Beyond the Weekend: Saved
Your Past, Present, and Future Rescue
The word "saved" gets used a lot in church. But what does it really mean to be saved?
In this series, we look at how salvation works. It's not just something that happened to us in the past. It's something God is doing in us right now, and something he will finish one day.
"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9).
Saved From
Read: Ephesians 2:1-3 | Listen: Ephesians 2
Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Ephesians 2:3b
Paul reminds the believers in Ephesus who they were before they trusted Jesus. They were spiritually dead in sin, disobedient to God, shaped by the ways of the world, and deserving God’s righteous judgement. Paul is not trying to shame them. He wants them to remember what they have been saved from. God created a good world, but sin brought war, murder, greed, jealousy, revenge, and all brokenness into his creation. Every person contributes to that brokenness. All people sin and are objects of God’s righteous anger.
God’s wrath can be difficult to understand. We want God to judge terrible evil and make things right. But we can struggle to see our own sin with the same seriousness. When we measure ourselves against others, we may feel like we are doing well. But when we measure ourselves against God’s perfect standard, we see our need for Jesus. Sin is not simply making bad choices or having areas where we “need improvement.” Sin separates us from a holy God, and we cannot fix that separation on our own. Like someone who is physically dead cannot bring themselves back to life, we cannot save ourselves. We need God to rescue us. And that is exactly what he did. God stepped into our hopelessness and made a way for us to be forgiven and brought back to him through Jesus. We need to understand what we have been saved from before we can fully appreciate the rescue Jesus provides.
TODAY: Take a few quiet moments to honestly name your sin before God. You don’t need to hide, minimize, or make excuses. Admit where you have missed God’s mark. Then thank him for the rescue you could never provide for yourself.
