thing I wish to do over the next few years is to explain to the Christian people the program of salvation as I believe the Lord has explained it to me. It doesn't matter how many revivals God sends, if we don't get hold of the program of salvation the good that is done in the revival won't last.

I know I've said these things before and probably will keep on saying them for fifteen years.

Today we are viewing salvation as a ticket to Heaven. Jesus is our ticket to Heaven. If we take the "four steps of salvation" we will escape Hell and go to Heaven when we die.

People, this is not the program of salvation.

The program of salvation is a Divine operation that takes the adamic personality and re-creates it until it is in the moral image of Christ and at rest in God's Person and will. The re-creation is not so we can go to Heaven but that we may have fellowship with God and participate in the work of the Kingdom of God which soon is to come to the earth.

While these two views of salvation may appear to be similar, or it may seem that the second is some kind of improved or enlarged version of the first, the truth is they are poles apart. One is a change of location. The other is a change of personality without reference to location.

There are several considerations or aspects of the program of salvation that we discussed last night in the Discipleship class that might be helpful to our readers.

The goals. Deliverance from destruction in the Day of Wrath is a primary goal of salvation. This part of the goal includes the forgiveness of our sins.

The second part of salvation is the transformation of our personality in line with God's calling on our life. I do not mean our calling in this world but our eternal position in the Kingdom of God the mark that has been established for us by the Lord. The second part of salvation includes the removal of the power and presence of sin in our personality, the forming of the Divine Nature of Christ in us, the coming of the Father and the Son to dwell in our transformed inner nature, and the gift of a body of resurrection life that will clothe our resurrected mortal frame.

To be continued.