God loves us very, very much. And, because He loves us, He desires to have fellowship and communion with us. Just as we desire to be closer to the ones we love, He wants to be closer to us. And, we desire to have a relationship with Him, too. Yet, our sin creates a gulf between Him and us. This gulf cannot be bridged on our own. We’ve sinned and fallen short of His glory and there is nothing we can do, in ourselves, to correct our fallen state.

Recognizing this, God, from the foundations of the world, prepared a plan to reconcile us to Him. In His economy, sin carries a price tag, and the cost is way beyond our ability to pay because the only currency, so to speak, for the payment of sin is blood. That is why the Word proclaims: without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin. Yet, because the whole world is in sin, not just any blood will suffice for payment. Sinlessly perfect blood is the only agent that will atone for your sin and mine.

Understanding this is paramount to understanding the life and purpose of Jesus Christ. God loves us so very much that the sent His only begotten son into the world to shed his sinlessly perfect blood to provide an avenue for us to have relationship with Him. By believing in what Jesus did for us at the cross, and realizing that he shed His sinlessly perfect blood to atone for your sins and mine, and then responding to His call - in faith - is how we can gain access to our loving Father. He was not obliged to pay this price, yet, because we mean so much to Him, he gave Himself for us. That’s grace!

Therefore, we are saved by grace through faith. Yet, faith without action is dead. If we truly believe all that the Bible claims about Jesus, if we truly have faith enough to understand He is our only hope for salvation from our sins, if we grasp we are hopelessly and helplessly lost without Him and we desire to have reconciliation with Him, then He has made a way of salvation for us.

The first step happens when we believe who Jesus is, that is: the Son of God who gave Himself for us. When we truly grasp this, we will understand our inadequacy before Him. We will realize our wicked sinfulness – greed, pride, lust, lying, rebellion, idolatry, dishonesty, envy, adultery, drunkenness, etc – and we will repent of all our sins and determine never to want that old, awful lifestyle again. When we repent, Jesus will forgive us of all our sins. At the point of repentance, we are now candidates for baptism, which is only for repentant believers. At baptism in Jesus name, our sins are remitted –that is, they are washed away as the blood of Jesus is applied in the watery, so to speak, grave. And, we should then be gloriously filled with God’s spirit, meaning God has taken up residency within us: He has moved in and we will now have his internal prompting, for He will lead us in His ways. The change in the believer is so pronounced that they are a whole new person - it will be as if they are now born again. And indeed they are: they are born into the kingdom of God, born into complete fellowship and relationship with Jesus our Creator and Savior, and born into the family of God which will spend its eternity in heaven worshipping and glorifying the King of kings, the Lord Jesus Christ. This is God’s awesome biblical plan of salvation.