Unfolding Salvation

By Ryan Danker

This issue of Good News is dedicated to the work of God in Christ to make us whole, otherwise known as salvation. It is my hope that the articles contained here will help us to better understand the process, or order, or even way by which God calls each and every one of us to new life in him.

God’s saving work has always been at the heart of the Wesleyan revival. The early Methodist leaders weren’t launching revivals wherever they went. They were trying to keep up with the outbursts of revival, the restorative work of God. God was at work and they wanted to catch up with what he was doing. And his work involved the salvation of souls. He who created us, loves us, and wants us to live victorious lives. And ever since we turned from him, God has gone out of his way to bring about our restoration.

Just think of Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son. It has many meanings, but one of them is that the parable is a picture of God’s constant desire for us to return home, to return to him, even when we’ve insulted him, squandered our inheritance, and lived self-centered lives. In the parable we learn that when the father, even after all that the son had done, sees him from a distance, he runs to him and takes him into his arms. This is the loving embrace that awaits each of us. This is a picture of salvation.    

From the moment of the Fall, when humanity sinned and brought death and corruption into the world, from that very moment, we begin to see God’s plan of salvation unfold. Look at the account of the Fall in Genesis, even there we catch small glimpses of God’s plan of salvation. Adam and Eve had broken the covenant that they had with God and the repercussions were disastrous for them and for the creation itself. God responded to their faithlessness by sending them away from the life that they were intended to live, a life that sin made no longer possible. But when God cursed the serpent that had beguiled them he spoke of the “seed” of the woman who will ultimately “bruise” the serpent’s head. The church fathers read this as a reference to Christ, born of Mary, the second Adam and the second Eve, from whom and through whom salvation would come.

The plan of salvation unfolds throughout the rest of Scripture. Even after the Fall, God continued to walk with his people, ultimately calling on Abram to become Abraham and Sarai to become Sarah, whose decedents would be a chosen people, a holy people set apart as a beacon of God’s work of restoration. He called the people of Israel to be his own so that they might cooperate with his work to bring wholeness and healing to the world.

Only in Christ, though, do we see the work come to fulfillment and completion. Only God incarnate, God with us, God as one of us, would the full healing begin, a new creation. Made one of us, he lived and died as one of us, saving us by his full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice on the cross. 

Sin entered the world through our disobedience, but Christ’s death conquered sin. And the same victory that he won on the cross can be applied to your life and to mine. Sin doesn’t have the last word, even on this side of death. Christ’s resurrection by the Spirit of God, a new life, can also be ours as we receive a share of that ultimate life awaiting the general resurrection when we will be made fully like him.

The beauty of the Wesleyan tradition can be seen in its hope-fullness. Wesleyans have a sure hope that we can experience the saving work of God in our lives now. In fact the word “now” is a very Wesleyan word — and arguably a scriptural one. Once when writing to an early Methodist, Wesley — who was talking about the fullness of salvation — said, “Be a Methodist still! Expect perfection now!” The promise of salvation is not just a promise for a future time, but a promise that can be fulfilled and experienced now. Holy love, the life God intended for us from the beginning, can reign in our hearts now.

We can see this in the words of Charles Wesley in one of his striking hymns,

“O for a heart to praise my God
A heart from sin set free!
A heart that always feels thy blood
So freely spilt for me!”

Salvation is something that we can experience in this life and expect now, but it is also a process. There are certainly moments of great change within that process, but wholeness in Christ is a work that we must dedicate ourselves to, by grace, for our entire lives. We are to grow from grace to grace.

Wesley once talked about the process of salvation by using a house as an analogy, a picture of God’s work. He said, “Our main doctrines, which include all the rest, are three, that of repentance, of faith, and of holiness. The first of these we account, as it were, the porch of religion; the next, the door, the third, religion itself.” Salvation is driven by grace — the power of the Holy Spirit — and faith, our response to God’s offer of love.

