A preacher I heard once said that the older he gets the more he realizes how much of a sinner he is.
I can relate to that. I thought of that recently as I heard about two different people who were struggling with the concept of eternal security. It’s common to hear of others who just can’t seem to feel secure in the salvation that is theirs in Christ.
One of these individuals has a family history of anxiety and depression, so that one made sense to me. One can wrestle with any fear to the point of serious unrest when there is a genetic component to the fears.
But the other person, as far as I know, has no connection to anxiety, and even if there was a connection, this individual has recently left the evangelical church for another “religion”. I couldn’t help but wonder…was this person still struggling with the concept of eternal security? Did the struggle to know for sure cause the person to dabble into another faith? After all, in some ways, it is easier to know if you are right with God when you have clear rules to follow and ceremonies to perform that make you feel sure of your rightness with God.
But that isn’t how we get to God!
Essentially, what is at the heart of the true Gospel is the knowledge that you couldn’t ever be secure in your own strength. It is the knowledge that you are so lost without God, that it is only His faithfulness in keeping His covenant with you that gives you any hope at all.
When we have been steeped in an evangelical culture that sometimes preaches morality more than grace, it’s far too easy to find people utterly missing the message of truth that the only thing that makes us secure in God is the work of Christ.
The only way we know that work of Christ is an initial and ever-increasing knowledge of our own inability to do anything to deserve His unconditional love.
The reality is that to really see God for who He is, we have to see ourselves honestly. Dane Ortlund expresses this well in his book Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners. He writes, it is “God’s very desire that we be joyously happy, filled to overflowing with the uproarious cheer of heaven itself…. For He is sending us down into honesty and sanity. He wants us to see our sickness so we can run to the doctor. He wants us to get healed” (p.p. 37-38).
To be sane, or if I may extend Ortlund’s thoughts, to be secure, we must go down into the honest evaluation of our own selves as sick sinners who will never be snatched from the hand of the Father because it is totally dependent on Him, not me (John 10:28-29).
Any veering away from true faith in Christ, even if it is to another “good” religion, is a false gospel. The one who struggles deep down with believing that their salvation is sure may not really be ready to receive that full truth: that they are a sinner in need of Christ and that His grace truly is enough for them.
Of course, we all are people in process, and though we still doubt His love at times, if we wrestle to the point of straying from grace and trade it for another form of works-based religion of any kind or form, then we’ve missed what God wants us to see.
We are sinners, even worse than we are willing to see most of the time; but when we are willing to humbly accept our need for Him and receive the Gift of love offered in His Son, then He will give us a security that carries us through any fears all the way through to eternal Life.
There is nothing, or should I say, no One, more secure than that.
Taking it Further:
In what ways do you agree that the struggle with eternal security demonstrates a lack of understanding of the gospel? In what ways is it just honest doubt about the amazing unconditional love of God?
Reference: Ortlund, Dane. Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners. Crossway, 2021.