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A Personal Savior
by Ron Lennex
Many years ago, as God was preparing to bring the Israelites out of Egypt, He sat Moses and Aaron down and began to tell them how he wanted them to remember their deliverance from bondage. In the 12th chapter of Exodus, the Lord described a feast that He wanted the Israelites to keep in remembrance of the day God set them free from the oppression and slavery of the Egyptians. We know that feast as Passover. He laid out every detail, describing exactly what He wanted the Israelites to do, and how He wanted them to do it. Among those details, was the central situation that the entire Passover surrounded, and it is that of the Blood of the Lamb. We all know that this is a type of Gospel, where Jesus was the Lamb of God and shed His Blood to take away the sins of the world... but there's something buried in that story that I think we miss sometimes... as a movement. In verse 2 of Exodus 12, God told Moses (and Aaron) that the month they were in was going to be the start of the new Hebrew calendar. It was their 'fresh start' month. A time of renewal, and change. They were no longer slaves, but now they would be free. In verse 3, He tells them that on the 10th day of the first month, they were to pick a Perfect Lamb out from their flocks. This Lamb had to be blemish and disease free (as Jesus Christ was) and a year old (innocence). Notice in verse 6, He tells them that they are to keep that perfect, innocent lamb until they had kept that lamb in their homes until the fourteenth day of that month. Now that's interesting to me. Why would God tell them to pick out that perfect, innocent lamb, and not kill it until four days afterward? Let's think about that for a moment... How many times do you think they fed that lamb in those four days? How many times do you think their children pet that lamb? How many times do your think those children played with that lamb? How many times do you think that the lamb would rub up against them and look at them with its 'puppy dog eyes' and beg for attention and affection? They had to take care of that lamb as a pet for four days before they killed it, roasted it WHOLE over the fire, and ate it... ALL of it. Four days... that's just enough time... to get attached to it. Just enough time to love it. Just enough time... to make the death of the lamb... personal. The sacrifice on the fourteenth day of that month cost the Israelites something. It was real to them. It meant something to them as they slit the throat of that 'friend'. The one they had gotten to know as a member of the family, had to die for their deliverance. I believe that made the Passover difficult for them. It brought home the cost of freedom to them. As much as we as a movement deride and condemn the baptists and charismatics for their "unbiblical" use of the term "personal savior", I think we'd do well to latch on to that term and embrace it with our whole heart... simply because if He's not Personal to you, His death doesn't mean a whole lot to you. Jesus is looking for a personal relationship with each one of us. It's not enough to 'know' doctrine... we need to know HIM... intimately, lovingly, affectionately... Personally... I'm glad He's MY Personal Savior...
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Christ whom we preach as the Almighty God manifest in the flesh.
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faith in our God and Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
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