She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. (Mt 1:21)
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (Jn 3:17)
And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. (I Jn 4:14)
I was dead but now I live. And I live because of my Savior. Hallelujah!
When a two-year-old girl falls into a river, she is in trouble. Unless someone saves her, she has just a few minutes to live. When a man is trapped on the tenth floor of a burning building, he is in trouble. He has no power to put the fire out, and he dies if he jumps. Someone needs to help him, or he is gone.
The Scriptures plainly teach that our plight is much like that of the two-year-old girl and the man in the burning building. We are in grave trouble, and unless someone saves us, we have no hope. The reason we are in grave trouble is that we have often disobeyed God, and we cannot escape His judgment. But the Scriptures also teach that we do have a person to save us.
Jesus is that person, and the term His followers use to describe this aspect of Him is “Savior.” A savior is simply a person who saves someone. The man who rescues the girl from the river is her savior in a real way, and the fire department that rescues the man from the building is his savior because it saved him from certain destruction.
Now when Jesus saves us, He does not save us from the river or the burning building. He does not save us from an oncoming army or a pestilence or a thief or environmental destruction. To be sure, these things are real, but as serious as these problems might be, you and I have a deeper problem still. When Jesus saves us, He saves us from our sin.
The reality is that, apart from Jesus, you and I stand before a holy and righteous God, and we do so with sin on our hands and in our hearts. When seen from the perspective of eternity, the consequences of that sin are more dire than the consequences of the river or the fire. The river can kill the body but cannot harm the soul. A just God, however, can destroy both body and soul in hell. Our sin is a disease we cannot overcome and a disease that brings a calamity such as earth has never seen nor ever will see.
But we don’t see it. We make light of it. We sleep as we live. The two-year-old girl doesn’t understand the danger she is in. Sometimes that’s how she got in the water in the first place. She doesn’t know that she needs a savior. She doesn’t see that her life is about to end. But it is. Whether she sees it or not. Unless someone rescues her. So it is with so many who never see the seriousness of their sin. They will perish even if they never see their danger.
Jesus is our rescuer, our savior. He became our savior through the Cross. Sometimes a government will send special forces behind enemy lines to rescue citizens who have been kidnapped and are being held prisoner. We are those prisoners, held captive by our sin. Jesus is God’s one-man SEAL team, and the Cross is the rescue plan. The Cross wipes away sin. It crushes its power. Those who come under the Cross are rescued. They are saved.
Our savior, by virtue of the Cross, brings us to God. He allows us to fulfill the purpose for which we were made. He makes us clean. And free. And whole. And full of life.
The proper response to a savior is joy. You were lost but now are found. You were blind but now you see. You were dead but now you live. This is why God’s people sing. They have been rescued from the pit. They have seen the ugliness of their sin, but they have also seen the beauty of their salvation. God’s people rejoice in their savior Jesus Christ. They do so because they see.
A second proper response to a savior is gratitude. We would think ill of the man rescued from the burning building if he felt no gratitude toward his rescuers. We would think his heart calloused. The follower of Jesus owes Him a great debt. Consequently, God’s people feel the significance of what Jesus has done for them and are grateful from the heart.
