so great a salvation

Recently I listened to a message by Paris Reidhead entitled "So Great a Salvation." It was possibly the best of all the sermons I have listened to on the sermonaudio site.

Too often we as Christians, and a fundamentalists, will look at salvation only as it pertains to deliverance from hell. We talk about when we got saved, and about getting people saved. It is a noble cause, and it is clear that the Lord certainly does want us to preach the gospel that souls may be saved, but salvation from hell is only a part of salvation as a whole. Jesus came to deliever us from our sinful nature that we may exhibit His righteousness here on earth. He died on the cross to conquer sin, not only to attone for it. Clearly we have a sinful nature, and we find ourselves all too often in sin, but on the cross Christ overcame that so that we would not live in bondage to sin right now. If we were purchased by His blood then we are His slaves today. We are to be slaves of righteousness now! There is so much more to Christ's work on the cross then we often attribute to it. Often times I think that we as fundamentalist will focus on God's hell, and preaching about God's hell, and warning people of hell, that we forget about the victory that Christ won for us here on earth. We need to warn of hell, no doubt, but I would go as far to say that we find comfort in preaching only salvation from hell, because we know we have received that. We are much slower to preach salvation from sin here on earth and deliverance from evil hear on earth, power over temptation here on earth, and displaying the righteousness of Christ here on earth. We are slow to preach these things because we know that we don't exhibit these aspects of salvation as we should. Oh it is an easy thing to preach brimstone, and it is an easy thing to know that Christ died to save you from hell, but too many Christians will be entering heaven by the skin of their teeth because they disregarded the salvation from sin here on earth.

I hope that all made sense I will be back again soon.