HOW WERE YOU SAVED?

If someone asked me to explain salvation, I would start by asking the person to describe to me how he got saved. Tell me how you were converted. To make my question more clear, instead of using the passive “got saved,” I would ask, “How did God save you?” What did God do in history to save you, and existentially, what did he do ten years ago, or when you were six, or sixteen, or thirty? Describe to me how God brought you to himself.

I am searching for how a person describes his lostness and the action of God to bring him out of his blindness, to bring him out of deadness to life, to bring him out of insensitivity to spiritual things to being thrilled with spiritual things. I come at the question of election by studying its effects in life. Very few people that I have asked those questions want to take decisive credit for their own conversion.

Now, with their hearts leaning in that direction, I take them to texts that teach what really happened to them, just to affirm that their impulse is, in fact, found in the Bible. “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

Once, we had no light and God gave it just like on the first day of creation. I would read, “Even when we were dead in our trespasses, God made us alive” (Ephesians 2:1, 5). You were dead, and God made you alive. That is how you got saved. “The servant of the Lord must be patient and correct with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance, leading to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 2:24–25). How did you come to repentance? God granted you repentance.

God gives sight, God gives light, God gives repentance, and “no one can come to me unless it is granted to him by the Father” (John 6:44, 65). At this point, I ask if they see that God was the decisive cause of their seeing Christ as true, and desirable, and the source of their spiritual life, and their repentance, and even their coming to Christ

How were you saved by Jesus? What is your personal story of how you were saved?

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