Kept for Jesus E-Book

Sam Storms

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 304

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Can Christians lose their salvation? This question has perplexed—and, at times, distressed—believers for centuries, and it is still often asked today. When faced with their sin and shortcomings, many Christians are tempted to conclude that they've strayed too far and that God no longer loves them. In Kept for Jesus, pastor Sam Storms addresses common concerns that Christians have related to their eternal security, offering hope and assurance from the Bible. Examining every New Testament passage that speaks to this important issue, this book charts a biblical course between those who say that Christians can lose their salvation and those who carelessly declare, "Once saved, always saved." This pastoral book will equip pastors, church leaders, and laypeople with biblical answers for anyone questioning their salvation.

Leseprobe

WHAT THE NEW TESTAMENT REALLY TEACHES ABOUT ASSURANCE OF SALVATION AND ETERNAL SECURITY

SAM STORMS

Kept for Jesus: What the New Testament Really Teaches about Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Security

Copyright © 2015 by Sam Storms

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Jesse Owen, 10AM Design

First printing 2015

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. 2011 Text Edition. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture references marked NEB are from The New English Bible © The Delegates of the Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, 1961, 1970.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture references marked RSV are from The Revised Standard Version. Copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-4202-2ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4205-3 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4203-9Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4204-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Storms, C. Samuel, 1951–

Kept for Jesus : what the New Testament really teaches about assurance of salvation and eternal security / Sam Storms.

         1 online resource.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher;

ISBN 978-1-4335-4203-9 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4204-6 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4205-3 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4202-2 (tp)

1. Assurance (Theology)—Biblical teaching. 2. Bible. New Testament—Theology. I. Title.

BS680.A86

234—dc23                           2014039257

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

To the elders and pastors at Bridgeway Church with deep gratitude for your friendship, your prayers of support, and especially your faithfulness to the gospel

CONTENTS

Introduction  1  How Deep the Father’s Love for Us  2  So Close yet So Very Far Away  3  The Dangers of Fickle Faith  4  The Logic of Love  5  Inseparable: Now and Forever  6  God Will Sustain You to the End  7  Test Yourselves  8  Whatever God Starts, He Finishes  9  Warnings, Perplexing Passages, and the Potential for Apostasy, Part 110  Warnings, Perplexing Passages, and the Potential for Apostasy, Part 211  Can a Christian Commit the Sin unto Death?ConclusionGeneral IndexScripture Index

INTRODUCTION

Meet Charley. On second thought, you probably already know him—or someone whose life bears a striking resemblance. Perhaps Charlene would be a more suitable name for some of you. In any case, his (her?) life will pose for us a painful and difficult dilemma. Let me explain.

Charley was born into a Christian family. His parents were devout followers of Jesus, and both of his siblings, an older brother and a younger sister, came to faith in Christ and remained vibrant and deeply committed to him throughout their lives.

Charley was raised in the church and was usually present whenever the doors were open, whether at a Sunday service, a youth meeting, special events throughout the week, or a summer retreat. When he turned twelve, he professed faith in Jesus, largely through the influence of his parents and older brother. He was baptized soon thereafter and was discipled by his youth pastor over the course of the next few years. Charley’s faith appeared to be quite vibrant and joyful. He endured the same trials and temptations as do virtually all teenaged boys, but he never wandered far or failed to repent when he sinned. He prayed every day and read his Bible and was growing in his understanding of God.

Following graduation from high school, he fell in with a different group of friends at college. They challenged his faith and insisted that he was being naïve to believe in Jesus. The arguments they regularly threw in his face were fairly typical:

Only ignorant and uneducated people believe that Jesus was really born of a virgin and rose physically from the dead.

Evolution is a proven scientific fact and makes the existence of God unnecessary.

If there is really an all-powerful and good God in charge of the universe, why is there so much evil and injustice?

If you keep this “faith” that you obviously inherited from your parents, you’ll never be able to drink and sleep around and experience the really fun stuff in life.

