Becoming Whole
Jude
Birth and growth are two different processes, both naturally and spiritually. There’s a difference between being saved and being healed until you are whole. Salvation happens instantly. Healing can be a life long process.
When God saves you, He quickens the eternal part of you. He calls it forth, and it springs to life in an instant. Your spirit is immediately changed by the Holy Ghost, and you can never be any more saved than you are in that moment.
If you compare a person who has just died to a person who died twenty years ago there’s no difference in their state of “deadness.” They are equally dead. The same principle holds for your salvation. You are either saved or you aren’t. It’s a state of being, not a state of becoming. If you were made alive in Christ, then you are alive in Christ. Your salvation was a supernatural impartation of God in your most secret place-your spirit.
Even though your spirit has been saved, you can still have areas that need to be healed-in your mind, your emotions, your appetite, and your desires. And until they are healed, you will continue to fall back into the same cesspool of sinful behavior again and again.
Don’t let people tell you, “If you were really saved, you wouldn’t act like that. You wouldn’t want to do that. You wouldn’t sin like that. “Lapses into error have nothing to do with the salvation of your spirit. They have to do with the healing of your soul and the fact that you are not yet whole. “Sin is not the real issue. Sin is merely the way people seek to medicate their problems.”
In other words, the reason people keep sinning after they are saved is that they are still hurting. A familiar sinful action is one of the ways they numb their pain. They go to the marketplace because they need intimacy for peace and come home with a fifth of alcohol.
Your answer does not lie in people or in things. It lies in the presence of God. Wholeness comes when you turn to Him in your weakness, your pain, your suffering, and you allow Him to do for you what no one else can do. Only God can regenerate the human spirit. And only God can raise a person to spiritual maturity.
Only God can grow you up into a person of grace and wisdom and wholeness.
Jude 24
Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling.