The first teaching was entitled 'The Doorway to Life' which was the first teaching I ever did on basic doctrine. We have renamed it The Study of Salvation.

The next one was entitled 'The Pathway to Life'. In this teaching I dealt with basic salvation, the doctrine of baptism, etc. This has been renamed Your Spiritual Life.

The The Study of Salvation showed you how to walk through the door. Your Spiritual Life showed you how to step onto the right path. Now you need to move onto the next phase which is the journey itself.

As a young child I used to love going on a journey. It used to be exciting to pack up the car and go on a long journey. It was especially exciting if we were going on a holiday or a picnic.

Journeys Can Be Good or Bad

Journeys can either be good or they can be bad. It all depends on how you look at it.

If you go on a long journey it can get boring to see the same countryside like fields or mountains all the time.

If you travel through a place like Mexico you often have a lot of desert to go through which is hardly worth getting excited about.

Maybe you are traveling along just fine, but suddenly you have a big hill to climb. It is great if you have a big, modern car that has the power to go over it.

But if you only have a little four cylinder engine in your car you have to change your gears down to try and get up the hill.

Now your journey is no longer so exciting. It is becoming a nuisance. You start to moan and complain and say, "Will we ever get there? There just seem to be so many hills."

Have you ever been on a journey like that?

Roadblocks and Irritations

Here is another little irritation. You are finally on the open road and ready to put your foot down. But then the highway fizzles out and you end up on a single lane road.

You end up behind a driver who is too afraid to go fast or take any chances. Or you get stuck behind a big truck that can't seem to get up any speed.

You want to overtake them but you cannot do it because there are people coming from the front.

The journey now becomes a nuisance and it stops being so much fun. And sometimes the only thing that keeps you going is the thought that soon you will reach your destination.

Maybe you finally get onto the open road and put your foot down. You are going at a really fast pace. But then someone flies past you in a fancy BMW and leaves you in the dust.

Now it spoils the journey some more because you realize that you weren't going that fast after all.

A Stressful Journey

I remember going on a journey once and having one of the worst experiences ever. I was in a foreign country that I didn't know anything about and I had to follow somebody to our destination.

The driver of the car in front of us obviously didn't look in his rearview mirror, because we battled to keep up with him.

We were driving as fast as we could, but the poor car could hardly keep up and was shaking to bits as we raced along.

The only way we could keep up with the car in front was to watch a roof rack that they had on their car.

We had to keep our eyes peeled on it and keep driving or we would have got lost. If we took a wrong turn we could have been in trouble.

You can see that journeys can be fun, but they can also be stressful. And your spiritual life can be very similar to a journey in the natural.

It can start out fun and be exciting. We can have good memories and pleasant experiences. But most of the time we have bad memories and experiences.

We have the hills and the people who aren't so nice to us. We need to know how to handle these things.

It Gets Better With Practice

The good thing is it gets better with practice. When you are first learning to drive you are usually very cautious and careful.

Perhaps you were nervous and kept putting your foot on the brake. You were unsure of yourself and afraid.

Some people are confident in driving and they do it all the time. They perhaps have to travel for half an hour or more each day to work on the freeway.

They just take it in their stride and don't even think about it anymore. They do it every day and they are used to it.

You also have other people like traveling reps, who spend most of the day on the road. They travel from place to place speaking to people, and it becomes a part of what they do every day.

When you drive enough all the time you eventually don't have to think about anything when you get into the car. You are not like the learner driver who has to think about every move that he makes.

After a while you don't even realize where you are going.

You follow the same route all the time. You get into the car and you drive, and you don't realize you have been traveling for half an hour already.

When you do it every day it becomes a habit - until someone tells you to take a different route. When that happens you can get lost and realize that you have missed a turn.

You are so used to taking a particular turn that you do it without thinking.

Now the journey is easy for you. You don't have to think much, and when there is an obstacle up ahead you are ready for it.

You think, "There's a hill coming up. I must change down the gears. The next intersection is where the traffic always jams up. I have to wait until it clears up."

You get to know the journey. You feel comfortable with it, and it becomes easier.

These are all experiences that you can have with traveling in the natural. And it is often similar to experiences you can have in the spiritual realm.

Some experiences may be difficult, but after a while you find that certain parts become easier to handle.

So based on what I have shared until now, you need to have a picture in your mind of what it is to travel on a journey. That is because your spiritual life is like a journey.

Different Stages to a Journey

There are always three stages to a journey. The first stage is where you start the journey. This means you must get into the car, head out and find the road that leads to your destination. Then you must finally get onto the road.

Once you are on the road you have the longest part of the journey ahead of you. Then the final stage is when you reach the destination you were aiming for.

You need all three of these stages for each journey you undertake.

The spiritual life is exactly the same. There is a starting point - a doorway to life. Then you find the path. And there is a final destination that we will reach in our spiritual lives.

That destination is to one day spend eternity in the presence of the Lord.

