Christianity and Peach Preserves

     I have been reading, quite literally all day, Bob George's "Classic Christianity." At the rate I am going, I should be done with the book by this weekend at which point I will give a complete review. However, I wanted to share one part of the book which has finally explained what I have been feeling about faith in a very simple and yet profound way. I have been feeling lately, as I study scripture, that we are giving an incomplete gospel to people when we merely preach accept Jesus and ask forgiveness. It seems that we may even be teaching believe Jesus and fix yourself. But the gospel is not simply about being forgiven and going to heaven. The gospel is about new life. George had this (in summary) to say about preaching a half-gospel...
     The process of canning is an excellent illustration of the two parts of the gospel. Let's say you are going to preserve some peaches, what is the first thing you have to do? Sterilize the jars. Imagine a husband walks into his home and his wife is boiling jars. He asks her what she is doing and she replies, "Sterilizing jars." He then asks what she plans to do with the sterilized jars and she replies, "Keep them clean." That does not make sense right? The only reason one would sterilize jars is to fill them with something. We would not expect a person to be apart of simply half of the canning process by only sterilizing jars. However, this is what we do with the gospel! We have separated God's sterilizing process--the cross--from His filling process--Christ coming to live in us through His resurrection. By separating the forgiveness of sin from the message of receiving the life of Christ, we have not only missed out on life, but also on the purpose of forgiveness in the first place. The reason one sterilizes a jar is to prevent spoiling in the preserves. The reason God had to deal with sin once and for all was so that we could be filled with Christ "without spoiling." As a matter of fact, there is one more step after sterilizing and filling--sealing. After sterilizing the jars and filling them with preserves they are sealed. Sealing keeps the good things inside and keep the bad things from entering. The scriptures say that having believed in Him, we have been marked with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit. Cleansing, filling, and sealing is a wonderful picture of the full picture of salvation. Once we see that the whole purpose is not simply forgiveness, but bringing the dead to life, it is easy to see why Christ had to deal with sin issue once and for all.
     All throughout the Bible, from the Old to the New Testament, there is one theme that runs throughout and that is new life--restoration and resurrection. Don't miss out on the life Christ wants to live through you.