Saved to Serve

The following is a Tozer devotional I receive via email once a day. This one I thought was worth retelling, but then changed my mind and thought it safer to have it copied into the blog. That way I can't butcher it.

Hope you enjoy it but more importantly hope it challenges you!


"August 29

Evangelism: Salvation Apart from Obedience

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
--Ephesians 2:10

Therefore, I must be frank in my feeling that a notable heresy has
come into being throughout our evangelical Christian circles--the
widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ
only because we need Him as Savior and we have the right to postpone
our obedience to Him as Lord as long as we want to!...

I think the following is a fair statement of what I was taught in
my early Christian experience and it certainly needs a lot of
modifying and a great many qualifiers to save us from being in
error.

"We are saved by accepting Christ as our Savior; we are sanctified
by accepting Christ as our Lord; we may do the first without doing
the second!"

The truth is that salvation apart from obedience is unknown in the
sacred Scriptures. Peter makes it plain that we are "chosen
according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the
sanctifying work of the Spirit for obedience" (1 Peter 1:2).
I Call It Heresy, 1-2.

"Lord, as I rejoice in the free gift of salvation, by grace through
faith, remind me regularly that it is a salvation unto good works,
that we're saved to serve. Amen." "