Perseverance of the saints

So I'm not teaching perseverance like the five-point Calvinist teaches it, where he seemingly says you can never have assurance until you die.

That's not what the New Testament teaches by perseverance of the saints.

That's a warped, distorted view.

So I listened to R.C. Sproul maybe three or four months before he died.

All right.

The fifth main point of doctrine, the perseverance of the saints.

Article one, the regenerate, not entirely free from sin.

Those people whom God, according to His purpose, calls into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, and regenerates by the Holy Spirit.

To this God alone, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be honor and glory forever.

Amen.

Rejection of the errors concerning the teaching of the perseverance of the saints.

Having set forth the Orthodox teaching, the Synod rejects the errors of those, one, who teach that the perseverance of true believers is not an effect of election or a gift of God produced by Christ's death, but a condition of the new covenant which people, before what they call their preemptory election and justification, must fulfill by their free will." For Holy Scripture testifies that perseverance follows from election and is granted to the chosen by virtue of Christ's death, resurrection, and intersection.

And then we had a second debate the next day.

And that debate was on Perseverance of the Saints.

Or a version of once saved, always saved.

The idea of once you're saved, you're always saved.

The debate I had did not have that viewpoint.

The debate I was having was on what we call pots.

K-O-T-S, Perseverance of the Saints.

The idea that once you're saved, you'll automatically persevere now because of the work of God, Holy Spirit of the Heart.

And I quoted from Calvin's Institute of the Christian Religion when he said just what you were saying, that God before the foundation of the earth, beginning of time, had already predetermined who would be saved and who would be damned.

And and went through the TULIP acronym, Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saint.

And without breaking each one of them down, I just focused on the middle one.

limited atonement and I said it's blasphemy to say that our Lord Jesus Christ did not die for every human being on planet earth to say that your destiny as a human being as predetermined before you're even conceived in the womb is utter blasphemy it totally misrepresents who our God is and that for me was you know I was trying to be a little bit funny by saying look In my Bible, I read about big trees and vines and date palms and myrtle and hyssop and all these great plants, but there are no tulips.

"And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works so that no one can boast." All right, I told you we're gonna talk about TULIPS.

TULIP stands for Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints.

Contrary to popular opinion, Calvin did not come up with this.

If you could meet Calvin in heaven and you said, "Hey, tell me all about TULIP," he would be like, "What, the flower?" This is not something he came up with.

Irresistible grace means that once God has-- Once the Holy Spirit is working on your life, you can't just back out.

It's irresistible.

And finally, and this is the purpose of our sermon today, perseverance of the saints.

In other words, if you really are a saint, and not the Catholic meaning of the word like somebody special, but saint in the New Testament simply means somebody who belongs to God.

It's your third time.

I think we talked first about eschatology kind of in general, and then we did your Once Saved, Always Saved documentary, which was really, really cool.

And now here today, we're going to talk about the Deformation, your new book.

Well, it's one of your new books you've been writing extensively.

And that's just, it was a blessing to me.

And yeah, can I ask you first, like, was there anything in particular that started changing your mind about Reformed theology? Like, what was the first thing that kind of...

Well, it was for me a waking up of like... uh basically repentance from alcoholism uh my testimony is basically that i felt like god was saying you cannot continue to drink and go to heaven and that was hard for me because i had a genuine uh 20 years before that or so uh salvation experience where like you know three years on fire for the lord you just can't explain it any other way except for this guy was transformed regenerated or whatever the words that you want to use had the holy spirit And I was passionate about Once Saved, Always Saved, so much so I basically equated it with the gospel.

But so this conviction that I had to quit drinking was not computing.

Not all of them, but but a lot of them.

And, you know, it's just like, well, and then Dinesh went so far as to say he didn't even believe the P of TULIP, Perseverance of the Saints, which is like, well, that's definitely I believe that once you're saved, you're saved forever.

But, you know, it's like you're not going to solve anything on the X platform regarding Calvinism.

Right.

Yeah,

you definitely can.

You know, there was a time when you could be in the Democratic Party and be a believer, but that was a long time ago.

I don't know if you know that Billy Graham, you just had his voice, but he was a registered Democrat.

We will to follow Christ because God gave us a new will.

And then finally, the perseverance of the saints.

The P.

Is it possible to fall away from the faith? If you are saved, if you are truly saved, if you are truly regenerate and born again, can you abandon that salvation and no longer be saved? The Bible says that those whom God has elected, redeemed, called, regenerated, justified, will ultimately be preserved in their salvation.