Dear Christian, what’s your salvation story?

Have you ever thought about your salvation story? 

Where do you even start? 

Mine starts like this: I grew up in a very conservative and legalistic home. I grew up in a home where you showed God that you love Him based on how much you do for Him. What I came to realize decades into living this kind of way was that no matter how much I did, no matter how many ministries I served in, I still never felt like I was enough. I felt like I was falling short and I thought, “God can't possibly love me, I'm still too sinful.”

 That was until He finally made himself known to me.

How did He do it? In quite a miraculous way actually. 

 I was praying, “Lord, I want to know you, but not just know you. I want to hear your voice, know your heart, and have a relationship with you.”

Someone reached out to me on Facebook and said, “Ilona, there's a book that you have to read, it's called “The Gospel,” the subtitle is “Discovering the power that make Christianity revolutionary.” 

Dear reader, this is the power that made my life revolutionary and I want to share with you. 

After “doing, doing, doing,” and performing to earn my love and salvation, I discovered in this book that God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life (John 3:16).

The gospel became so simple and clear to me, you don’t have to do anything to earn love anymore. You don't have to perform to earn your salvation anymore. You simply need to say, “I'm a sinner in need of a savior, I believe in Christ's death on the cross, and I accept the love of Jesus and I will give it away to everyone I know.”

It's as simple as that-that has become my salvation story! I discovered that no matter what I do, I can't lose it and no matter what I do, I can't earn it. That’s another beautiful concept I learned that changed my life-GRACE. 

So it makes it simple to live every single day now. I live in the love of Jesus and give that love away. What do you think about this? Isn't it amazing? Think about that, no matter what you do, you can never lose the love of Jesus unless you literally reject it and walk away from it, and no matter what you do, you can never earn it-it’s simply given to you freely and you just have to let that love in.

I just want to hold you there and I want you to think about a couple of things. The first one is what is your salvation story? Have you even accepted the love of Jesus yet? Are you going to keep it to yourself or will you give it away? 

Also consider that you don't have to do anything to earn God's love anymore because it was given to you freely at the cross. The question is, will you believe it? Will you receive it? Will you live like it and honor Him with that?