It wasn’t long before Charley stopped attending church and eventually declared himself to be an atheist. He grew increasingly angry at the institutional church and nurtured a deep resentment toward those who influenced him while growing up, having become convinced that they hid the truth from him and only wanted to control his life.

Charley is now thirty, already twice divorced, an alcoholic, and painfully bitter and unpleasant to be around. He wants nothing ever again to do with Christianity.

So what’s up with Charley? What happened? Without getting too technical, it’s important that you understand how Christians from various traditions and denominations explain this.

The majority of those who identify with the Nazarene, Methodist, Assembly of God, Church of Christ, and Free-Will Baptist traditions, among others, insist that Charley was, in all likelihood, genuinely born again at the age of twelve. He truly trusted Christ and was truly saved. He was justified or declared righteous in the sight of God. He became an adopted son of God and was forgiven all his sins. The Holy Spirit came to indwell Charley and to empower him for godly living. But through a variety of factors and for a whole host of reasons, Charley willfully repudiated everything he once affirmed, denied his faith, and apostatized. Notwithstanding all that friends, family, and even God himself could do to persuade him to stay true to Christ, he walked away in denial of the Lord he once embraced. Charley forfeited his salvation. He is now, at the age of thirty, a child of the Devil and headed for eternal condemnation, cut off from Christ.

Although no one really likes to be labeled, we will call people who embrace this view “Arminians,” named after the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Dutch theologian James Arminius. Be it noted, however, that not all Arminians deny the eternal security of the believer.1 More on this later.

There is another view that some of you have never encountered. People who embrace it come from a wide variety of backgrounds, including some Southern Baptists, dispensationalists, and others from so-called independent Bible churches. They insist that once Charley was truly saved, he was forever saved. Even though he walked away from faith and repudiated Jesus, he is still safely secure in the arms of his heavenly Father and will, regardless of how he lives and dies, end up in heaven for eternity. Charley ought to have walked in obedience and faithfulness, and we should encourage him to do so. But he doesn’t have to. If he chooses to live a life in unbelief and immorality, he is still saved.

However, whereas he doesn’t lose his salvation, his denial of Jesus and his sinful behavior will lead to the loss of rewards in heaven. He gains entrance into the eternal kingdom of God, but he will not experience the joy of knowing his heavenly Father’s approval, and he will suffer the loss of rewards that other, more faithful Christians, will receive.

While not affiliated with any particular denomination or tradition, that view has come to be known by many of its critics as “antinomianism.” Now, please understand, those who advocate this view would never call themselves “antinomians.” The term antinomian comes from two Greek words that together mean “against the law.” It has often been used to describe those who say that although you ought to obey the principles and moral laws of the Scriptures, you won’t lose your salvation if you don’t. You’ll only lose your reward. In other words, you should persevere in holiness of life, but if you don’t, you’re still a child of God.

Those whom I’m calling “antinomians” argue that if you are once saved, you are always saved, regardless of how you live or what you believe after you initially come to saving faith in Jesus.

Finally, those who typically come from Presbyterian as well as Southern Baptist and other traditions associated with what is known as “Calvinism” or the “Reformed” faith (because of their close association with the Protestant Reformation and its leaders Martin Luther and John Calvin) look at Charley and draw one of two conclusions.

First, some conclude that if Charley was truly saved at the age of twelve, he is still saved at the age of thirty, and will, by God’s grace and the convicting work of the Holy Spirit, eventually come to his spiritual senses and return to the Lord. This may come only after enduring severe discipline from his heavenly Father, but eventually God will bring him back. In some cases, people like Charley are disciplined straightway into heaven; that is to say, the discipline of the Lord results in their physical death. They die prematurely under the discipline of God, but they are saved eternally.

Second, others conclude that the likely explanation for Charley’s departure from his professed faith in Christ is that he was never genuinely born again. His so-called faith was spurious. His apparent life of obedience was prompted by factors other than a genuine love for Jesus. He was self-deluded and deceived everyone who knew him. If he had been truly born again, he would have persevered in his faith.