What we describe as prevenient grace — which means the grace that goes before — is in reality God’s desire to be in relationship with all people. He calls to us like one seeking the lost. He is constantly seeking a loving relationship with each and every one of us, even when we’re not seeking him. This call or grace awakens us, takes the blinders from our eyes, and we begin to see our present situation, a situation where sin has the upper hand. This is sometimes called an awakening. One of the earliest names of people in the Evangelical Revival was actually “the awakened.” They knew that they needed God, and that only in him could they find true wholeness and peace.

When we are awakened to our need for salvation, seeing the depths of our sin and the mess we have made, we experience the need for God’s mercy and we are given a desire for God. And so by grace we turn to him in faith, which can also be understood as trust. Faith is the key, even as grace is the engine. In justifying grace we receive by faith the pardon of God who justifies us, forgives us, placing our trust in what Christ has done for us on the cross. And we’re not just seen to be justified, we are justified as the life of God becomes our own.   

The Book of Common Prayer describes God as one “whose property [character] is always to have mercy.” He longs to set us free. And once we receive God’s pardon, we begin to experience the power of God’s cleansing work. The past is gone and we start anew. This is called the new birth and it is when we first experience the freedom we have in Christ. Its name alone should tell us how vital this is as a new beginning, a new life. It’s not just a name, though; it’s an actual change. We are born again by the power of God.

New birth is the beginning of the process of sanctification; a process propelled by the means of grace such as prayer, fasting, meditating on Scripture, partaking of Holy Communion, and serving one another in love. A true Christian life should be filled with these opportunities to encounter God’s grace. In the process of sanctification, walking hand and hand with Christ, we learn his ways. For a moment, think of it just as you would any relationship. It takes time to get to know another person. But after spending enough time with someone, you know what that person likes, what they think about things, even some of their better, or lesser qualities. Now apply that to Christ. And unlike a relationship with another person like ourselves —even one we love deeply — Christ has no lesser qualities. He is the very embodiment of perfect love, or as Charles Wesley wrote “pure unbounded love.” To walk with him is to walk with God. And no one who spends time with God remains unchanged.   

This walk, or process, enables us to experience what Wesley called Christian perfection. Don’t be frightened by the word “perfect.” The word is used regularly in Scripture such as in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus commands us to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” As with any command of Scripture, it is also a promise. God doesn’t just give us commands from on high; he gives us the grace to actually live this way. His commandments are promises of his grace.

But what does Scripture mean by “perfect”? Scriptural perfection is not static as though any change would undermine it; it’s actually dynamic. It is perfection in love (think of that loving father from the parable again) that breaks the power of sin and enables us to live a life of holy love that looks and sounds and is a life shaped by Christ’s own life. The point is to be like Christ, because in him we see God’s vision fulfilled and he wants to see that vision fulfilled in us. Salvation, in so many words, is the freedom to be who God always intended us to be.

The hymns of early Methodism were organized by Wesley in a hymnal to describe this ordering of salvation. The hymnal has a wonderfully long title — very common at the time — A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists. It was published in 1780 and until the recent publication of Our Great Redeemer’s Praise in 2024, this hymnal was the only truly pan-Wesleyan hymnal, one that the whole family can use.

My doctoral advisor, David Hempton, has said of the 1780 hymnal: “If one were to choose one single artifact of Methodism somehow to capture its essence, the most defensible choice probably would be the ‘Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists.’”

And the hymnal is organized according to the Scripture way of Salvation taught by the early Methodists. We can see in it sections “for those groaning for full salvation,” for “those backsliding,” for those who are walking with Christ and one another in the early Methodist bands (small groups), and for those who have reached perfection in love.

Poetry has a unique way of communicating the faith. And so I leave you with one of Charles Wesley’s hymns from the 1780 collection.

“Saviour of my soul, draw nigh
In mercy haste to me;
At the point of death I lie
And cannot come to thee;
Now thy kind relief afford
The wine and oil of grace pour in;
Good Physician, speak the word
And heal my soul of sin.”

Let us pray for this blessing in our own day, in our churches, our communities, and in our own lives. 

Ryan Danker is the publisher of Good News.