Luke 1:74-75 “…to rescue us from the hand of our enemies,
    and to enable us to serve him without fear
in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.”

Throughout history mankind has been a bit confused about salvation. We think about being saved from disaster and from enemies, when the bigger salvation is being saved from our own sins. As Walt Kelly had Pogo say, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” I have long been convinced that the reason God allows difficult circumstances in our lives is to cause us to turn to Him, recognizing that we can’t save ourselves. Temporal salvation is of minor significance, when compared to eternal life! Zechariah here does touch on the purpose of temporal salvation, and that is to enable us to walk with God, serving Him in righteousness and holiness. If God bails us out of a fix, and then we turn around and ignore Him and sin again, what benefit is that? Repentance is indispensable to salvation! It’s like someone being saved from drowning, but then they choose never to learn to swim. God wants growing children! The term is currently terribly politically incorrect, but many, many people are spiritually retarded, way back on the “developmental scale” of where they should be. None of us get there perfectly in this life, as Paul famously noted, (Philippians 3:12-14) but like Paul, we need to be focused on becoming what God created us to be. When that is the case, we will experience His salvation in more ways than we can imagine, culminating in eternal and total salvation before His throne. That is something to look forward to indeed!

Every once in a while we see people who mature spiritually very rapidly, and they are a challenge and an inspiration to us. Charlie Kirk is one such individual. He wasn’t “saved” from the sniper’s bullet, but his life demonstrated that he was saved in innumerable other ways. Yesterday I was moved to watch his wife’s testimony, and she spoke of how he acted as a husband and father, in righteousness and holiness indeed. His public acts were on display, standing for God’s truth on every level, but doing it as Peter instructed, in “gentleness and respect.” (1 Peter 3:15) He was less than half my age, actually younger than I was when we arrived in Omura, but he certainly lived a very full life in the eyes of the Lord, going from salvation to salvation. For however long the Lord keeps me here, I could certainly do worse than to follow his example.

Father, thank You for this reminder. Help me indeed fulfill every purpose for the salvation You have so graciously given me, on every level, for Your glory. Thank You. Praise God!