Published Caption: None Photographer's Caption: None
Once saved always saved? Free will or election?
The above makes you want to read this article, reading may make wish you hadn’t, I pray not.
Today’s gray areas, blurred lines are damaging biblical character.
Theologically the above title has been debated, even contentiously so much the original point has more than taken a backseat, and at times been lost.
The black, white and red letter of the Bible is the inspired and inerrant word of God. It’s alive and active, sharper than a double edged sword, able to separate even to thought and intention.
Are the Commandments and the instructive disciplines suggestive? Or are they goals to achieve, lives to be fashioned after, with a desire to please the Lord and author?
A dear brother asked me, “Do you have to believe that you are once saved and always saved, if yes, is it because that’s what you need to believe because it gives you safety to do as you please?” Since then hundreds of conversations, prayer, study, tears and joy have been a result of that question. It has lead me to place my trust in God’s word implicitly with all my heart.
I pursue life knowing I’m secure in the Lord’s care. Why, because, I believe in my heart and confess with my mouth Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead. Yet, try to live as if salvation depended on how I live. Not be as secure to say how I live, talk, and example Christianity matter’s not because I’m eternally secure.
We do have church tenants that define our view in regard to the title above. Yet, my heart’s desire is to encourage those around us to life as defined in a picture frame that hangs in our home titled:
“Character:
The circumstances amid which you live determine your reputation; the truth you believe determines your Character.
Reputation is what you’re supposed to be; Character is what you are.
Reputation comes over one from without; Character grows up from within.
Reputation is what you have when you come to a new community; Character is what you have when you go away.
Your reputation is learned in hours; your Character is built in a lifetime.
Reputation grows like a mushroom; Character gross like an oak.
A single newspaper report gives you your reputation; a life of toil gives you your Character.
Reputation makes you rich or makes you poor; Character makes you happy or makes you miserable.
Reputation is what men say about you on your tombstone; Character is what the angels say about you before the throne of God.”
Our society needs such men and women or its future is bleak. We need to be those who know and live in the truth of 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, and Colossians 3:17, 23.
Christianity is far less of what you say and far more of how you live what you say. It’s NOT your life to live, it’s the Lord’s.
Patrict Propster is pastor of Carson City’s Calvary Chapel.
