Why are so many people who have prayed prayers, professed Christ, and thought they were born again still unsure whether they are saved or not?  Many are the people I speak to, who, despite the promises of God’s Word that they can know they have everlasting life (I John 5:13), have no such assurance.  They aren’t living for Christ, and they don’t feel like they belong to or with Christ.  What can be done to help them?  What course should they take?  That all depends on what happened to bring them to this point in life.

I see two possibilities in the Bible.  The first is that they never belonged to Christ in the first place. I John 2:19, warning about some opponents of Christ, says, “They went out from us, but they were not of us: for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.”

There are far too many people who parroted a prayer without understanding the gospel or genuinely believing it.  There are too many who for social, political, or personal reasons claimed to be Christians, but never actually came to Christ in humble faith.  When these turn from Christianity or obviously fail in the Christian life, it isn’t because they lost something – they never had it.

Does this mean that every person who doesn’t feel saved, remember being saved, or act like they are saved was never a Christian in the first place?  Or is there another possibility in the Scriptures?

There is.  Peter describes another situation in which people are not living for Christ, and though they have been saved, they have forgotten their cleansing. II Peter 1:5-9 tells us that people who do not diligently grow in Christlikeness become blind, unable to see what is in the distance, and they forget that they were purged from their old sins.  They were purged – they are saved.  But they forget it.  They forget the knowledge and assurance of their salvation because they do not live in the knowledge and assurance of their salvation.  They don’t live it out, so they lose their confidence within.  We actually find assurance of our standing in the way we walk.  When we walk away from Christ, we can so easily forget that we stand in Him.

So when I encounter someone who had an experience, prayed a prayer, but still doesn’t know whether they are saved or not, I know it can be for two reasons.  They may never have genuinely trusted Christ in the first place.  Or they may have ceased to live in that faith and so lost the confidence of it.

Unfortunately, since I can’t see their heart, I don’t know which condition applies to which person.  Fortunately, God does.  And if they want to know where they stand with Him, I believe He will show them.  The Holy Spirit reproves the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8); the Holy Spirit bears witness within believers that they are the children of God (Romans 8:16).  He can bring the lost to faith, and He can bring the saved to faithfulness – if they are willing to hear Him.

When asked the question, “Do you know for sure where you will go when you die?” the most common answer I get seems to be,

“I don’t know.”  Its common companion is, “I don’t think you can really know for sure.”  It’s perhaps the most important question to answer in this life – and most people know they don’t know.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  Many churches, denominations, and teachers proclaim that a person might become unsaved after being saved, or might not be able to be saved because they aren’t part of the elect.  Many seem to think that faith is a good starting place, but we need to do some kind of works in order to complete or keep our salvation.  Other major religions I know of leave the question of eternal destiny to be decided at or after death.  This thinking usually makes a person’s works the ultimate determiner of eternal destiny, because doing the wrong works, or not doing enough of the right ones, can negate other good works, or even faith.  Certainty in this life is impossible, because we don’t really know what we will do or how we might fail in the future.

However, this is one of the beautiful differences between biblical Christianity and other faiths.  We believe in a God who is truth and loves truth; He works by faith and knowledge, not by doubt and fear.  We may not know how we might mess up in the future – but He knows the future, so when He redeems us, He does so knowing the full cost of that redemption.  It’s a redemption that was accomplished with an atonement that paid for all sin – past, present, and future.

So He tells us in I John 5:3, “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.”  This is consistent with the themes throughout Scripture of God’s truthfulness and faithfulness, and of His call to us to respond with reckoning, confidence, and trust.

When we simply take God at His Word, having answered the call of His Word to faith, we can know.

What if I mess up too badly or for too long?  Can I lose my salvation?  Many believers who take an honest look at the mistakes they make after they profess Christ ask questions like this.  Many who look at the disturbing warning passages in the New Testament come away with the same questions.  And that’s before we even consider our more judgmental moments looking at other people who claim to be God’s, but live like the devil’s.

But maybe, “Can I lose my salvation?” isn’t quite the right question.  I think we might be focusing on the wrong transaction when we ask the question that way.  I think the question may only even get asked because of the way we think about being saved.

If I went fishing on vacation without a life jacket and fell out of the boat because I wouldn’t let go of my fishing rod, I might need to be saved from drowning. 

Maybe after being saved that first time, I would learn my lesson and always wear my lifejacket and care more about safety than my fishing gear.  But anyone who knows me is probably already rolling their eyes at the likelihood of me always making the smart decision when it comes to fishing.  It’s quite possible that having been saved from the water on Monday, I might fall back in on Thursday and need to be saved again.  If we just see sin or hell as a peril that we need to be rescued from because of our behavior, then it’s easy to think that the same decisions that got us in trouble last time could put us right back in trouble again.  Then we might “lose our salvation,” because we’d need to be saved again.

However, salvation is not the only thing that happens when we trust Jesus Christ.  That glorious transaction is also described as redemption, justification, sanctification, sealing, indwelling, glorification, quickening, and more.

The Bible passages that talk about this moment are almost too numerous to go through in a single simple blog post.  One of my favorites, though, is John 5:24.  There Jesus says, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.”

Grammar isn’t many people’s favorite.

Verb tenses matter, though.  John 5:24 doesn’t say that the person who comes to faith through the Scriptures “will have everlasting life” – it says “hath everlasting life.”  That is, it’s not a future possibility, it’s a current reality.  The moment we trust Jesus Christ, we pass from death into a life that can never end.  (And don’t even get me started on the implications of that Greek perfect tense there!)  If we could “lose our salvation” (to mix the other picture back in), that life wouldn’t be so everlasting, would it?

