PERSEVERANCE OF THE SAINTS
A number of years ago I had an intense conversation with another pastor who was in the habit of giving “assurance of salvation” to a person who just prayed to receive Christ as Lord and Savior. He would say something like, “Welcome to God’s family. Satan will try to fill your mind with doubts about your salvation, but you can rest assured that you are eternally secure—“‘once saved, always saved.’” I told him that I thought he was engaged in a dangerous practice, since only God knows whether or not a person’s prayer to receive Christ was the result of true regeneration or some other motivation. I was, and still am, concerned that if you give “assurance of salvation” to somebody who is not genuinely saved, but actually in danger of eternal damnation, you work against the Spirit of God. This is a serious issue. We are dealing with eternal destinies; therefore, we must proceed with caution.
There is of course a place for assurance of salvation. God doesn’t want His children to be terrorized by the prospect of hell. John’s first epistle was written “to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 Jn. 5:13). How can we know with certainty that we have eternal life? John mentions three tests for self-examination throughout his letter. First, we have to believe that Jesus is the Christ who was born of God and has come in the flesh (2:22-23; 4:1-3; 5:1). Second, John says, “We know we have come to know him if we obey his commands” (2:3). Third, John notes, “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brother” (3:14). John Stott has said, “These three tests belong to each other…because faith, love and holiness are all the work of the Holy Spirit. It is only if God has given us his Spirit that we are able to believe, to love and to obey… To fail to pass these tests is to stand self-exposed” (John Stott, The Letters of John, 59).
Can a true Christian “lose” his or her salvation? The Bible answers with an emphatic “No!” Paul writes, “Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory” (Eph. 1:13b-14). Second, our salvation has been entrusted to Jesus’ care and protection. “All that the Father give to me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away… And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day” (Jn. 6:37, 39). Third, the Father will also do His part: “being confident of this that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6; cf. 1 Thess. 5:23-24). True Christians cannot lose their salvation, for the triune God works together to preserve it.
However (and this is a massive and important “however”), as John Calvin reminds us, “Paul himself also dissuades us from over-assurance: ‘Let him,’ he says, ‘who stands well, take heed lest he fall’ (1 Cor. 10:12). Again: You are grafted in the people of God? ‘Be not proud but fear’ (Rom. 11:20). For God can cut you off again that he may engraft others” [cf. Rom. 11:21-23; (Institutes vol. 2, 972)].
We will avoid presumption, and understand the doctrine of “the perseverance of the saints” when we balance our teaching with conditional “if passages” like Hebrews 3:14: “We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.” There is no contradiction between God’s sovereign security of the believer and the believer’s personal responsibility to persevere. “Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience” (Heb. 4:11).
What, then, are we to make of those who appear to lose their salvation? Jesus told us in the parable of the sower that some people “receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away” (Lk. 8:13). True belief is seen is perseverance, therefore true believers “hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop” (v. 15).
John wrote of those who appeared to be Christians for a short time: “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us” (1 Jn. 2:19).
In summary: “The perseverance of the saints means that all those who are truly born again will be kept by God’s power and will persevere as Christians until the end of their lives, and only those who persevere until the end have been truly born again” (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, p. 788).