Let us offer a new definition of salvation for your consideration.

Salvation is our change from the adamic nature to the image of Jesus Christ and our being brought into untroubled union in God through Christ.

Salvation is not addressed to Heaven or to any other place, only to our change of personality.

I can't imagine any sincere Christian having much trouble with our definition that salvation is the power of God through Jesus Christ to change us from a sinner to a saint. After all, if any individual be in Christ there is a new creation, old things have passed away, all things have become new and all things are of God. It is the new creation that is at issue. I think we all understand this.

But look at what this new (and perhaps acceptable) definition does to our argument!

How can one maintain we are saved apart from works when it is the works that themselves are the purpose of the salvation?

How can one maintain that once we have been saved we never can be lost, unless he means by this that once we have been transformed into righteous behavior we never can be untransformed?

To add one more complexity—our present evangelical teaching stresses the opening move in our salvation. However the Scripture teaches clearly that salvation has a specific beginning, a specific process, and a specific conclusion. The Scripture adds that we are not saved until we endure to the end.

We are saved when we believe in Christ and are baptized in water.

Then we have to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, holding our confidence steadfastly to the end, being careful not to draw back to destruction.

Finally we are kept by the power of God unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time.

One can see instantly that the presenting of Divine grace as a one-time maneuver in which we enter an abstract zone of legally applied righteousness that is independent of our conduct in our body has nothing in common with the directive to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, or with the hope and warning that we are saved by enduring to the end.

Editors of the newer translations are insisting, in their comments, that grace operates independently of our enduring to the end. Thus the very Words of God are rendered incompetent, immaterial, and irrelevant by the current adoption of the position of "faith alone" as an axiom through which the remainder of the New Testament must be screened.

However, defining salvation as the process of changing us into the image of Christ and bringing us into the rest of God runs along perfectly with the concept that salvation has a specific beginning, a specific process, and a specific conclusion, and that we are saved (transformed) by enduring to the end.

The new covenant is not primarily one of forgiveness but of the engraving of God's Word in our heart and mind until the flesh becomes the Word.

I think God is saying that the American churches are to repent during the last few years of the twentieth century, that if they do our nation will be blessed; if they do not disaster will overtake our country.

God already has a plan for our repentance including the issuing of available power and direction for our complete deliverance from the works of Satan. Reach up to Jesus and see for yourself if this is true.

It appears to me that the level of repentance God is demanding cannot come about until we evangelicals realize we are preaching our traditions and not the Scripture, and that God is insisting His commandments be kept.

The depth of spiritual-moral evil on the horizon is so much worse than anything we have encountered thus far that apart from the most sincere repentance and turning to God the Christian churches will flounder in moral weakness and sin. The covetousness, worldliness, pride, adultery, fornication, pornography, profanity, lying, stealing, criticism, gossip, slander, malice, strife, worship of people, hatred, unforgiveness, striving for preeminence, group loyalties, stubbornness, impatience, self- seeking found in the churches will continue to abound. Business as usual!

We are not to seek power. We are to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, a Divinely inspired righteousness that will work out demonstrably in the lives of the saints. When we turn to God and start seeking righteousness God will pour out all the power we need to be more than conquerors through Christ.

In so doing we shall save ourselves and our nation. (from Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth)