Bible Question: COULD A BELIEVER LOSE THEIR SALVATION? |
Bible Answer: Most people here are missing the beauty of salvation!!! Rather than looking at the issue of if you can lose your salvation, I think it is more an issue of pride that people who say you can lose salvation have. It is more an issue of whether or not you believe in God's sovereignty over salvation (predestination/free-will). Since I am sure that has been a subject that has been beaten heavily on here, I will not go into it too much. But, I see it as an issue of pride when someone says that they have anything to do with choosing God! If God is not in sovereign control over His people, then how could He be God? The human heart is wicked above all else. "For while we were still sinners Christ died for us". In our sin and evil ways we would never "chose" God. The world hates God! And once we were a part of the world. The wicked heart does not have the desire to know God, the wicked heart would never chose God. However, when God sovereignly saves someone, he gives us a heart of flesh so that we are able to be saved. We may consciously say, Lord, I want to follow you like Hebrews 12:1 says, "fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith". Then in Phil. 3:13 we are told that we are to "forget what lies behind and reach forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus". So, when God gives us the heart of flesh, from there we can make our decision, but until God gives us the heart of flesh, we have no means on our own to be saved!! Imagine this...you are going out to lunch and you walk into a hamburger shop (whereby for this example hamburgers are sin)....you have a few choices...hamburgers, hamburgers or fries...this is us in our life of sin...we cannot chose salvation because our wicked situation (the hamburger shop we are in) does not have the ability to chose righteousness. When God choses to save someone, he takes us out of the "hamburger joint" and puts us into the "food court", where from there we have the ability to chose pizza (salvation) because God has taken us out of the world of flesh and given us a heart of flesh. I know it's very corny, but it has helped many students understand what it means to be sovereignly chosen. Continued |