There is something both healthy and unhealthy about our propensity to see our salvation in a punctiliar, once-for-all context. Many, though not all of us can pinpoint the day when, by His grace we entered into His kingdom by faith. Even those who cannot name the day do believe that it happened once and for all.
It’s a good and healthy thing that we understand that we are already fully forgiven, adopted, beloved of our Father. We fail to grasp the scope of His grace when we walk about as if He has forgiven us but won’t really, fully love us until we’re dead and sin no more. There is no leveling up to look forward to with respect to His love for us, and that’s a good thing. We’re already at level infinity. We became saved, and will never again be anything other than His.
We do, however, remain sinners as long as we live. And such often means that we don’t rightly rejoice over the ongoing nature of our salvation. We look at salvation as something behind us, something we’ve already accomplished. We’ve moved on to the sanctification stage. And for some that is measured by how finely we are able to hone our theological convictions. Salvation is milk for babies. We want meat.
Oh mercy no. We will not only never move on from the salvation He has given us, but we will never move on from the calling to rejoice in that salvation, to walk in joy because we walk in shock. He saved a wretch like me. Which is nothing to yawn over but is something to revel in.
We ought never to forget that in ourselves, each of us is rightly under God’s curse. When we wake up each morning in our bed we ought to rejoice that we are not asleep in our graves. More astonishing still, we ought to cry out in thanksgiving that we are not perpetually drowning in the lake of fire.
It is right and fitting that we should, when we wake each morning, give thanks for His many blessings. We give thanks for the refreshing rest He has given us, that He watched over us through the night. We praise Him for a warm home, wherein we are secure from the elements. We express our gratitude for the work that lies before us, and for the daily bread He daily provides for us.
These are all things for which we owe Him infinite gratitude. How much more so, however, do we owe Him infinite gratitude, daily, that He has forgiven all our sins? That we wake up at all? How ought our hearts sing to wake up not drowning in the lake of fire but secure in His nail scarred hands? This, friends, isn’t rhetoric, but the truth. This isn’t poetry to send us into flights of fancy. It is instead hard-edged reality to send us into genuine joy and thanksgiving.
Every morning for the unbeliever is another morning God in His grace invites repentance. Every morning for the believer is another morning God in His grace is owed ecstatic gratitude. Lord help me to live a life of thanksgiving, always giving sacrifice of praise.