How Your Salvation Makes You Yourself

I struggle a lot with individualism. I think most teens do. We reach the point when we realize we are on the brink of adulthood, and discover, almost for the first time, that we are individuals. Soon decisions will be ours to make. Life-changing decisions. Decisions that could affect a marriage with someone we don’t even know yet, or change the life of a child not yet born.

Life suddenly seems an overwhelming chaos we must learn to control, and we see ourselves as future shadows we are meant to uncover bit by bit. We must seek out our purpose. Find our destiny.  Make our mark. Become our own person. And as we sit on our high-horse breathing in the terrifying, exhilarating facade of personal power over our future trajectory, the gates of Troy slam behind us, and we are overrun by the enemy we foolishly invited as a gift to our own pride and conceit.

It may seem that seeing yourself as “your own person” was the point at which the battle was lost. That self-individualism is the arrogant vein that burst and that seeing our future as in our own hands was the moment when our own hands failed us – what a very un-Christian way to see ourselves. But yet the desire is there – to become who we were meant to be, to change the world in our own little way, give something for history to remember, and die full of life and glory – Is it a desire God never meant to be satisfied? Or are we only satisfying it in all the wrong ways?

View Your Salvation Properly

Okay so it seems that maybe we’re not that special after all. Our own unique fingerprints make no difference when our hands will never be satisfied. Our lives will pass like a vapor, history forgets us, or never saw us at all.

We eventually realize that doing our best in the normal, monotonous, routine tasks of life that no one really cares about may be the best we’ll ever do. Being individual in a sea of individuals is a step off the high-horse into getting up, growing up, getting a job, getting married, raising kids, retiring, and then dying like everyone else.

But that’s a view void of Divine grace and the purpose God has given us in our lives.

Here’s the thing.

Salvation individualizes you. The call of Christ is made to you personally. God has chosen you before the foundations of the world. God has seen you as a real person before and after we have ever known enough to see ourselves as one. This means that the calls, the commands and the promises of Scripture, are not just made to the corporate elect, but are richly, deeply and intensely yours.

As Charles Spurgeon put it so beautifully:

“If you are indeed called by divine grace, you have come into fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ, so as to be joint-owner with Him in all things. Henceforth you are one with Him in the sight of the Most High. The Lord Jesus bare your sins in His own body on the tree, being made a curse for you; and at the same time He has become your righteousness, so that you are justified in Him. You are Christ’s and Christ is yours.” 1

In salvation, you are not only part of the body of Christ, bought by His blood, but you are a sole member of His body, personally chosen, called, redeemed, being sanctified, and destined for glory. Your prayers are heard by your Lord and your Savior. Your future is guided by the hand of your Sovereign God. Your breath is given by His desire. Your faith is a gift of His free grace to you.

View Your Individualism Properly

In the beautiful paradox called salvation, you die and the real you – the person you were meant to be – is resurrected. In becoming more and more conformed to the image of Christ, you become more and more truly yourself.

C.S. Lewis, as usual, says it best:

“Suppose a person who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch to taste and he experiences a particular strong, sharp taste. You then tell him that in your country people use salt in all their cookery. Might he not reply, ‘In that case all your dishes taste exactly the same: because the taste of that stuff you have just given me is so strong that it will kill the taste of everything else.’ But you and I know that the real effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from killing the taste of the egg and the tripe and the cabbage, it actually brings it out. They do not show their real taste till you have added the salt.” 2

In other words, our natural condition is the Unman – to quote one of Lewis’ fictions – and not only does salvation individualize you: it re-creates you. We not only put on Christ, but in putting on Christ, we put on ourselves as we were created to be.

Lewis continues:

“The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become…He invented – as an author invents characters in a novel – all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him…In fact, what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and cannot stop…It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own…There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have give your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most ‘natural’ men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.” 3

View Your Purpose Properly

Our purpose on this earth – your purpose on this earth – is to glorify God by drinking, and savoring, and enjoying, and being satisfied, and finding our fullness of Joy in Him.

One of our main goals in striving to be individual, is we believe that is the only way we can be happy and fulfilled. It is. But Joy and satisfaction cannot be found in the ways we cling to the unman, or in striving to be individuals in a sea of individuals. It can only be found in Christ – in becoming, for the first time, an individual in a sea of grace.

God is glorified when He is valued above all other things of lesser worth, and we find happiness not only in valuing Him above all other things, but we find our value in valuing Him above all other things.

Christ died to secure your salvation. He offers you no less than the eternal Joy of the Kingdom.

Soli Deo Gloria,

 

 

 

 

1 Charles Spurgeon, All of Grace, p. 123

2 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
3 Ibid