Eternal Security

Today we're going to talk about the security of salvation. Last time I was here, we discussed salvation itself and what is it, and we kind of focused in on one verse, which was Ephesians 2.8 and 9.

Ephesians 2.8 and 9, it says that, for by grace you're saved through faith, and that's not of yourself, it's a free gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast. We talked a lot about that it's by grace alone, and it's through faith, and that salvation itself is a gift, not of works. There's nothing you can do to earn it. And it takes away all the pride of man on his part. We define grace as God's unlimited and unmerited blessings towards us based on the totally adequate work of Christ on the cross.

We talked about there's seven principles of our faith. The first one is that it demands content. You have to believe something. And the value of your faith is in what you believe, not in the fact that you believe. The value is in what you believe. We talked about the fact that faith is initiated by hearing. And faith is the only action that a man can do that excludes the works category. Faith is a non-meritorious act because you believe in what somebody else did. It's the only act in harmony with grace, and it eliminates the pride of man, and it also achieves the greatest blessing that's available.

We also said that the object of our faith had to be the gospel, and the gospel itself was 1 Corinthians 15.3, which is, For I delivered unto you of first importance that which I received. that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, and that he rose again on the third day according to the scriptures.

And that's the entire gospel, no additions and no subtractions. It was written accurately by the Holy Spirit. It's an absolute statement of fact. It has to do with a specific person and a specific act, and it speaks of the specific death of the Lord Jesus Christ. His death accomplished a specific thing, which was the dealing with our sins. So, we entered into all of that by believing faith.

So today, let's talk a little bit about eternal security. In the doctrinal statement of Holly Hills, After salvation is the section on eternal security. And the statement says, we believe that everyone who is born again is kept by God's power and is secure in Christ forever. The assurance of salvation through the knowledge of God's word is the privilege of every believer.

When you take a look at that, there's really two issues there. There's the issue of the assurance of my salvation, and the other one is eternal security. And then, like we do in most of the elements of our doctoral statement, there's a lot of verses, and I'm going to quote just a couple of them.

In John 13-1, the Lord says, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them to the very end. In John 17, 11, he asked the Father to keep through his name those whom had been given to him. Randy read this morning Romans 8, 35 and 39. 1 Corinthians 6, 8 says, who shall also confirm you to the end? Hebrews says, wherefore, he's able also to save to the uttermost them that come to God through him.

1 Peter 1, 5 says that we are kept by the power of God. And there's several other verses I recommend you go and look at them. The first aspect I want to talk about is assurance, the assurance of salvation. And with assurance, you have to ask the question, am I accepted by God? Does he accept me? And on what basis does he accept me? Is everything in the Christian life that I am involved in, the most important aspect of it, or the first aspect of it, is am I accepted? And if the answer is yes, then what basis? The first basis is I must be accepted on grace alone.

Ephesians 1.5 says that according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise and glory of His grace, through which He has made me, or you, or all of us, accepted in the Beloved.

John 5.24 says, And believe on him, and sent him, and has everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but pass from death to life. And in John 10, the Lord says, My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they know me, and I give them eternal life. And I give them eternal life, as Vern has said a lot. It's in the present tense, which means I'm constantly giving them life all the time. It isn't that I gave it to them once. I'm always giving it to them.

So, just those three verses initially should be enough to give us some assurance. The extent of the Father's acceptance of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, is the same as my acceptance before the Father. We can forever thank Him for our acceptance because it doesn't depend on what we are in ourselves. It depends on what He's done. So that leads to a short discussion of position and condition, or put another way, standing and state. Every believer has a position before God. It's perfect, it's eternal, and it's established in the Father's presence. Every single believer has that. We also have this thing called condition or a state, which is our Christian walk.

We're walking around, we're developed from infancy to maturity, and although our position doesn't change, our condition changes all the time. If we judge God's attitude towards us according to our day-to-day condition, guess what? We're never going to be absolutely sure and be convinced that He totally accepts me. So when we think that everything's going really well, and we are happy with the Lord, and we know the Lord's happy with us, we even can say, you know what? I'm pleasing to God, and therefore he loves me and accepts me. But when the Lord lets us go into failure, and he allows me to have a desert experience, or I even fail in my Christian life, It's an important part of my spiritual growth that it happens. Then we're apt to feel that I must be displeasing to God, that He doesn't seem to love me, or that He doesn't accept me any longer.

