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.

Or take your wedding day. It is meant to be the beginning of a life long commitment to a growing relationship. For some of us, it becomes a kind of de facto end to romance. We have accomplished what we have set out to accomplish. We are now married to that person of our dreams. And we begin to take each other for granted. We would never have done that during the engagement. Symbolically, as a couple kneels at the altar having their vows consecrated, they then stand up, receive the blessing of the pastor, priest or rabbi, and they turn and walk down the aisle into a brand-new life. It is not the end. It is the beginning. Oh, there will be sorrows. There will be joys. And most of life will be lived in an oscillation between those two extremes. That life will have its problems. But it is a new life in which one is able to see in the perspective of "'til death doth part." That's what marriage is meant to be.

Some of us view salvation this way. We see it as the end, not the beginning. We forget that salvation is not only with our past, but it is transformational of our present.

Brian D. McLaren, pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in suburban Washington, D.C., quite insightfully addresses this dynamic in his book, Adventures in Missing the Point. In his chapter titled "Missing the Point: Salvation," he writes that the modern Christian way of missing the point is thinking that salvation is only about escaping hell after you die. There's another approach: that salvation means being rescued from fruitless ways of life here and now, to share in God's saving love for all creation, in an adventure called the kingdom of God, the point of which you definitely don't want to miss."