A masterful job has been done of keeping the Christian church preoccupied with the thing God has dealt with once and for all – sin. While at the same time, it has been ignorant of the thing that God wants us to be preoccupied with – life!

This does not mean that we are to minimize what Jesus did on the cross. We can never be thankful enough for that! We need to understand that the ultimate goal of salvation was the restoration f life so that we can truly appreciate the purpose and meaning of Jesus Christ’s death for us on the cross.

When I was a boy my mother and grandmother carried out a summer ritual called canning. I don’t know why it was called “canning” since everything was put into glass jars. Grandma and we kids would go out into the backyard and pick fruit for what seemed like days. The morning went like this, one raspberry or strawberry or blackberry for the pail and one for our eager little mouths. It took a long time to fill the pail doing it like that.

Grandma would scold us and remind us that there wouldn’t be enough for next winter if we ate them all now. Somehow next winter just didn’t seem very important to us on a warm summer day.

Once we had enough berries, we would take them into the kitchen and carefully wash them. Meanwhile, my mother had been sterilizing the jars. The kitchen was filled with steam! Sterilizing the jars meant that the contents – the fruit– would be preserved from spoiling.

It would have been rather strange if we had come into the kitchen in January and found my mother still sterilizing the same jars since there was nothing to put into them then. So if she had just kept sterilizing the same jars day after day and then put them on the shelf only to clean them again it would be rather futile. Why clean them if you are not going to fill them? We’d certainly have a lot of clean jars, but that would be only half of the process. That’s a lot like asking God to forgive us and to forgive us and to forgive us – to stay like clean jars but not putting anything into us.

Sin has been dealt with once and for all. We need to realize that first.

Hebrews 9: 24-26

For Christ didn’t enter the earthly version of the Holy Place; he entered the

Place Itself, and offered himself to God as the sacrifice for our sins.

25 He doesn’t do this every year as the high priests did under the old plan

with blood that was not their own;

26 if that had been the case, he would have to sacrifice himself repeatedly

throughout the course of history. But instead he sacrificed himself once

and for all, summing up all the other sacrifices in this sacrifice of himself,

the final solution of sin.

As far as God is concerned, the issue of sin has been dealt with. We need to be seeing it from His point of view. Jesus did what John the Baptist said he would do:

John 1:29 (Amplified)

29The next day John saw Jesus coming to him and said, Look! There is the

Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world!

Sin has been taken away. The jars are sterilized we don’t have to keep “boiling” ourselves! Unfortunately, we have done that with the Gospel, we have separated God’s sterilization process – the cross – from His filling process – Christ coming to live in us through His resurrection!

To a large extent, the church has been guilty of teaching half a gospel – that is, the cross of Christ that brought us forgiveness of sins. But by separating forgiveness of sins from the message of receiving the life of Christ, we have missed out on experiencing life and lost sight of the purpose of forgiveness in the first place.

God had to deal once and for all with the sin issue so we could be filled with Christ “without spoiling.” Let me illustrate this “half the gospel” issue in another way. Let’s imagine that a man has died of a disease. If we were to rescue the man, we would have to deal with two problems. One, we’d have to raise him to life, but also, we’d have to cure him of the life-threatening disease.

What if we only cured him of the disease but did nothing else? He would still be dead – right? On the other hand, if we raised him to life but didn’t deal with the disease, he’d only die again. Ever since the Fall of Adam, the earth has been the land of the walking dead – spiritually dead. The disease was a sin.

From God’s point of view, salvation involves the raising of spiritually dead people to life. But before He could give life to the dead, He had to eradicate the fatal disease that killed men- sin. So the cross was God’s method of dealing with the disease, and the resurrection of Jesus was God’s method of giving life to the dead.

The half-gospel that has been taught has stopped at the point of dealing with the disease and not going onto the purpose of providing the cure in advance of raising us to life, which is to have the life of Christ living through us.

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who

live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live

by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

That takes us to the next point.

Galatians 2:20

There was another step in the “canning” process. On the stove would be a pot filled with melted wax. It came in little bars measuring about five inches by three inches. When the wax was hot, Mum would pour it onto the now-filled jars of preserves.

I recall finding jars in the cellar with homemade labels that told what was in the jar and when it had been preserved. Those wax seals were still in place years later! “Preserves” was the perfect name because they were sealed tight for a reason. The sealing kept the good things inside and the bad things that would spoil the contents outside.

This is the picture of the born-again believer. He has been cleaned, filled and sealed.

Ephesians 1:13 It’s in Christ that you, once you heard the truth and

believed it (this Message of your salvation), found yourselves home free–

signed, sealed, and delivered by the Holy Spirit.

Cleansing, filling and sealing: a great picture of salvation! Once we see that the goal of salvation is raising the dead man to life, it is easy to see why Christ had to deal with the sin issue once and for all. He did it to fill us with His life.

John 4:13 This is how we know we’re living steadily and deeply in him,

and in us: He’s given us life from his life and his very own Spirit.

We can now find the full purpose of our having been cleansed of sin so that we could be filled with life, everlasting and eternal life! As Paul Harvey would say, “now you’ve heard the rest of the story.”