With God, position is everything. Condition is nothing. I shouldn't say condition is nothing. Condition is important. But with God, position is everything when it comes to our acceptance in His Son. He wants that every one of us would have the same estimation of our position that he does. He's concerned. Yeah, he's concerned about our condition from from day to day.

But our acceptance is not based on how we're doing in our condition. So the second part of this is you might. Well, I titled it. Knowledge is power. We need to know on what basis we are accepted. You might say it's the so-no-so conviction of the Christian life.

2 Timothy 1.12, Paul says, For I know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him unto that day.

So, to the extent that my assurance of salvation wavers, our Christian experience can be crippled. It's the same in a human family. If I grow up in a dysfunctional family, I may begin to doubt if my parents love me. I may begin to doubt my status in the family. So I may lose some of the assurance that I should have and no longer I'm really sure about my position in the family. That can have a devastating effect on a child.

Here's how strengthening and assuring it is for us to know that our parents love us. It's exactly the same way in the Christian life. Our unshakable assurance as to the spiritual parentage comes from the Word of God. Our new position is as sure and unchangeable as the scriptures say they are. because they're founded on the Scriptures. Our actual condition is going to fluctuate all the time, and we're going to have two steps forward, one back, we're going to progress, we're going to retreat. Hence, our position, though, is the only ground of our assurance of our salvation. Let me give you another example. Let's say that there's a young man whose father's name is Carboni. I just picked that name. and whose mom's maiden name is Valentino.

When we know the parentage of this young man, we know that he's Italian, right? We know that his position by birth, that he's an Italian. We know that when he grows up, he's going to be Italian in his condition. His characteristics, his condition will reflect his position. He's born into an unchangeable position, and he is going to grow into the condition that mirrors his position. They're both Italian. Both his position and his condition.

Spiritual birth is exactly the same way. We have a family position, and our new birth, we may have great effect on our condition. We may be filled with love and joy and peace. We may have all kinds of positive experiences as a believer. And that's a result of our position. But our condition may ebb and flow. It may not line up all the time with our position. So there's going to be growth all during our lives, but our family position is never going to change.

We are sons of God. And it's upon this position in Christ that our assurance of salvation must be established. John says, and we know that the Son of God has come, and he's given us an understanding that we may know him that is true, that we are in him that is true, even in his Son, Jesus Christ. This is true God and eternal life. So, how does a believer run into problems when he's a young believer runs into problems. I think it kind of goes this way. It usually is in the area of assurance that is the first issue and the first major mistake he makes in his Christian life.

After he starts out, he's got his position down, he's doing really well. There's a great change in his condition. At least there probably should be. Many of the old sins that he used to commit go away. His habits drop away. Many of his experiences are joyous, and he's a very outgoing believer.

His life is flooded with the first love and enthusiasm of a young believer. So as a babe in Christ, he's keenly aware of this transformation. He's aware of what's going on in his life. And it's so perceptible, and it's wonderful, but there's a danger here. The shift in his experience is beginning to go from his position to his condition. In other words, he feels saved, so he acts saved.

And so we may say, I know that I'm a Christian, look at me and listen to how I'm living. Well, at this point, feeling assured is where we base our Christian experience. We're assured of salvation because we feel like we're saved. But let's look what this leads to.

One morning he wakes up, I wake up, comes the dawn, and on this particular day I realize I don't look very saved, and I sure don't sound very saved, and I don't any longer really feel very saved. All day long, everything goes wrong. And by nightfall, I'm absolutely convinced that I'm maybe not so saved. I don't have the assurance I started or I used to have yesterday.

So what do I conclude? Well, I may conclude that since my condition is so bad, I may not just be a Christian after all. At any rate, I'm going to make up my mind that tomorrow I'm going to regain my assurance. And so the next day I strive to look and to sound and to feel saved. In short, I begin to struggle to maintain my assurance. But now what's the change? The change is I've centered my faith upon myself and my condition. And there's nothing but failure compounded when I do that.

Our positional relationship with God hasn't changed one iota, no matter how I feel about it. And it never will, but my assurance certainly has. It may be this or a similar experience that God will teach us that our new Christian life and our assurance is that of life And everything about my Christian life has its foundation in my position, and that it's all of grace. It means that I must learn from the Word of God exactly what my position is. That's the only safe ground there is. My feeling about it is not safe.

