What Is the Meaning of Salvation? — Owen on the Saving Christ
⏱ 14 min read
You can recite the answer. Jesus saves. You learned it in the children’s chorus, you wrote it in the front of your first study Bible, you have heard it preached more Sundays than you can count. And still, on a slow evening with the lamp low and the day quietly closing itself, the honest sentence in your chest is something like — I am saved from what, exactly? And into what? And by what mechanism? And why do I not feel saved on a Tuesday afternoon when the work is hard and the house is loud and the soul is dim? The word salvation has been so much in the air for so long that it has become a shape rather than a thing, and the doubt is not whether you believe — the doubt is whether you have ever really understood what you believed.
John Owen, sometime in his middle forties, sat down to write what most pastoral readers consider his most personal book and gave it the title Communion with God. He had already written the famous polemic — The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, the seven-hundred-page argument for what the saving Christ actually accomplished — and he could have stayed in that key. He chose not to. He turned, in his middle years, from the argument to the experience, and wrote a book about what salvation feels like in a soul that has begun to receive it from the Father, the Son, and the Spirit separately and severally. The Puritan voice in Communion with God is not the courtroom voice you may have heard caricatured. It is the voice of a man trying to teach an over-anxious church how to actually enjoy the Christ they had been arguing about. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is the slow daily companion this kind of reading wants — a place to take Owen’s careful vocabulary into the evening practice that lets the doctrine slowly become weather in your inner life.
Owen wrote in seventeenth-century English that can look intimidating on the page. But underneath the dense sentences is a pastoral mind that knew, with the precision of a man who had buried ten of his eleven children, what a doubting soul actually needs. He did not write to impress. He wrote because he had watched too many believers carry a saved status without ever entering the communion that being saved was supposed to open the door to. The meaning of salvation, in his mouth, is not first a legal verdict — you are no longer guilty — though it includes that. It is the door to communion with God Himself, and the legal verdict is only the entrance, not the room.
(If the language of the Puritans has felt like a closed room — if even reading Owen seems like a wall you cannot climb — inductive Bible study for beginners — a 4-step method is the practical way back into the actual scriptures Owen was preaching from. And if even the modern study Bible has felt out of reach, a beginner study Bible for women and how to use it without being embarrassed walks the quiet re-entry.)
The first passage: the eternal free love
“They that know thee will put their trust in thee. Men cannot abide with God in spiritual meditations. He loseth soul’s company by their want of this insight into his love. They fix their thoughts only on his terrible majesty, severity, and greatness; and so their spirits are not endeared. Would a soul continually eye his everlasting tenderness and compassion, his thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, his present gracious acceptance, it could not bear an hour’s absence from him. … Let, then, this be the saints’ first notion of the Father, — as one full of eternal, free love towards them.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly, because Owen is doing pastoral surgery in this paragraph and the cut is meant to be felt.
Notice the diagnosis. Men cannot abide with God in spiritual meditations. The soul cannot stay in His company. The chair time is short. The mind wanders. The prayer feels stiff. Owen, in the seventeenth century, was watching the same restlessness in the pew that you carry into your own evenings, and he had a precise account of where it came from. They fix their thoughts only on his terrible majesty, severity, and greatness. The picture of God they were carrying into the chair was a picture only of His severity. The picture had no warmth in it. And because the picture had no warmth, their spirits are not endeared. The soul cannot stay long in a room with a God she finds only intimidating.
This is the part of the meaning of salvation that most modern believers have never heard articulated. Salvation, Owen would say, is not only the legal change in your status before God’s severity. It is the gracious revelation of another whole side of His being — everlasting tenderness and compassion, thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, present gracious acceptance — that the unbelieving soul had no access to. The unbelieving soul could only see the severity, because that was all she had earned the right to see. The saved soul is the soul given new eyes — eyes that can see the eternal free love that has, all along, been the deeper truth about the Father.
Let, then, this be the saints’ first notion of the Father. Owen wants you to change the picture. The first idea that should rise in your mind, when you sit down in the chair tomorrow morning, is not the severity. It is the eternal free love towards you. Not because the severity is not real. It is. But because, in salvation, you have been brought across the severity into the inner room of His love, and the inner room is the first room the saved soul lives in. The severity is the wall around the inner room. You are no longer outside the wall. You are inside, with Him, in the love that was always the truer thing about Him.
