SALVATION ----- what really happens!   When we became born again by the Spirit we were baptized into Christ and placed IN Him by God. This is not something which we, with any amount of human effort can accomplish, any more than we are able to keep abiding IN Him once we have been saved.   Religious institutions will insist that in order to remain saved, you will have to adopt and conform to their traditions and understanding of how to maintain your salvation. Don’t listen to them!   What happened when you were ‘saved’?   To my limited understanding, and I do not profess complete understanding to this great mystery which God Alone completes, I believe the following.   When we receive the glorious news that our sins are forgiven and that our admission to heaven has been paid by the finished work of our LORD Jesus Christ and His sacrifice; we are placed IN Him by God, we are cleansed by His Blood from ALL unrighteousness which allows the Holy Spirit to come dwell IN us because we have now been cleansed by the Blood.   At this moment we have not just been saved from Hell, we have, just as importantly been saved from OURSELVES. In that moment we are baptized INTO Christ’s death, old things are passed away and all things have been made new. We are indeed NEW creations IN Christ Jesus our LORD.   Unfortunately, our flesh (body) and our soul (mind, will and emotions) do not want to take this news lying down! While it HAS been crucified with Christ (if we have been truly born again) and the old self is technically dead, it still must be transformed into the very image of Christ Himself, which is the final end of all true Christians. Of course, during this time our souls (where our will resides) and our flesh will carry on and throw tantrums and hissy fits for quite some time as God works out the marvelous work which only He can complete. That is why we are told He is the Author and Finisher of our faith, it is not finished as a result of our effort, and in fact the process is greatly hindered by our effort. Presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice is not nearly as easy as some would have you believe. (As a side note, anyone who says it is easy has not really done it.)   I think, that God in His mercy does not allow us to see ourselves as we truly are before we are saved, nor does He show us our miserable condition as we are being transformed. Little by little, step by step He will lead us into the fullness of Salvation which His only begotten Son has paid for with His death, burial and resurrection.   During this time of transformation, your mind (which lives in the soul realm) in its untransformed state will want to try and figure out and understand the mysteries of God by trusting to its own understanding. It is from this endeavor that much false doctrine and teaching springs to life! For the carnal mind is not subject to God’s laws and indeed it never can be. People who do not trust in the LORD but rather rely on their own understanding will be satisfied with all manner of false teaching. They are forgetting that God’s thoughts are NOT our thoughts, and that God’s ways are NOT our ways.   The LORD has provided us with the means of not relying on our intellect so that we may in fact understand the hidden things of God. How? By baptizing us with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Unfortunately many born again believers miss this necessary event because their ‘church’ does not understand how it works, they seem to think you have received the Holy Spirit when you first believed in Jesus, and that is not the case. First you receive Jesus and then HE baptizes you with the Holy Ghost, this is not done by any member of the clergy, it is done by Jesus Himself.   Without this baptism you will be unable to grow in the Spirit, being restricted to your own mental capacity to understand the things of God, and our intellect will NEVER figure God out. It will however, come up with all manner of bad doctrine designed to keep us in our spiritually crippled state. We will always remain spiritual cripples if we have not been baptized in the Holy Spirit and do not make use of His provision to grow into maturity (perfection) in our Christian faith.   If we do not receive the gift of a prayer tongue, we are missing a gift which will build us up in the spirit as we are no longer praying with our own understanding but rather speaking directly to God, as He speaks directly into our spirit. When we resist the Holy Spirit and what He would do if given the opportunity we are assuring we will be stuck in a spiritual vacuum all of our natural lives. This of course is an example of not having worked out our salvation, as we have not allowed God, by His Holy Spirit to transform us, because we have limited Him with our foolish, man made doctrines.   When we limit our understanding of salvation, to being the saving of our eternal souls we miss the many benefits which should be manifest in the lives of all those who believe. Some of those benefits would include seeing the promises of God manifest in our lives as all the promises of God are yes and amen in Christ Jesus.   We should experience complete deliverance from the demonic strongholds which have been built up in our lives and which do not instantly vanish when we receive the LORD. We should walk in victory over sickness and disease as a natural body submitted to and under the influence of the Holy Spirit is not a hospitable home for either sickness or disease.   We should have complete victory over sin, as it no longer has any influence over us as we abide in Him and sin not. We should enjoy an abundance of Life which Jesus promised and none of us can imagine, so we need not try and figure out that either, the LORDS idea of abundance is far beyond our idea of abundance.   During this time of transformation, as our salvation is being worked out, Christ is being formed in us and as He is, we are ever growing in our understanding of Him and who we are IN Him. Until one day, He will be completely formed in us and we will come to His full measure and stature. This my friend, is supposed to happen in our lives BEFORE we leave this earth, it is to happen in the here and now and it will happen to them who simply believe.   Rejoice in your salvation for in it our Saviour has saved us from eternal damnation, saved us from ourselves (our will our mind our emotions), saved us from the devil, saved us from sin, sickness and disease and has made provision for us to grow up INTO Him until we have been transformed into His very image and likeness.   Jim Taylor aka A Simple Layman