Second Timothy 1.9, God has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace which he gave us in Christ Jesus. So, there's some other aspects of my assurance and one of those is the witness of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit witnesses with my spirit, in Romans 8.16 it says the Spirit himself witnesses with our spirit that we are the children of God. That's how you know.

But where should we look for the witness of the Spirit? Should I look at my condition, or should I look into the Word of God? There's a tendency here, I think, to hanker for insurance in the realm of feelings again. Some anxious soul says, if I had the witness of the Spirit, I would be really happy, and I would be at rest.

But alas, I don't have that witness. We're looking in the wrong place. for the Spirit's witness. You cannot look within. The secret is the witness of the Spirit, because he's a spirit of truth, is not an inward feeling of consciousness, of pardon. It's a witness recorded in the imperishable words of the Holy Scripture. That's where it is. And that's the tool that he uses. The witness of the Spirit is not a vague uncertainty or of an inward consciousness. It's a written testimony that lies plain and clear on the pages of Scripture. That's the witness of the Spirit.

When the author of Hebrews says to the reader, their sins and iniquities I will remember no more, that's the fact, not how I feel about it. Every believer is entitled to know that the question of his sins is divinely and eternally settled. Every believer is entitled to know that. So when the Spirit of God, who is the author of the Bible, speaks to our hearts, he does it by means of the Word of God. As you study the Scriptures concerning your position in the Lord Jesus Christ, what happens? The Spirit of Christ gives you a deep assurance within your spirit and beyond the realm of feeling that this position I have cannot be altered, And it can't be contradicted, because he said so.

1 John 5.10, he that believes on the Son of God has the witness in himself. And this is the record that God has given to us, eternal life, and the life is in his Son. And these things I have written, written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life." So the foundation, the witness of the Spirit, is in the Word of God.

That's where it is. The third aspect of our assurance of salvation is that it's unconditional. that its foundation is really in the second part of our discussion today, which is eternal security. Our acceptance by God as a believer is based on grace alone, and so eternal security must be based on grace.

Now you're going to encounter, and probably already have, people who oppose the truth of eternal security. I had an experience with John and his Boy Scout troop. We went camping with a bunch of guys one time, and myself and another man were the adults, and he's a believer, and we spent two and a half days talking about eternal security because he didn't believe in it.

And the reason he didn't was because he didn't feel saved. It's too bad that he wouldn't take out his Bible and read what God had to say about his eternal security. But he felt that he wasn't eternally saved. So he was working a lot harder at it than I was. These opponents insist upon some form of works, which he did, in order to remain saved.

But the God of all grace, the one who saves and secures us, says in Romans 4, 5, To him that works not, but believes on him that justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. So your unmerited act of believing God is what God counts as your righteousness. We are unconditionally, eternally secure in the risen Lord Jesus. Jude 24 and 25 says, Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power now and forever."

It's not that we don't fall. It's not that we don't, to some measure, sin every day. but we cannot fall out of our eternal position. One man said, and you've probably all heard this before, you may fall down on the deck, but you can never fall off the ship. So what are the keys? There are some keys to my eternal security. And the keys are, the number one key, and probably the most important key, is the sovereignty of my God. He's the master of eternal security, and the fact that He is sovereign And the sovereign God of the universe means that if He says it, then it's so.

And He has chosen me, and He has made me one of His sons, and made you one of His sons. Ephesians 1-4, according, He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, having predestinated us unto the adoption of sons by Jesus Christ to Himself according to the good pleasure of His will. We've already seen that the sovereignty of God and the sovereignty of our Father accepts us in His Son, and that He's working out His eternal purpose and will concerning all of us. He's doing that every single day. In Ephesians 1, 6 and 11, He says, to the praise and glory of His grace, through which He has made us accepted in the Beloved. in whom also we have obtained an inheritance, and being predestinated according to the purpose of him who works all things after the counsels of his own will."

The sovereignty of God, when it comes to the security of salvation, is the cornerstone on which I rest my security. If he says it, that's good enough for me. The second part of eternal security can be based on the justice of God. We live, in case you haven't noticed, in a flagrant injustice world today. And it heartens, I think, us to know that our security is based squarely on God's justice. God took care of the issue of our unrighteousness and our ungodliness.

