Spiritual Formation

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Reflecting on your life experiences, do you feel more neglected, disciplined, or condemned?

Neglect results from a lack of loving concern. Condemnation results from a lack of loving redemption. Both abandon people into the hopelessness of a world filled with evil. Neglect is a passive condemnation. You might not immediately be aware of the danger you are in, unlike condemnation which is much more obvious. But discipline includes the best of both and discards the worst. It not only points the way out of destruction but also provides the means to get to safety.

Neglect and Condemnation Eliminate All Hope

To be condemned is to be hopelessly abandoned. Punishment doesn’t include redemption. Punishment destroys. There is no provision for any kind of desirable future.

The one who punishes is evil and selfish. The one being punished only becomes more afraid.

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

1 John 4:18 NIV

While you are being punished, you might not believe your situation is permanently hopeless, but in day-to-day living, you will likely feel overwhelmed with despair.

People who fail to develop faith in Jesus will face condemnation. They will finally reap what they have sowed. They won’t be able to escape God’s wrath.

“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Matthew 25:46 NIV

They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.

2 Thessalonians 1:9 NIV

Discipline Creates Confidence

The one who disciplines invests in a positive outcome. As God corrects you (not punish or condemn you), you will experience a curious mixture of sorrow and hope (Hebrews 12:11). The hand of correction stings for a time, but awareness of its gift soon follows.

God always guides those who are His children into righteous living. Such training requires an investment. As God corrects you, He accepts the responsibility to see you become something more and better. God is on your side. God will never abandon you.

You can have eternal security and endure strong discipline from God at the same time. In fact, you can’t have one without the other.

And have you completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son? It says, “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son.” Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all.

Hebrews 12:5-8 NIV

Isn’t being able to claim yourself to be a true son or daughter such a great reward? God’s discipline is for your eternal benefit, not eternal condemnation. When you can feel the difficulty of life weighing on you, you can simultaneously recognize God is working to help you become better. God’s correction leads to hope. God cares about your life; He wants you to swim not sink.

God won’t simultaneously condemn you to hell and invest in your future. Sensing God’s sincere effort to remodel your life is yet another way to validate your eternal security. You can confidently say, “I’m a child of God. God cares about me enough to correct me and keep me on the right path. He wants me to make it safely across the finish line and to be at home with Him forever” (Psalm 23).

This post is part of a series on eternal security. You can read the introductory post: eternal security means full assurance of salvation.
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Reading time: 4 minutes

Is God capable of unconditional love? Is God for you or against you? These are dangerous but necessary questions. Dangerous because, who are we to question God? If God isn’t perfect, then no one is. Necessary because we must have the answers if we are to trust God.

Unconditional Love Does Not Eliminate Hardship

The Bible contains several stories that may cause you to question whether God is for you or against you. You might feel like one day He is on your side, and the next, He is working to thwart your success. Why would God allow Joseph’s brothers to betray him? Why would He kill Uzzah for touching the ark? Why did He kill Ananias and Sapphira for lying?

Anyone who deliberately goes against God’s purposes can’t expect to have a positive outcome. In the case of Joseph, it was his brothers who suffered because of the famine. They lived with guilt for years. Joseph suffered too, but he didn’t act against God. Uzzah directly disobeyed God’s command. Similarly, Ananias and Sapphira intentionally tried to lie to God. The quality of suffering is vastly different when sin is involved.

In all these situations God’s purposes prevail. Some people are examples to others for what not to do. These are exceptions for the most part. God’s discipline might lead to physical death but not spiritual death. The important takeaway is, no matter how much you suffer, you must continue to trust God.

Unconditional Love Eliminates All Obstacles

Sin and the love of this world prevent many people from entering the kingdom of heaven (James 4:4). Determining if God is for or against you might be as easy as knowing whether you are for or against God.

Many attitudes and actions go along with being “pro” or “for” someone. You would likely:

• count yourself as on their side.
• speak favorably of them.
• be willing to be under their authority.
• act for the sake of their interests.

God takes this one step further and asks His follower to be willing to give up anything and potentially everything to become a member of His family. It’s a true mark of being a believer. Absolutely nothing should prevent you from following Christ. Only true believers can see that nothing is more important than God.

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’

So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

Luke 14:26-30, 33 ESV

To respect God’s offer of unconditional love believers must meet it with their own unconditional surrender.

Unconditional Love Guarantees Absolute Security

Unconditional love is the greatest virtue and therefore the greatest measure of God’s character. God isn’t a trickster. God is for us, not against us. As believers, we are God’s elect, chosen and justified by Him. God is on our side, working for His purposes which includes our benefit. And furthermore, God is “kind to the ungrateful and the evil” (Luke 6:35). He is patient and kind to us even when we don’t deserve His unconditional love.

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?

Romans 8:31-35 ESV

If nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, we always have reason to hope. If you could lose your salvation, how could you continue to feel hope and connection with Christ? You couldn’t. Thanks to God’s unrelenting and indestructible love, you can live in security, not live in fear.