For the modern Christian woman whose chronic spiritual posture has been bracing — bracing against God’s disappointment, bracing against the next failure, bracing against the verdict she suspects is coming — this is the line that quietly answers the bracing. Eternal free love. He has loved you from of old. The kindness is not new. The acceptance is present. Salvation is the slow opening of your eyes to the love that has been there the whole time you were bracing against the severity you thought was His only face.
The second passage: the comfortable persuasion
“To give a poor sinful soul a comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections, that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him, hath thoughts of tenderness and kindness towards him; to give, I say, a soul an overflowing sense hereof, is an inexpressible mercy.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly, and notice how many of the verbs are God’s.
God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him, hath thoughts of tenderness and kindness towards him. Four verbs, all the same subject — God — and the object of all four is the poor sinful soul. The grammar matters. Owen is not saying that the saved soul has worked up to a state of deserving these four divine actions. He is saying that the saved soul is the one to whom these four are given — and that the experiential reception of them is itself a gift of grace.
A comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections. This is the meaning of salvation in its third tense. Salvation is not only the past-tense legal verdict — justified. It is not only the present-tense walking — being sanctified. It is the experienced inner persuasion, slowly given by the Spirit, that the four divine verbs apply to you. Not in theory. Not in the abstract. To you, in your kitchen, on Tuesday, in the body you actually have, with the failures you actually carry. The persuasion is comfortable — Owen’s word for settled, restful, free of anxiety. The soul that has received this persuasion does not have to keep checking whether it applies. It has been given the steady inner sense that it does.
For the doubting reader, this is the line that names what you have been longing for without having the words for it. You have not been longing only for forgiveness. You have been longing for the comfortable persuasion — the settled inner sense that He is actually like this toward you, today, in this very chair, with this very tea going cold. The longing is real and the longing is right, and Owen, with seventeenth-century patience, would tell you that the persuasion is not produced by your effort. It is given. An inexpressible mercy. You receive it. You do not manufacture it. Your part is to sit in the chair where it can be given.
This is the second tense of salvation Owen wants you to enter — being saved. Not the past event of justification. The ongoing slow inner work in which the four divine verbs become, by the Spirit’s daily ministry, a felt and settled reality in your faculties and affections. The first tense was — you have been declared right with God. The second tense is — you are being slowly given the inner sense that He loves, delights, is well pleased, and holds thoughts of tenderness toward you. Salvation is happening, in this second tense, every evening you sit down at the page and let the four verbs be the air your soul breathes.
(If the practical question of how to sit in the chair at all has been the obstacle — if you do not have a structure for the evening practice — inductive Bible study for beginners — a 4-step method is the slow, gentle starting place. And if the children in the house are now asking their own version of the am I saved? question, Bible-based journal prompts for kids (ages 6-12) holds the same theology, made small.)
The somatic that goes with the comfortable persuasion
Pause here. Owen’s doctrine, dense as it can read, lands in a body, and the body of the doubting soul has been carrying the bracing the whole time the mind has been carrying the doubt.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both shoulders lower by a small amount — not by trying to relax them, but by simply stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up against the expectation of bad news. Notice the jaw. Let it soften by a fraction. Notice the chest. Let it widen by an inch. Take one slow inhale — the chest now has a little more room to receive it. On the exhale, let it go all the way out.
That small unbracing is the body’s version of what Owen calls the comfortable persuasion. The bracing is the body of a soul that does not yet trust the four divine verbs. The unbracing is the body of a soul that has begun, slowly, to let He loves, He delights, He is well pleased, He holds thoughts of tenderness be the actual weather she breathes in. Stay in the unbraced posture for thirty seconds. Then let the breath move on and continue reading.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is the daily home for the unbraced sitting. One passage each evening. A place for the honest sentence. A slow structure built for the saved soul who has not yet, in her body, entered the room the legal verdict opened for her. The journal is not the cure. He is. The journal is the daily place the cup is held steady while the persuasion is poured.
