Second, Jesus came to give you salvation (rescue) to a new life now — a NEW BEGINNING.

Salvation is rescue to be all you were created to be in the now.

You can't do this on your own. You need a Savior.

This is where the Gospel of Jesus Christ becomes so exciting.

The Apostle Paul declared to fast-living, bogged-down sinners with meaningless first-century existences, struggling with success issues, that they could have a new beginning in life. He put it in these words: "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!" (2 Corinthians 5:17). He wrote that to people living in that very materialistic coastal city named Corinth, with pressures on them so similar to those on us today.

He wrote to citizens in the northern Greek city of Philippi on the major East/West trade route, declaring how he had learned to "forget what lies behind," based on what God had done for him in Jesus Christ. No longer was he weighed down by the sins of the past. He was a forgiven man. No longer was he trying to energetically please God, saving himself by zealous actions. No, he had learned God's love, His amazing grace, and his life had been transformed by the person of Jesus Christ, who offered meaning and purpose for existence. He no longer had to define himself by past successes and failures. He was free to live in the now as he was created to live.

Some of us have a very distorted understanding of salvation.

Whether we have thought it through or not, we live as if becoming "born again" is the end instead of the beginning. We forget that to repent of sin and put our trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation is not only the end of an old life; it is the beginning of a new life. The day a baby is born is the day of beginning. It is not the end.

Or you can put it in the terms of graduation from college. What do we call graduation? It is "commencement." What does commencement mean" The end? No! It means the beginning of a whole new life. When a person graduates from college it does not mean they now never need to open a book again, or study, or have creative thoughts. It means they now have been given, at great expense and effort on the part of many, including themselves, the tools to be an intellectually growing person. I have read the average male college graduate reads less than one book a year. I am not certain if that statistic is accurate. I am not certain I have ever met an "average" person. But I do know there are people who assume the life of the intellect is of formal, academic matriculation. A period of formal education brings us to a point, if we take advantage of it, that we see a larger world of ideas in the natural and social sciences. We have an appreciation for art, literature, history. If we nurture that, we are a growing person intellectually all through life. Graduation is truly a commencement, a beginning.