Salvation - The Starting Point of the Journey

The starting point of your journey was when you were born again and became saved. You entered into the Christian life for the first time and started your journey.

Everyone hangs onto the hope that we will soon reach our destination; that soon Jesus will come and take us out of this miserable journey that we're traveling all the time.

You say, "The Lord is going to come and get rid of all the people in their big BMW's. He's going to clear the traffic of people who just clog up the road."

I'm afraid that is not true. There is a journey that you have to travel before you get there.

The Tenses of Salvation

I want to look at a Scripture that you have likely not noticed before. It is an obscure little Scripture but it speaks volumes of truth.

[(2) Corinthians 1:10] says this: Who delivered us once for all from such a great death, and is in the process of continually delivering us: in whom we have an expectant hope that he will still deliver us in the future;

This Scripture speaks about the tenses of salvation. It says He has delivered us (past tense once and for all). He continues to deliver us (present continuous tense). And He will yet deliver us (future tense).

This sounds rather like a journey doesn't it? It has a starting point, a continual process, and it comes to an end. It has the tenses of salvation.

The most difficult part of the journey is the part between where you start and where you reach your destination. It is the longest and most difficult part; the one that everybody struggles with.

I am not going to share on that here because it is too big. I will deal with it in subsequent chapters.

I want to rather start by introducing you to the past tense and future tense of salvation. Once you understand these you will have a better understanding of what is happening to you now as you travel between the two.

Past Tense of Salvation

Let's look firstly at the past tense of salvation. If you are a born again believer, this is something that has already happened.

You began your journey - the past tense of salvation - on the day you were born again.

If you are not a born again believer, then the past tense hasn't taken place. You haven't even begun the journey yet.

Paul says, God has saved us, once for all. It is the Greek past tense, which refers to an event that already took place. It doesn't take place over and over again.

Your salvation took place, not because of anything that you did. You didn't get saved because you made an effort to change, or because you decided to turn over a new leaf.

Your salvation is not based on you. You were saved because of what Jesus did over [2000] years ago on the cross of Calvary. That is the basis of your salvation.

It is very important that you understand this. If you don't understand it, you are not going to fully comprehend what the past tense of salvation really is and what it means to you.

You need to understand that it required from you nothing more than to have faith in what Jesus had already done.

You took a step of faith and you received what Jesus had done. You took it and said, "I claim it and I receive the free gift of salvation."

An exchange took place and you received His life for your life. You gave him your life and He gave you back something a thousand times better and more: His life. That is the experience of being born again.

I want to share some more facts now related to this past tense of salvation and being born again.

Salvation is Complete

Firstly, salvation is a once only event that is completed. Jesus has delivered you once and for all. You can only be born again once. You cannot get born again - again.

You do not lose it every time you sin. If you did, you would get born again five times a day or more, depending how many times you sinned.

This is why it is so important to grasp the past tense of salvation and to realize the fact that this is not something you did. It is something that God did.

All you needed to do was to put your confidence, your trust and your full faith in what Jesus did, not in what you do. If it depended on what you do, you would lose your salvation every five minutes.

It is past tense, completed, and never to be repeated again. You never have to go back to that place on the cross and start over again.

There are many people who like to believe otherwise. There are also many preachers who like to put people under a continual guilt-trip.

They make them feel that they are second-rate believers, or that they have lost their salvation. Then they have to come and commit themselves to the Lord and get saved all over again.

They fail to recognize that the past tense of salvation occurs only once. I will show you more Scriptures as we continue.

Sin is Dealt With

Now here is something very important. When you were born again, this process of salvation dealt with guilt once and for all. You will never be condemned again for any sin that you commit.

Wow that really blows your mind. You will never be condemned for the sins you have already committed, the sins you are committing right now, or the sins that you will commit in the future.

Maybe you are thinking, "So does that mean that I can go ahead and sin whenever I feel like it? It doesn't really matter that I am a Christian. Can I just go ahead and live the way I did before?"

That is actually what lies in the middle - the journey part. We will be dealing with that in a lot of detail shortly.

No Going Back

Once you have started your journey you have to continue. You don't go back to the beginning again.

Can you imagine driving along and you change into the wrong gear on the car? Oh dear, you find yourself back at the beginning and you have to start again.

Sometimes that sort of thing happens in a computer game. But life isn't like that, nor is the spiritual life like that.

Some people seem to think that that is the way it is. You mess up just once in your driving and you have to start again. Can you imagine driving for [1000] miles, messing up and then having to start all over again? That would be disastrous.

I hate games like that. I find them boring. You are nearly at your destination and you have just one mile to go.

You can see the end goal, but you make a mistake. Now you have to go back to the beginning.

If that is what the Christian life is like I don't want to serve the Lord.

But many Christians are doing just that. They are never progressing in their spiritual life because they are always going back to the starting gate.

God has delivered us once and for all from the guilt of sin. Yes we must confess our sins and deal with them, but it does not affect your position. I will speak about this later.

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