Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
— Romans 7:24-25
What is salvation? It is essentially the deliverance from sin. In our society today, that would seem rather irrelevant because we have gotten rid of sin. Several years ago, a famed psychiatrist authored a book entitled Whatever Became of Sin? It has evaporated. Bring up the subject of sin on some talk show and people would look in stark horror at you.
Sin, of course, is any disobedience to God. Salvation is deliverance from disobedience to God. You cannot have a salvation which becomes a license to disobey God; yet there are those who hold that position today.
The great English pastor, Charles Spurgeon, put it this way: “The amazing thing is not that everybody is not saved. The amazing thing is that anybody is saved.”
Think of heaven as a place where there is not even the possibility of so much as a sinful thought. That is total deliverance from sin. In our lives here on earth God frees us from sin by forgiving us, but He also frees us from committing sins because we walk with Him.
Question to ponder:
Can you think of a time when the Lord kept you from sinning?