Hello, Beloved Reader! I’m Faith. Thanks for visiting me today! In this post, we will be continuing with Part 2 of our Salvation series and the question we will be answering is this: Why is salvation important?

Imagine for a moment, that you enjoy ice skating. From the time you were born, you were on the ice and it’s all you’ve ever known. There’s a river not too far from your house and you like to go there when it’s frozen over to skate the day away. One particular winter, when you go down to the river, you stay a bit longer than you meant to. It’s alright though. When you get home, everything seems fine with your family, and the next day you go out skating again.

This time you stay longer than you did yesterday. This happens more and more as you get better and better at skating. But while you are skating, there are people at home who are suffering without you. They have to take care of things you normally would because you are spending all your time enjoying yourself. Yet, you don’t see it, for you’re too caught up in the pleasure of skating. You even miss the special days, like holidays and birthdays, that come by while you are out on the ice practicing different moves and tricks for hours on end.

One day, you make your way onto the ice. It’s particularly warm today, but you ignore the threat of the spring weather trying to ruin your fun. You get on the ice and start practicing your spin. The world twirls about you as you turn and the wind nips at your nose. You haven’t noticed it yet, but instead of staying in one spot, you have started spiraling toward the center of the frozen river. You also haven’t noticed that the ice here is thinner than you think it is.

When half your body plunges into the freezing abyss, you find yourself scrambling to get out, but the ice that was once your friend keeps breaking. As you panic, it continues to betray you, forcing you to stay in the cold, cold water. This ice has held you up for a season, but now the season is changing and revealing what’s really going on under the surface of the pleasurable ice. Repaying your affection with an evil, murky trap.

This is where you find yourself in need of a Savior. For without one, you are doomed to freeze in the deep, icy blue that surrounds you.

I guess you’ve figured this out by now, but let me explain anyway. We aren’t talking about ice skating here. Now, ice skating may not be a sin, but I’m using it to represent sin in my story. 

In my story, you had been on the ice since you were born. We, ourselves, are born into sin. (Romans 5:12. John 3:3.). Sin is something that satisfies our fleshly desires, whether that be executing anger by hurting someone’s feelings, or stealing something from a store because it’s easier than working to pay for it.

The ice pleased the fleshly desire to ice skate. A person looks at sin and sees it appeals to the fleshly lust of whatever their evil heart wishes to accomplish (Jeremiah 17:9). Sin gives pleasure to the flesh, so people do it. 

Sin takes you further than you want to go, keeps you longer than you want to stay, and costs a lot more than you want to pay. Bro. Anthony has referenced this saying many times.

In the story, it started making you stay longer than you meant to. In turn, you started dismissing the people in your life, only deeming yourself as most important. Once you were okay with that fact, it started taking you further and further into the middle of the sin. Then finally, when you were so far into sin, it stopped being fun. See, sin is fun for a season. After that season, its mask breaks and reveals its true intention to destroy you. In turn, costing your life, which is a lot more than you would want to pay.

It wants to destroy you before you see there is a better way.

This is why salvation is so important. We have a part of us that is eternal. Ecclesiastes 12:7 says that the spirit returns to God when we die and our bodies return back to the dust from which we were made. If our actions in the body determine where our spirit goes when we die, the devil wants nothing more than to keep us trapped in sin so we will suffer the same eternal judgment he will in Hell (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10).

Salvation is an opportunity for escape from this reward of Hell.

Let’s go back to the story for a second. You are still in the icy water, but you see someone on the bank. You believe He will help you, but you have to cry out to Him. When you do, He comes running and with no regard for Himself, He jumps in the water. You ask Him to save you and He shoves you out of the water and onto the solid ice. Your Savior is now covered in frozen water.

Jesus became sin, who knew no sin (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus died, suffering the death that we deserve. He did this so that we could have the opportunity for eternal life in Heaven. Salvation is what makes this possible.

Out of the freezing water, a person will most likely want to run as far from the ice as possible. Where is there to go from the cold of outside, but into the fiery warmth of the Holy Ghost-filled house of God? When you are truly saved, your spirit will be towards God and not towards the sin that you know will so easily destroy you.

Do you see? Salvation is important because we refer to it as the turning point in our lives, where we start to refuse our flesh the pleasure of sinful lusts which will ultimately destroy us and send us to the terrible place of fire and torment.

Not only does it save you from this place, but once a person is truly saved, they will start to witness to others about the warm love they can find in Jesus. Your salvation starts a series of events that changes the lives of those around you, and those around them, and so on and so forth.

I hope by now you understand the importance of salvation. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you will join me next week as we talk about how you can achieve this salvation!

— Faith Cross