This post is part of a larger series about eternal security.
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Reading time: 3 minutes

The Gospel has the power to perfect you. The change is so radical because it is irreversible. When you accept God’s salvation by faith, you leave behind sin as part of who you are. Christians can believe they have been permanently set free or they can cling to their old self-image. But once you cross over to perfection, it’s impossible to return to imperfection.

Jesus is Permanently Perfect

Never having to worry about losing your salvation might seem too good to be true. But it is only possible because of who Jesus is, not because of who you are or what you have done. Jesus is Lord and He lives forever to intercede for all believers. Previous sacrifices by human priests had no power to save. Jesus paid the price for your perfection. He paid it one time, for all time.

And by [God’s will] we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

Hebrews 10:10 ESV

You are Permanently Perfect

Through Jesus, you are perfect for all time. That means your sanctification is guaranteed to be complete. It is inevitable. God considers you as sanctified and perfected, even though His work in you must continue throughout this life.

We have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

Hebrews 10:14 ESV

Therefore, you are both perfect and being perfected. You have been sanctified and are being sanctified. You are perfect in a way that you can’t reverse the process and become imperfect. At the same time, you are continuing to be sanctified.

Living By Faith Keeps You Perfect

God has the power to make you perfect, but you must do your part, too. You must activate the faith to see yourself through God’s eyes. You must agree with God and consider your sinful self (your “old creation”) as dead and your spiritual self (your “new creation”) as alive.

For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Romans 6:10-11 ESV

Further along in Hebrews 10, verse 38 at first makes it seem like believers can fall away from their faith.

but my righteous one shall live by faith,
and if he shrinks back,
my soul has no pleasure in him.”

Hebrews 10:38 ESV

“Shrinks back” and “has no pleasure” might not sound too severe, but the following verse clarifies that shrinking back can lead to destruction. Thankfully, it continues to clarify that those who have a genuine faith will preserve their souls. It is vitally important to not miss the word “if.” Because of verse 39, we can conclude that “if” indicates only a hypothetical possibility, not a definite occurrence.

But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.

Hebrews 10:39 ESV

When you read Hebrews 10 you must recognize who you are. Do you identify yourself as a non-believer, who lacks the faith to believe in the gospel message? If so, you live as an enemy of God, with your sin blocking you from reaching perfection.

Or, do you identify yourself as a believer, incapable of shrinking back? If so, you preserve your soul through your believing faith. Keep your faith in Jesus. You are truly saved, safe, and secure when you entrust your life to Him. It’s not possible to be a believer and not live by faith. Living by faith is the very essence of being a Christian. Where there is faith and the Spirit of God, there is freedom and there is no longer condemnation for sin. Your sin can’t prevent you from keeping your eternal life.

Read more about eternal security.
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Reading time: 4 minutes

What would it take for you to feel secure? Would money do it? Health? Fame? What about possessing the certainty of God’s promises to you? That is my most valuable possession. How about you?

What assurances of eternal life do you have? Believers possess full assurance of salvation, gain complete joy because of salvation, and can abide in Christ.

The way to be saved is by believing that Jesus is the Christ. If you have persistent doubts about your salvation, you’re probably not saved. But if you’ve made this declaration and you know in your heart it is true, by faith, then you have been born of God.

Whether you are a believer or not will greatly influence how you interpret and understand the Bible. To the degree you doubt whether you are saved, you increase the chance that you’ll interpret the Bible incorrectly. That’s because only believers have the Holy Spirit and the only way to understand the Bible is through the Spirit. You won’t be able to put your confidence in the words of truth if you can’t even know for sure that you are saved.

Believing Confirms You Can Feel Secure

1 John says clearly that once you cross over to being a believer, you can know with confidence that you have eternal life. Several verses in chapter 5 drive home that you can feel secure.

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.

I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.

We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.

1 John 5:1, 13, 14, 18 ESV

When you are confident in Jesus, you believe He will listen to you when you pray. If you are born of God then:

1. You won’t keep on sinning.
2. God will protect you (and keep you from continuing to sin).
3. The evil one can’t snatch you away from God’s hand (John 10:28-29).

Joy Results When You Feel Secure

John, even earlier in Chapter 1, provides a formula for having complete joy: to have fellowship with the Father and the Son. Jesus is the life made manifest, the eternal life. To know Jesus is to secure life for all eternity (John 17:3).

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

1 John 1:1-4 ESV

Abiding Keeps You Secure

1 John 3:6 makes it clear that those who keep on sinning (with a hardness of heart and without repenting) never had salvation. If you have any doubts also consider verses 5:1 and 5:13.

No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.

1 John 3:6 ESV

The entrance into the Christian life is all or nothing. Only believers will be with Christ forever. This will keep some people out of the kingdom of God. However, it also means that once you are in, you will remain in, because God is the one who has the power to keep you secure.

If there is a way to lose salvation, the only way would be not believing and trusting in Jesus Christ. God promises you eternal life as long as you keep in your heart the gospel message which you heard when you became a Christian (see 1 John 2:24-25). This should be the very thing we as believers are eager to do.

Read more about eternal security.
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