Timothy has one more, and he asks, uh, can we say we have 3 stages in the salvation process? Yes, absolutely. Um, and for those of you who have seen the questions, if you look at his question, he goes into detail what he means by those 3 stages, and to some degree he answers his own question. I think what you shared there was excellent, Timothy. I would agree, I think, with everything that you said. So, um, there are 3 stages of salvation. Sometimes I'll say there's 2 stages; it depends how you're counting them.
The first stage is coming into baptism, okay? When we're an unbeliever, then, um, normally the salvation process—you know, we hear about Christ, we hear the Kingdom Gospel, we believe, we have faith in Christ, we repent of our sins, and then we're baptized, um, at the end of that process. And that's normally in the early church, what they would think of as when you got saved, when you entered into salvation, was when you came out from baptism and then had hands laid on you to receive the Holy Spirit.
So the first stage, coming into baptism, you don't have to have any works coming into salvation. Now, it certainly does not hurt to have them, not that it's going to add anything to your salvation, but like in the case of Cornelius, I mean, God reached out to him, sent an angel, um, and then sent Peter to Cornelius's house because Cornelius had such good works.
And why Peter says that, you know, God is not partial but to, uh, him who works righteousness, that God reaches out to, doesn't matter if they're Jew or Gentile. So there's certainly nothing wrong with that, but we're saved through faith in the blood of Jesus Christ, and we don't have to earn that forgiveness that we receive in our initial salvation. We don't have to earn it at any time. But after we are saved, then it's like the Israelites when they crossed the Red Sea; they were saved out of Egypt.
Egypt would represent the world. But then they were in the wilderness. They weren't in paradise yet. They were then having to journey to the promised land, and as we know, Paul points out in 1 Corinthians how most of them didn't make it. And he uses analogies to the Christian life there—to baptism, to communion—and gives warnings of what happened to those who didn't obey there in the wilderness. So, yeah, we're in a trial period right now.
Once we're saved, we become fruit on the vine, that Jesus uses the illustration in John 15. But he says we have to produce fruit or we'll be cut off the vine. Now, he gives us the power. We're not on our own. We don't have to, um, produce the power. We would be unable to do so. But we do have to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in our lives. We have to surrender our lives and let the Spirit control us, or we're not going to produce fruit. So we do play a major role in that.
Um, it's—we play a major role in obeying God. Again, he will give us power, but he is not going to do our obeying for us. He expects us to obey. And so, yeah, we're in a period of probation now, just like the Israelites were. How are we going to respond? We talk about loving Jesus. Okay, Jesus says, "Show me with your life. If you love me, you will obey my commandments," Jesus said. So that's what we—God is going to be looking at. That's the second stage of salvation.
Okay, then at the end of our life, um, is the final stage. That's when it ends. There's nothing we can do after death to change what our destiny is going to be. And on judgment day, then it'll be announced. Either we inherit the kingdom, as Jesus says in Matthew 25, or we'll be sent out into outer darkness. Um, so that would be the third stage of salvation. So the second stage, we have to be faithful to the very end, and then, yeah, at our death, then it's complete.
We either have fully received salvation or we are lost if we have turned away from Christ.
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