Salvation: Past, Present, and Future
When someone is saved, when he or she comes to know Jesus in a personal way, when the drawing of the Spirit of God meets up with the faith of a responding sinner, that person is wonderfully and miraculously made new. The question remains: Is that all there is to salvation? Is it a once and done work in our lives? That answer is “no.”
Salvation is not only a past event in the life of a Christian. Don’t get me wrong, there is a past event. There is a moment in time where a person steps from being lost to being found, being separated from God because of sin to being reconciled to God through faith. For me, that moment was in August of 1978 when as a nine-year-old boy I prayed to receive Christ as my personal Savior and Lord. Have you had an event like that in your life where you responded in faith to Christ? That is the moment of regeneration. That is the time when we are born again.
At that moment of being made into a new creation in Christ, we also experience justification. That is where we move to being in right standing before God. We are declared forgiven of our sin and declared righteous by receiving the righteousness of Christ that He gives us. We are justified. We are declared right with God.
But we must realize that the past event of our salvation is not the end of God’s work. Salvation also has a present tense. For followers of Christ, God is presently and constantly working to grow us to look and act and love more and more like Jesus. This process of the ongoing work of the Spirit of God in our hearts is called “sanctification.” For followers of Jesus, this process will last the rest of our lives.
2 Corinthians 3:18 says it this way: “And we all…are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory” (NIV).
Believers in Jesus are being reshaped into His image. That is an ongoing process, and that is a life-long process. As long as we are still breathing on this earth, the Spirit of God is working in us to grow us in the Lord. This is the present tense aspect of salvation: sanctification.
Finally, salvation has a future tense, too. One day, when this life comes to an end, we will step into the presence of Jesus, and the culmination of our salvation will become a reality. We will leave our sin nature behind. We will leave our heartbreaks and headaches behind. We will experience glorification. This is the future tense of salvation.
So, if you know the Lord in a personal way, then the reality of your salvation in the past (regeneration and justification) leads to the growing in your salvation in the present (sanctification) and ultimately the fullness of your salvation in the future (glorification). Salvation is past, present, and future for believers in Christ.