And then there are the verses that say we are justified – declared righteous by God Himself.  Would God go back on His word, change His mind, and declare unjust what He has already declared just?  (Remember that when He declared us righteous, He knew every sin of the future and declared us just anyhow.)  Of course, He can declare us righteous, because He has actually made us righteous – sanctified, and even glorified.  (I Corinthians 6:11; Romans 8:30)  We are already seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:6) – shall we be torn from the hands and body of Jesus and cast out of heaven, when we have already been made righteous in Him?

And that’s before we get to the work of the Holy Spirit, which seals us “unto the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30) and is the down payment on the blessings we have in Christ (Ephesians 1:14).  Will God go back on a deal He has already made the down payment on?

Then there’s the declaration that God will not fail in us.  Philippians 1:6 says, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”  Once saved, it is our destiny to become like Jesus Christ.  (Romans 8:29)  Even though WE fail in that in this life, GOD will not fail in that throughout eternal life.

I think we fear losing our salvation because we think too small about salvation.  It’s not just a rescue from peril; it’s not just a change of forwarding address for the soul.  It’s a birth – and birth can’t be undone (and death can’t happen after this birth).  It’s a sealing with a seal that can’t be broken.  It’s a contract with a being who can’t go back on His Word.  It’s a relocation.  It’s a transformation.  It’s a change of nature and destiny.  None of that can be lost, or it never happened in the first place.

It’s not just “once saved, always saved” – it’s “born again, never dies.”

It is impossible to truly love Christ while rejecting His body.  The church is Christ’s great love and the greatest work He is doing in the world right now; should we refuse to be a part of it, while claiming to receive His love and work in our lives?  I thought about writing a post about church membership, but Matt Chandler covers many of the points I would have made, so I’ll just give you what he says for the moment.

Is Church Membership Biblical?

Though it should perhaps go without saying, I’ll say it here just to be clear.  Sharing an article or quote from someone else doesn’t mean I agree with everything else they do or say (or even that I completely agree with everything in a quote or article itself), but that I see something of value, something worth considering there.

To address what I mean when I call myself a fundamentalist, I’m going to have to take a little time off from my busy schedule of political ranting, working on my AK-47 spray-and-pray form, and building bombs.  Having to take time off from angry destruction to have rational discussion makes me mad enough to blow something up!

Oh, wait. I don’t mess much with politics, especially in my role as a pastor; I don’t own an AK-anything; and I’ve never built a bomb. (Well, that egg-drop project back in high school might have come close… but nobody got hurt, aside from the smell. The fire wasn’t really all THAT big.)

Despite the impression you may have gotten from media (which often does’t make careful distinctions – it’s hard to clarify who really is what in a 600-word article or 2-minute television news report, even if you’re inclined to, let alone a Tweet or Facebook post), Christian fundamentalists have virtually nothing in common with the Islamic fundamentalists or Hindu fundamentalists who have done such violence in recent years.

The reason people can apply the term “fundamentalist” to some Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and more is that we each have people who take what they believe seriously enough to put it into action and are deeply attached to core tenets of their faith.  But our faiths with their core tenets are radically different, which means that when we put them into action, they are much different from one another.

I don’t know of a single self-professed or accepted-by-the-community Christian fundamentalist who has committed any act of violence in the name of his faith. We don’t kill people for God, and we don’t blow things up for God. We’re willing to die for our faith – but we would never kill for it. That would be a denial of the very fundamentals we stand for.

So if I’m not defined by crazy politics or violence, what makes me a fundamentalist?

A Christian fundamentalist is one who holds to and stands up for the basic truths of Christianity. The exact list of fundamentals and their implications may differ from person to person. (The Fundamentals, a collection of 90 essays which helped define the movement in its early years, was written by 64 different individuals representing nearly every major Protestant denomination at their time.)  But all the lists from all the early fundamentalists pretty much boil down to the essential truths for salvation, and those revolve around Jesus Christ: how we know Him, who He is, what He did, and how we respond.

Even though the name is only about a hundred years old, it’s a biblical idea. The Apostle Paul repeatedly told people to know doctrine and to be willing to separate from (not work with or fellowship with) people who denied core truths or who lived in blatant sin. The Apostle John nailed it down in I John 4:1-3. The person who believes the truth about Jesus Christ, whatever else they may be wrong about, has a relationship with God. The person who hasn’t believed the truth about Jesus Christ, whatever else they may be right about, has no relationship with God. When a person teaches the truth about Jesus Christ, whatever else they may get wrong, they are helping the cause of Christ in that at least. When a person teaches error about who Jesus is and what He did, whatever else they may get right, they are hurting the cause of the gospel of Christ.

Am I a fundamentalist because I hate people? No! I’m a fundamentalist because I love God and want to do what He says. (This is the test of love for Jesus, after all: “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus said.) I’m a fundamentalist because I believe the gospel of Jesus Christ to be the most important truth this world has ever heard – so important that I can’t pretend my faith is the same as someone’s who rejects it.

That’s what makes me a fundamentalist – believing the fundamental truths of Christianity and being willing to take a stand for them. In recent years, many people in fundamentalism have gotten tangled up in a lot of other things, some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t, and too often, the movement gets defined both from within and without by those other things.  Because the movement sometimes seems to have lost its way, or at least its clarity, I’ll occasionally use the term “historic fundamentalist” for myself.  I’m defining the name more like its inventors than some of its modern adherents.  At its heart, though, fundamentalism is about the gospel of Jesus Christ – and so am I.

Now I think I’ll go and make another … sandwich, a sandwich! What, you thought I was going to put together something explosively dangerous, just because I’m a fundamentalist? Well, okay, that description might suit any food item I make.  But as a fundamentalist shaped by the identity and message of Jesus Christ, it doesn’t describe me or my ministry.