As you can see, the Arminian says that Charley was truly saved, apostatized from the faith, and is now lost. The antinomian says that Charley was truly saved, is still truly saved, but will suffer the loss of rewards in the age to come because of his disobedient lifestyle. The Calvinist says Charley may have been truly saved, and if so, he will come under the discipline of the Lord, who will either restore him to his walk with Jesus or take him home to heaven prematurely. Alternatively, says the Calvinist, Charley was never truly saved, and his failure to persevere in a life of obedience is evidence that his profession of faith was just that, a verbal profession, and not the genuine faith that possesses forgiveness of sins.

As you will quickly see, I hold to the Calvinist or Reformed view. I agree with the Arminian when he says that perseverance in faith and holiness is necessary for final salvation, but I disagree with him when he says that a born-again person can fully and finally apostatize from the faith, thereby losing his salvation. Likewise, I agree with the antinomian that all those truly born again are eternally secure in their salvation, but I disagree when he says that a born-again person can live in unrepentant sin throughout the course of his life, be encouraged with the assurance of salvation, and expect to find himself in heaven.

I will strive to be as objective as I can in explaining what others believe, but there is no escaping the fact that I am solidly, energetically, and passionately committed to the view that when a man or woman is born again by the Spirit of God and justified by faith in Jesus Christ alone, he or she will persevere in faith unto life’s end, even though that perseverance may be a bit bumpy and inconsistent along the way. That person, however, will never utterly abandon Christ because the Father has promised never to utterly abandon us but to keep us safe and secure through faith.

WHY DO PEOPLE REJECT THE DOCTRINE OF ETERNAL SECURITY?

Many of you live with deep-seated anxiety about eternity, an anxiety that occasionally degenerates into outright fear. “Am I really saved? I think I’m saved. I hope I’m saved. But these doubts are driving me insane. What if I sin again today, just like I did yesterday and the day before that? Will I eventually cross the point of no return? Will God, at some point, cease to love me and just give up on me?”

Some of you live confidently in the assurance of your salvation. You’re even happy and joyful about it. Others who aren’t saved are persuaded they are. Their so-called assurance is little more than presumption and arrogance. Then, of course, some are convinced that although they are saved today, that may change. What are we to make of this, and what does the Bible say about it?

As a Calvinist who believes in the eternal security of God’s elect, I often ask, Why do people disagree and embrace the Arminian view? Why do people doubt or deny the doctrine of eternal security? Why do so many insist that they’ve known friends or family members who once were genuinely born again but through some sin or backslidden rebellion have lost their salvation? There are several reasons for these beliefs.

Often the culprit is tradition: “That’s what I was raised to believe. I can’t bring myself to believe that Mom and Dad and the preacher and all my friends were wrong.” This is a far more powerful influence, subtle and unconscious though it be, than most of us realize. I’m not immune to it any more than you are. To be open to another view seems like we are saying, “The past was all for naught. It meant nothing.” To some it feels as if they must question the integrity or value of people and pastors whom they love and respect and who’ve been a powerful influence in their lives. That is difficult for many to cope with.

Undoubtedly a major contributing factor is the presence in the New Testament of several so-called problem passages. Two such texts are found in Hebrews 6 and 2 Peter 2, both of which I attempt to explain later in the book. Let’s be honest: every view has problem passages! There are biblical texts that seem to run counter to each of the three views I presented. We have to deal honestly and fairly with them and ask, Which view does the best job of accounting for everything the Bible says on this topic? That being said, many are Arminians simply because they believe that’s what the Bible teaches.

I also think many fear that if people are told they can’t lose their salvation, they will indulge in gross immorality. They fear it will lead people to think: “If I can’t lose my salvation, I’ll do whatever I please” (see Rom. 6:1–4). In other words, the legitimate concern for holiness leads some to an illegitimate rejection of security.

As noted, others have known people like Charley (or Charlene), whom they are convinced are Christians, who later give every indication of having fallen away. Believing them to have truly been born again, the only explanation is that they have lost their salvation.