The third passage: the rest in His love
“When the soul sees God, in his dispensation of love, to be love, to be infinitely lovely and loving, rests upon and delights in him as such, then hath it communion with him in love.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly, because this is the third tense.
The first tense of salvation was — you have been declared right. The second tense was — you are being given the comfortable inner persuasion that He loves you. The third tense, in Owen’s careful pastoral grammar, is — you will, slowly, over the years of your walking, come to actually rest in His love and delight in Him as the lovely One He is. Salvation, fully entered, is communion with Him in love. Not arm’s-length agreement. Not contractual cooperation. Communion — the mutual abiding, the settled rest of the saved soul in the love of the One who saved her.
Rests upon and delights in him as such. The two verbs are critical. The saved soul rests upon God. The verb is structural — He is the load-bearing reality the soul leans on. And the saved soul delights in God. The verb is affective — He is the One she enjoys, the One her affections move toward without being marshalled. Most of modern Christian life never enters the second verb. The first verb has been preached — rest upon Him. The second is, in Owen’s voice, the part many believers have never been told they were saved into. Delight in God Himself, as the lovely One, is not extra. It is the third tense of salvation. The whole point of being saved is that you are slowly, over years, brought into communion with Him in love — not only into safety from condemnation but into enjoyment of the One who is, in His very being, infinitely lovely.
For the modern Christian woman who has been told her whole life that being saved means forgiven, in heaven when you die, this is the part of the meaning that quietly opens the deeper room. Salvation is not only the legal transit from condemnation to forgiveness. It is the opening of the door into actual communion with the lovely Christ, beginning now, in your kitchen, in your evening, in the small steady showing-up of a soul that has begun to take seriously the possibility that He might be enjoyed as well as obeyed. The enjoyment is not a frivolous extra. The enjoyment is the third tense. The saved soul who has not yet entered it has not yet entered her own inheritance.
Then hath it communion with him in love. The word then is the door. After the seeing — sees God to be love. After the resting — rests upon him. After the delighting — delights in him as such. Then, finally, the communion. The slow shape of the saved life is the slow movement through these doors, and the meaning of salvation, fully unfolded, is the soul’s gradual entry into the deepest of them.
What salvation will actually feel like over a year
Owen’s three-tense answer does not produce a dramatic Tuesday. It produces, slowly, the gradual unbracing of a soul that has been holding herself stiff against a verdict that was settled long ago. Over a year of small evening reading — not heroic, not without dry weeks, just steady — the centre of gravity in your inner life moves. The chronic am I saved? gives way, slowly, to the quieter He has loved me from of old, the persuasion is being given, and the communion is the room I am being slowly brought into. The question changes because the answer has begun to be lived rather than calculated.
You will catch yourself, after months, sitting in the chair without bracing. You will catch yourself, on a hard evening, turning toward Him without first having to argue yourself across the threshold. You will catch yourself enjoying Him in small uncalculated moments — the sun on the window, the kindness of the neighbour, the line of the Psalm — and you will recognise, Owen would say with quiet satisfaction, that the enjoyment is the third tense doing its work. The saved soul is no longer only forgiven. The saved soul is becoming at home in the love of the One who saved her.
What is the meaning of salvation? In Owen’s reverent, careful, three-tense answer — it is the past-tense legal verdict that declares you right with God; the present-tense comfortable persuasion that He loves, delights in, is well pleased with you; and the slow future-arching communion in which you come, at last, to rest in His love and delight in Him as the lovely One He is. Saved. Being saved. Will be saved. Three tenses. One Christ. One inexpressible mercy.
(The sibling articles in this fathers-on-salvation cluster sit at what is the gospel? — Spurgeon’s All of Grace and what does it mean to be saved? — Wesley on the new birth. The three fathers answer the salvation question from three different rooms. Owen’s room is the quietest of them, lit by a single lamp, with the chair pulled close to the lovely One who is, by His own dispensation of love, the room itself.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each evening, one short passage and a place for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that lets the three tenses of salvation be slowly walked from the page into the actual furniture of your inner life.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Owen’s careful vocabulary — the eternal free love, the comfortable persuasion, the rest in the lovely One — into a daily companion built for the woman whose understanding of salvation is, at last, ready to live in all three of its tenses.
