Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore, let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach. For we have no continuing city here, but we seek one to come.
Select a thought to read by choosing a collection, the month, and then the day:
Everybody is saved! Praise the Lord! All people living on earth now, including wicked men, are saved from the wrath of God-but only because that wrath has not yet come. One of the principal meanings of "to be saved" is "to be kept from" or "to be rescued", and everybody living today is, for the moment at least, being saved from hell and the wrath of God.
So, OK. I give in. Christians are right. I admit it. They are saved. Every Christian living on the earth now is saved. In fact, everybody who reads this, Christian and non-Christian, is saved. If you are alive, you are saved. So am I. And so is every believer, every sinner, every saint on his knees, waiting on God, and every thief lurking in the dark, waiting for some innocent victim. All of us who have not yet died are saved, right now, from God's wrath. But how will we fare when we are examined by God on the Day of Judgment? One moment after we are judged, will we then say that we are saved? After that all is said and done, God's judgment will be the only judgment that will matter, in the end.
It is for this reason that Paul cautioned believers not to claim much before Jesus pronounced his judgment. "Judge nothing before the time", he wrote (1Cor. 4:5), adding that even though his conscience was clear, that a clear conscience did not mean that God would judge him to be righteous (1Cor 4:4). Paul remembered a time in his life when, though serving God with a clear conscience, he found himself hating and persecuting God's own people. Paul told Timothy (2Tim. 1:3) that he had "served God with a clear conscience" from his youth. This means that even during those days when he participated in the stoning of Stephen and the persecution of the saints, he was serving God with a clear conscience, "thinking to do God a service".
If Paul had been a typical Christian of our time on the day Stephen was stoned to death in Jerusalem, and if one had asked him on that bloody day if he was a saved man, he would have answered, "Yes! And you can't make me doubt it!"
But what would God have said? To illustrate my point, let me relate a story told to the saints by my father, years ago.
There was a sweet motherly saint who had been taught by her Christian minister that she should claim to be already saved. My father read to her the many Scriptures to the contrary and tried to reason with her, but in the end, she could only answer, "Brother Clark, I just have to say that I know I am saved."
To which, as a last response, he asked, "Well, Sister Norris, do you know that you will be?"