Salvation is for all!

Salvation is by God's grace on us through faith in Jesus Christ our Lord, on His finished work on the cross to overcome sin once and for all, dismantling everything that Satan had ever built. Sure, we Christians no longer do sinful stuff, or rather, do less sinful stuff...

"...but are you sure about him(points at a hardcore ex-convict)? Are you sure he is going to be saved?" a man asked. "He's a hardcore gambler, does extortion from everywhere, a drug-pusher, fearless gangster, a..." The list goes on and on.

The above example shows how we, as humans, still will inadvertently look at people with tinted glasses. But what does our Lord say about people like these?

...They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
-Luke 5:31-32

Indeed! And we have a very good example in the Bible of a great sinner who repented and went back to Jesus - Saul of Tarsus. Saul was a zealous Jewish man who went around persecuting the early church, and observed most of the Jewish laws, and surpassed his forefathers in his zeal. 10 Commandments, the Jewish Torah, you name it, he keeps it. However, Saul was like a tyrant to the early church - he brought many early Christians to prison because of their belief, all the time thinking that he did some service to God. Also, he consented to the stoning of Stephen, who was preaching the Word of God.

Would a person like this, though obeying the Law of Moses but still doing such atrocities, be ever saved and forgiven? The early Christians never offended Saul, but he persecuted the early church because of their belief. Kinda like Hitler, eh? Bearing in mind that the early church was quite small at that point of time, Saul's actions would jolly well have destroyed early Christianity altogether.

He was however saved when he realised by doing so, he was actually persecuting Jesus, the Lord. When he was struck blind, and brought to Ananias, he was baptised, regained sight and straightaway went preaching about Jesus. His conversion from Judaism to Christianity was astonishing, for he was saved by his faith in Jesus. However, if God did not bestow his grace upon Saul(now called Paul), he would not have done the many wonders that he did, such as preaching the word of God throughout Western Europe and the Middle East, the regions around the Great Sea, and producing the 13 Pauline Epistles that we now read, such as I and II Corinthians, Romans, Galatians, etc.

Now, if God is gracious enough to even let Paul be saved and do such things and be such a wonderful apostle of Christ, in spite of his sins and persecution of His people, who is to say that people who are ex-convicts, hardcore gangsters and the outcasts of society cannot receive the love of Jesus?