Thursday, October 7, 2010

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Grace / Jesus / Salvation

Can a Christian lose their salvation?

October 7th, 2010 at 11:08am by Tedd Harris

It is impossible to answer a question like this in a short amount of space, and still give proper due to differing viewpoints. This also delves right off the bat into one’s basic theology! But acknowledging how heavy a question it is, let me give you just two things to consider:

1. Was your salvation your idea, or God’s?
You can get a pretty good answer to that by reading Romans 8:29, and Ephesians 2:8-9. In the Romans passage, God already knew and predestined His believers. (How it is true both that God chooses believers AND believers choose God is something theologians have been arguing about for centuries. I’m not even going to TRY to tackle it here.). And in the Ephesians passage, I submit that if salvation is solely on the merits of God’s grace, our “works” have absolutely nothing to do with it! Being good won’t get you in… being bad won’t get you out.

2. Which of your sins did Jesus not die for?
You are aware of the passage of time. But relative to the Cross, all of your sins have been future tense.

This is not to say what you do isn’t important. James made very clear that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:17). As someone once said, you can’t get to heaven on works, but you won’t get to heaven without ‘em.” In short: if you are a believer, there will be changes in your life.

So in other words, I do not believe you can lose your salvation. If someone’s life is wholly inconsistent with what Christianity is, one has legitimate reason to wonder if they are a believer; but it seems to me that losing salvation would be overriding God’s grace; and I don’t think that’s going to happen!

Okay, one last thought (I guess this makes three)… if you really love someone, do you spend your time trying to think of things that will make them happy, or do you spend your time trying to see how much you can get away with before they get royally hurt or ticked? How do you treat God?

Just something to think about.