at hand, and he said, ’He will save me’—­not from it, but through it—­’into His everlasting kingdom.’  And so in the words of my text we may say—­though Paul did not mean them so—­as we see the distance between us, and that certain close, dwindling, dwindling, dwindling:  ‘Now,’ as moment after moment ticks itself into the past, ‘now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.’  Children, when they are getting near their holidays, take strips of paper, and tear off a piece as each day passes.  And as we tear off the days let us feel that we are drawing closer to our home, and that the blessedness laid up for us in it is drawing nearer to us.  ’Our salvation,’ not our destruction, our fuller life, not in any true sense of the word our ‘death,’ is ‘nearer than when we believed.’

But some one may say, ‘Is a man not saved till after he is dead?’ Is salvation future, not coming till after the grave?  No, certainly not.  There are three aspects of that word in Scripture.  Sometimes the New Testament writers treat salvation as past, and represent a Christian as being invested with the possession of it all at the very moment of his first faith.  That is true, that whatever is yet to be evolved from what is given to the poorest and foulest sinner, in the moment of his initial faith in Christ, there is nothing to be added to it.  The salvation which the penitent thief received on the cross is all the salvation that he was ever to get.  But out of it there came welling and welling and welling, when he had passed into the region ’where beyond these voices there is peace’—­there came welling out from that inexhaustible fountain which was opened in him all the fullnesses of an eternal progress in the heavens.  And so it is with us.  Salvation is a past gift which we received when we believed.

But in another aspect, which is also emphatically stated in Scripture, it is a progressive process, and not merely a gift bestowed once for all in the past.  I do not dwell upon that thought, but just remind you of a turn of expression which occurs in various connections more than once.  ’The Lord added to the Church daily such as were being saved,’ says Luke.  Still more emphatically in the Epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle puts into antithesis the two progressive processes, and speaks of the Gospel as being preached, and being a savour of life unto life ‘to them that are being saved,’ and a savour of destruction ‘to them that are being lost.’  No moral or spiritual condition is stereotyped or stagnant.  It is all progressive.  And so the salvation that is given once for all is ever being unfolded, and the Christian life on earth is the unfolding of it.