The Purpose of the Gospel

“Draw me after you and let us run together!" Song 1:4

The purpose of the Gospel is not to produce holy specimens to be admired, but to remove the barriers to enraptured love for God, unencumbered by the thought of self.  We can want to be saved and sanctified so that we can feel better about ourselves and think we are getting somewhere (finally!) in the spiritual economy.  We can want to be made right with God, to have our sins cleansed, to be made sons, to be made holy. However, these are means, not ends. The purpose of the Gospel is to remove the relational barriers between God and us.  His intent was to free us of self-examination so that we can live a life of loving abandon, so enraptured that we are unconscious of ourselves.  The lover is so intoxicated with the beloved that there is no room for a thought of himself.   This is what God wants.

Oswald Chambers says, "Salvation is not merely deliverance from sin, nor the experience of personal holiness; the salvation of God is deliverance out of self entirely into union with Himself. My experimental knowledge of salvation will be along the line of deliverance from sin and of personal holiness; but salvation means that the Spirit of God has brought me into touch with God’s personality, and I am thrilled with something infinitely greater than myself, I am caught up into the abandonment of God."

Am I absorbed in a Christian self-improvement program, or finding myself more and more lost in him?