Part of the blame can also be laid at the feet of certain religious leaders who need people to be insecure in their salvation in order to retain control over them. They cultivate anxiety and doubt in the hearts of people in order to exert greater control over their lives (and often their money). Fear is a powerful means by which to keep people under one’s religious thumb.

Many believe that eternal security diminishes a person’s moral responsibility. It places too much emphasis on God’s sovereignty and not enough on human free will.

Finally, for some, the exhortations and warnings in Scripture to be holy, to persevere, and to endure make sense only if the possibility exists that one may choose not to do so.

So my aim in the pages ahead is twofold. First, I want to convince you who embrace either the Arminian or antinomian view that you are mistaken in your belief. I make no apologies for that. Second, I want to deepen everyone’s confidence in the supremacy of God’s saving and preserving grace. I want you to conclude each chapter more joyful and grateful than when you started reading, because you know that your sins are forgiven and that God will never, ever leave you or forsake you.

1 Arminius himself wrote, “I never taught that a true believer can either totally or finally fall away from the faith, and perish; yet I will not conceal, that there are passages of Scripture which seem to me to wear this aspect.” The Writings of James Arminius, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1977), 254 (emphasis original). Arminian scholar Roger E. Olson concludes that “Arminius himself never settled the matter.” Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities (Downers Grove, IL: Inter­Varsity, 2006), 187.

2

SO CLOSE YET SO VERY FAR AWAY

We have been looking at a young man named Charley, who professed faith in Christ at the age of twelve and appeared to live a Christian life for quite a few years, only to walk away from Christianity while in college and end up in angry atheism and bitterness toward both the faith in which he had been raised and the Christian church. I asked how we might explain Charley’s experience.

Was he truly born again at the age of twelve and later apostatized from the faith, thereby losing or forfeiting his salvation? That’s the answer of Arminian theology and those in the Nazarene, Methodist, Assembly of God, Church of Christ, and Free-Will Baptist traditions.

Others argue that Charley was truly saved at twelve and still is now at the age of thirty, even though he lives in open, defiant, unrepentant sin and unbelief, and even though he may continue to live this way until his death. He didn’t lose his salvation but will likely suffer the loss of rewards in the coming kingdom. Those who believe this we are calling “antinomians.”

The view that I believe is most consistent with Scripture is that if Charley was genuinely born again at age twelve, he still is, and God will bring discipline to his life and eventually restore to him the joy of his salvation. In some cases, as was true with Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 and some of the Christians in Corinth in the first century, this discipline of the Lord leads to premature physical death. But the child of God remains a child of God.

A more likely scenario is that, notwithstanding his profession of faith at twelve, Charley never genuinely repented and trusted Christ. His religious or spiritual experience may have had a temporary impact on his life, sufficient to deceive not only him but also others into thinking he was truly saved. But had he truly been born again, he would have persevered in faith and obedience. Whatever rebellion or backsliding he may have experienced, God would eventually have brought conviction of sin to his heart, repentance to his life, and restoration of his relationship with Christ.

In this chapter we are going to examine three well-known passages in Matthew’s Gospel, each of which will help us in its own way come to a deeper understanding of the nature of true, saving faith and its counterfeit.

MATTHEW 7:15–23

What do you do when people claim to be Christian, attend church on a regular basis, know the definitions of all those big theological words, and are even dedicated to ministry and appear to be successful, not simply in the little things but especially in the supernatural dimension? Jesus warns us not to be gullible or to believe everything they say or that we see. This is clearly his point in our first passage, Matthew 7:15–23.

False prophets are nothing new. God warned the people through Jeremiah in the sixth century BC. “An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land,” declared the Lord; “the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule at their direction; [and] my people love to have it so” (5:30–31a). Again in 14:14 we read: “The LORD said to me: ‘The prophets are prophesying lies in my name. I did not send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lying vision, worthless divination, and the deceit of their own minds.’”