The message of Jesus himself and of the early disciples was not just one of the forgiveness of sins, but rather was one of newness of life – which of course involved forgiveness as well as his death for our sins. And yet that newness of life also involved much more beside. To be “saved” was to be “delivered from the power of darkness and translated into the Kingdom of his dear Son,” as Colossians 1:13 says. We who are saved are to have a different order of life from that of the unsaved. We are to live in a different “world.”…..It is because this was the sort of salvation to be accomplished that the resurrection, not the death of Christ, was the central fact in the gospel of the early believers.
Dallas Willard
(from The Spirit of the Disciplines)
