Bill Vanderbush

Salvation is not an event we attend. Salvation is the Man who was wounded for our transgressions and by whose stripes we are healed. The word that appeared nearly eighty times in the Old Testament as a promise now is the name of the One you can call in the night, Yeshua. Jesus. You do not achieve salvation. You receive the One who is Salvation.

A Midwest childhood of open windows, no cellphones, and drinking from every water hose was the way I grew up. Then on a Tuesday twenty-five years ago the world changed. We lost an innocence and we suddenly needed a security we had never felt the need for before. In this episode, Bill Vanderbush names what is so hard to recover once it is lost, and draws the deeper parallel. Theosis was the early church’s ordinary way of life in union with Christ, slowly replaced by distance and separation until the power of the cross has been universally diminished in sermons today. This is a call to recover what was stolen, not by rebuilding an innocence we cannot get back, but by drinking again from the new covenant life God has never stopped offering.

A watching world already suspects that Jesus is a historical idea we inherited, a brand we defend, or a set of conclusions we police. Then they watch us fracture over the very questions we claim He died and rose to answer. Jesus prayed for our unity. But we have delivered the opposite. Our divisions are not just an embarrassment. They are evidence. If He is risen, then the most compelling apologetic we have left is not another perfectly airtight religious system. It is a people who actually take their cares to Him and then live as if what He says is enough.

We have spent generations blaming the commandments for a problem they were never designed to solve. The Law is not your enemy. Your independent self is. The Law is a perfect mirror. A mirror can show you that your face is dirty. A mirror cannot wash you.

When you try to establish your own righteousness, you are still living in the old administration. You are still treating the law as a path rather than a signpost. You are still saying, “If I just try harder, pray longer, perform better, God will finally be pleased.” But the Christic Covenant announces that the performance has already been rendered perfectly, once for all, by Another.