As we receive Jesus and follow Him each day our spirit is filled with the eternal resurrection life that is in Him. We have passed from death to life. His Life is the light by which we walk. He who is joined to the Lord Jesus is one Spirit with Him (I Corinthians 6:17).

In the Holy Spirit we have been raised with Christ to reign triumphantly with Him at the right hand of the Father (Colossians 3:1-4). Our eternal life will be revealed to the earth at His appearing.

When is our soul redeemed?

Our soul is saved, or redeemed, as we step along in faith through the wilderness of trials and testings of the world. We must learn to possess our soul in great patience. We will save our soul if we endure to the end of our testings.

In your patience possess ye your souls. (Luke 21:19)

But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul. (Hebrews 10:39)

"Of them that believe to the saving of the soul."

Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently: (I Peter 1:22)

The Christian ascends in the Spirit to God at the moment of receiving Christ, having been made one with Him in His resurrection. Then, if he continues to press forward in faith each day of his Christian journey, his soul will go to a place of rest in Jesus at the moment of his physical death.

And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: (Revelation 6:9)

There is not one moment of spiritual death, of separation from God, for the victorious saint. He who lives and believes in Christ shall never die.

To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (II Corinthians 5:8). Because we live and believe in Christ we never shall be separated from God. If we should leave the earth this moment because of an accident, heart attack, or stroke we know that our soul will ascend to Jesus immediately.

Christ is our resurrection and our life.

To this point we have mentioned the redemption of our spirit and our soul. But neither of these is the resurrection from the dead of which Paul is speaking in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians.

If the redemption of our spirit and our soul were the resurrection from the dead of which the Scripture speaks, and for which all of creation is waiting, then the resurrection would be past for all the saints who have died and gone to be with the Lord.

Make sure you understand thoroughly the preceding paragraph. If you do not you will understand neither the remainder of our brief discussion nor the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians.

To be continued.