Can Being Saved Be Like Boot Camp?

The Process of Justification Can Sometimes Be Like All "H' Breaking Loose

Everyone experiences God differently because no two people are the same.
I've learned that being saved is like being in boot camp.
I answered an alter call thinking everything was going to be sweetness and light, moonlight and roses.
Many go into boot camp thinking it's all fresh air, sunshine, exercise with comradery – kind of like summer camp.

In boot camp, you go through something like the stages of grief. First, there's shock.

Then there's anger ("If I knew it was like this, I wouldn’t have signed up!").

Then there's resignation – the realization you aren't going anywhere because your backside belongs to the service and not to you anymore. One way - either the easy way or the hard way, “it” is going to get done.

You can’t resign from boot camp. But you can go to the brig and/or get a less than honorable discharge.

And once you are saved, the only way to “resign” is the “sin unto death” which is said to be when the Lord takes people “home” to heaven because they are incorrigibly non-compliant:

1 John 5:16 – “If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life—to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death; I do not say that one should pray for that.”

So, you have no choice but to accommodate yourself to the program. You are remolded to fit the service’s program and you have to be changed to fit Christ’s program.

In this case the Holy Spirit of God, who is said to indwell every believer upon his being justified (saved) in Christ, takes the place of a drill instructor.

Going through God’s boot camp tempted me to doubt my salvation but the Lord used this verse of scripture to prove to me that what I had thought was evidence that I wasn’t saved actually was evidence that I am saved:

Proverbs 3:11-12 “My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.”

OK! Got it!

That the Lord holds the saved to a much higher standard in this world, once they are in Christ, is a minor inconvenience considering the blessings of the next world.

Gotta remember that!

For at least some of us saved, it’s like being a kid with the only strict parents on the block. You see the other kids running around and carousing in the streets at all hours and nothing happens to them. And you used to be one of those kids and you want to carouse too but now you have strict parents and you’re gonna get “it” if you do carouse. And when you do get “it”, you are surprised again and again at how all those things that you used to get away with doing, you can’t get away with anymore.

The saved won’t be perfect until they are given a glorified body in heaven.

Pastor and radio Bible teacher J. Vernon McGee said something like: “If you knew me as I know myself, you would turn your radio off right now. And if I knew you as you know yourself, I wouldn’t want anything to do with you.”

Galatians 5:17 – “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.”

In contrast to the saved, God permits the lost to “Eat, drink and be merry” in this world because there sure won’t be anything like that for them in the next world.

Sometimes, things just don’t go like you think they will.