… for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. (Luke 2:11)

The descriptor “Savior” is actually used in the gospel accounts only three times: once by Mary the mother of the earthly Jesus, once in the angelic announcement to the Bethlehem shepherds at the birth of Christ, and one other time by the Samaritans. To be sure, we see the verbal form of that description applied to Christ: “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). So the title is His because that is what He does—He saves.

The concept of salvation immediately invokes in Christians a reference to eternal salvation. And that is the most wonderful and ultimate sense of the word. However, when we shine the truth of salvation through the prism of the whole counsel of God, we discover a richness of our Savior that we dare not miss. For example (and we cannot come even close to exhausting all the hues of what it means), we are saved from the wrath of God that we justly deserved. We are saved from eternal damnation in hell, where the “worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). Also, Scripture tells us, Christ saves us from being “cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt 8:12). We are saved from an eternity apart from His presence, apart from His love, grace and mercy. We are spared from eternal hopelessness. Rightly did Dante post on the sign at hell’s entrance, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter” (Dante’s Inferno).

But Christ also saves us from a meaningless existence. He saves us from the strictures of the Law. He released us from bondage to sin and the tentacles of Satan. He rescued us from the sting of death and from the enslavement of empty human philosophies about life after death. He liberates us from bondage to other people’s opinions of us.

A great and precious perspective of Christ as our Savior overwhelms us when we realize that if God is for us, who can be against us (Rom 8:31)? As such, He frees us from guilt, the self-destructive thinking associated with lack of assurance. We are saved to live without turmoil, anxiety, worry, self-doubts, insecurities or anything else that would separate us from the love of Christ.

Yes, Christ is our Savior. While our eternal salvation is secure forever, we often don’t experience salvation from the daily things that oppose us. God calls us to believe this great truth: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (Rom 8:37 ESV).

Lord, I trust You as my Savior both for eternity and for right now!