In Romans 3.26, God says to declare his righteousness that he might be just, and the justifier of him who believes on Jesus.

God is both of those. He's just in saving you because of the work of Christ on the cross. And he's also the one that justifies you because of the work of Christ on the cross. He does both. As aggressively as God would condemn a man who's not a believer, he just as aggressively saves one who is. He's just.

Peter says that Christ also has suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God. God's justice, when you believe, demands that he save you so you can trust him. A little poem that I've found is this payment. This is, I think, from William Newell. Payment God cannot twice demand. First at my bleeding surety's hand and then at mine.

God is not going to require of you your death and Christ's death. It's Christ's death that saves you, not yours. The third aspect of the eternal security is the love of God. The love of God, the Father loves us just exactly as He loves His Son, exactly the same. And the reason is, is because we're in Him. We have His very life.

So as Randy read this morning in Romans 8, who can separate the Lord Jesus from the Father? Nothing. Who can separate you from the Father if you're in Christ? And so those verses in Romans 8 are really powerful because they go through all of the issues that could possibly come up in a person's mind that would separate you from the love of God.

The verses are wonderfully, they're a wonderful position that everybody has in the love of Christ. You may not feel any of those things, but your feelings don't count. What counts is, is what God says. And in the very first verse in 35, He says that even God can't separate you from His own love because you're in Christ. So our eternal security is based on God's love. The next aspect, it's based on the power of God.

God has determined through His power that I'm going to be a son, that you're going to be a son, all of us are, and that our inheritance is kept with him in the heavenlies by his power. Peter says in 1 Peter 1, 3-5, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who according to his abundant mercy he has begotten us again unto a living hope.

What's the hope? By the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to what? To an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and fades not away. And where is it? It's reserved in heaven for you who are kept by the power of God through faith under salvation ready to be revealed at the last time.

God has not only determined that we're going to have an inheritance, He's determined what it is, and He, by His power, is keeping it for us, every single one of us. And the last part of eternal security, I think you could say it's based on the promises of God. The overwhelming evidence that we've studied so far, or looked at so far, isn't enough. God has given us great promises And so let's look at a couple of them. In John 6, 37, the Lord says, All that the Father gives me shall come to me, and he that comes to me I will in no wise cast out.

Did you come to him as your Savior? Yes, you did. He did not reject you, but rather he received you in his eternal love. So having come to him and been saved by his marvelous grace, He has promised never to cast you out. Now we're all going to experience at some time in our life the approach of Satan when we sin or when we're weak or when we're immature. But none of that will affect God and His power at all or His love towards us. Because if we look at our situation based on our feelings and based on our condition, It's the promises of God that will, one of the things that will hold you together. Hebrews 13, 5 says, I will never leave you, nor will I ever forsake you.

Maybe if you walk away today with one little phrase in your mind, this would be it. God said it, I believe it, and that settles it. If you understand that God said it, and that you believed it, and that settles it, then you won't be subject to your feelings when things aren't going so well. God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.

So in closing, I want to read a quote from Lewis Barry Chafer, the founder of Dallas Seminary. I've had this in my archives for a long time, and I read it occasionally. And it's one of those arguments or rationales that a man with a much greater mind than I have put together.

He says, could it be possible that God would so love an individual as to give his son to die for him and still love him to the extent of following him with the pleadings and the drawings of his grace until he has won that soul to his family and created him anew by the impartation of his own divine nature and then be careless as to what becomes of the one he has thus given his all to procure.

So it's upon this sure foundation of acceptance and assurance and eternal security amid the urgent needs and intense delights of the Christian life that every one of us will grow in the knowledge and grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. the promise, the power, the love, the justice of God. God would not do everything he's done and then let us fall away because we felt like it. He does everything based on his own will. And God so loved us that he gave us his Son.

So my security is based on the Word of God and the witness of the Spirit based on that Word. So, let's close. Dear Father, as we sang this morning, we do have a blessed assurance. We do have a security. We do have an assurance that we are your sons. And as we continue to grow in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, our assurance will be confirmed. Our security will be how we live and act and walk. Father, we're so thankful for that. And we pray in your Son's precious name. Amen.