My new book officially came out on Friday: Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart: How to Know For Sure You are Saved.
The following is a repost from an earlier blog post and an excerpt from the book:
The Bible is clear that salvation is a gift given irrevocably, once for all. We prove we have it, however, by renewing ourselves in repentance and faith continually and never ceasing to persevere onwards into glory. The warnings are one of the means by which God keeps us persevering in the faith. A failure to heed the warnings is evidence that we never possessed that saving faith to begin with.
To see this balance, consider one of the New Testament’s most notoriously difficult passages on eternal security:
“For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt.” (Hebrews 6:4-6)
Say what? Those who were “once enlightened” and “fall away” are unable to be “renewed again to repentance?” Does this mean that if you fall away you can never even come back to Jesus? Far beyond simply losing your salvation—this would mean that once you lost it you could never get it back!
I believe the writer is giving a general, pastoral warning to his congregation rather than attempting to delineate how the processes of regeneration, justification and eternal security work together. He is simply saying, “Listen—if you’ve have seen the glory of Jesus and been convinced of the truth of His resurrection, only to return to your sin, what else is left to say? What “greater argument” is there left to use on you? What could possibly be more ‘convincing’ than Jesus’ death and resurrection?”
This warning is a statement to believers and unbelievers alike about the importance of the gospel. Hopefully, it will rouse unbelievers out of their slumber. We know that God will use it to keep His believers tethered closely to the gospel. Warnings like this one are one of God’s means of keeping believers awake to the gospel.
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