Salvation: Sinner to Saint, or Dead to Alive?

I was talking with a friend this morning about the relationship between repentance and salvation. For his required ministry for Moody he does street evangelism in downtown Spokane. One day while out talking to people he came across a young man who is homosexual. He indicated that he wanted to be saved and to follow Jesus, but wanted to know if homosexuality was a sin. My friend told him that while it is definitely a sin, people go to hell for rejecting Christ, not for being gay.

The discussion we had was what to do or think or say to someone like that about the relationship between their salvation and their turning from their sin. This is a touchy area. It's not precisely black and white. Do you tell them they must turn from their sin and to Jesus, and that they can't be saved until they commit to give up their old ways...or do you tell them to come to Jesus as they are, and that repentance from their old ways is a process?

After discussing and looking to several biblical texts for answers, we concluded that to answer the question, a bigger question is whether salvation is more about sin or more about life and death. A related question we asked was whether turning from sin and turning to Jesus was one action or two, and which one logically comes first.

To us, it seemed inconceiveable that a person who is dead in their sins could turn from their sin themselves in order to then turn to Jesus for forgiveness. Logically a person dead in their sins can do nothing to affect their state.

One text we looked at was Ezekiel 16. In this passage God describes to Israel what their "salvation" looked like from His perspective. While so much of the time we look at salvation as an issue surrounding sinfulness and depravity being healed or cured by God's declaration of the sinner as justified. But the way God portrays this event had nothing to do with sin. He describes Israel not as sinful and rotten, but as an abandoned infant, cast out into the field and left for dead. The imagery portrays salvation as centering predominantly on life and death, the calling out of death and into life. In this event God speaks to the child, "Live!" and they come to life.

So what do you do with someone who knows they must turn from homosexuality when they become a Christian and struggles with it repetitively after getting saved? Do you tell them faith is a commitment to submit in obedience, or do you tell them their forgiveness is not effective on the basis of the purity of their repentence but on the basis of the purity of Christ, whose blood cleanses them?