Trust Him to keep you

Back in the day (really not too very long ago) I was involved in a lot of "Can a Christian lose their salvation?" discussions. The number of Christians who fear, at least a little (and sometimes a lot), about whether or not they'll remain "saved" is probably more than you can imagine.

While I haven't participated heavily in discussions like that in quite a while, and while it would take too long to share all of what was discussed in those discussions, I'll highlight one of the main questions I used to ask people who worried or feared about the "loss" of salvation: "What exactly is it that saves a person in the first place?"

Paul put it quite simply:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast (Eph 2:8-9)

How much of that is your work? How much of it is "of yourselves?" None of it! It's "the gift of God, not by works..."

So then, once we're saved, does it suddenly become "of ourselves" to keep ourselves saved? For the many people who are so worried about Christians losing their salvation, it would seem that there's more than just an ounce of that type of thinking going around in their heads.

To lead up to where I'm going with this, let me relate that type of thinking to receiving some sort of gift that doesn't come with the batteries. Sure, the gift is free, but it's up to you to continuously provide the batteries to make sure the gift remains in working order.

But that's not the type of gift God has given us! God has not simply given us the gift of salvation, and then left us alone to try to maintain it our own. He has included Himself - His very Life - in the package!

It was His life that saved us, and it's His life that keeps us!

Unfortunately a very deficient "gospel" has been spread, and keeps on being spread, in which grace and salvation are depicted merely as a matter of our sins being forgiven. It's great that our sins have been forgiven, but if you are forgiven and yet remain in the same condition, what good is that? What's missing from the gospel message that's commonly taught is the issue of LIFE! We've not only been forgiven of all sin, but our sin has been taken away and we died to our old life in Adam, and we were raised up and made alive together with Christ Himself! Not only have we been forgiven, but our condition has changed! In Adam we were dead to God, but in Christ we are now fully alive to God.

Paul's words that follow the words quoted above say that we are God's workmanship. It's all of Him. Getting saved is of Him and not of us. Remaining saved is also of Him and not of us. If you couldn't get yourself saved, what can you do to keep yourself saved??? Trust Him to keep you.

"God... even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ..." (Eph 2:4-5). If He made you alive even when you were dead in your trespasses, do you think for a moment that He's going to not keep you alive when you sin now? While you can do nothing to keep yourself, He can and does continuously supply you with His very life, because as a branch is continuously sustained, not in and of itself but by the life of the vine, you are also continuously sustained by the very life of the One who calls Himself the Vine, Jesus.

God doesn't need your good works - He produces them

The words of Paul that I shared in a post earlier this week from Titus 3:4-7 included these words: "He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done..."

That's something to cling on to and never forget! Our good works - our righteous deeds - play absolutely no part in getting us saved, (and if they play no part in getting us saved, they play no part in keeping us saved either - it's all by God's mercy and grace).

I suppose some could take this to mean that good works, or righteous deeds, are therefore irrelevant in the life of a Christian. Perhaps Paul had that thought in mind as he followed up those words about the wonderful gift of salvation in verses 4-7 with the words of verse 8:

This is a faithful saying, and these things I want you to affirm constantly, that those who have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable to men.

In similar fashion, Paul also talks about good works in Ephesians 2:10, again, immediately after talking about how "by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast" (Eph 2:8-9).

He says:

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

I said all of the above to establish that "good works" are indeed a part of the life of the Christian. But unfortunately the error that legalists have made is to make "good works" out to be the root of the Christian life. That is, legalists say that good works are necessary to maintain salvation. In their eyes, the work of Christ is superseded by our good works that we do 'for' Him. But look at the two passages I just shared (and there are plenty more passages along this line) and notice two things. First, notice the purpose of good works. Second, notice the source of good works.

In the passage from Titus, Paul says that those who have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works. Why? Because these things are good and profitable to people. You're not going to score any points with God, especially in regards to maintaining your right standing before Him, through any effort of your own! No amount of good works will help to maintain your acceptance by Him. It's all by His grace. Your good works are simply an outflow of His working in you, as the passage from Ephesians implies. You are God's workmanship (you are not your own workmanship). He Himself - His very life in you - is the very source of your good deeds. The good works that He works in and through you are good and profitable to people!

"Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing," wrote the writer of Hebrews. Why? Was is so legalists could turn Sunday mornings and evenings, and Wednesday evenings, and whenever the church doors are open, into "service times" at a "building" that Christians should attend to maintain their good spiritual standing before God and man? It sure has been made out to be that way today, hasn't it? But rather, the real reason for the "good habit" of meeting together was simply to encourage one another and to spur one another on toward love and good deeds (Hebrews 10:24-25). It's pretty simply, really.

(By the way, have you ever looked at the surrounding context of Hebrews 10:24-25? Did the writer simply suddenly decide to add those two sentences out of the blue? What exactly was the "hope we profess" (vs. 23), that the writer had been writing about? I think it's worth spending some time with in order to understand how he led up to those words, and I encourage you to look at it on your own).

Good works are a fruit of our life in Christ. They are most certainly not the root by which our righteousness is established or maintained! Christ is the Vine. We are the branches of the vine. The LIFE is in the Vine, and the fruit grows not as the branches struggle and strive to produce fruit for the Vine, but as the LIFE of the vine flows into the branches as the branches abide - rest - in the Vine. The branches have no life in and of themselves to produce anything anyway! "Abide in Me," Jesus says, "and you will bear fruit."

In Christ, we have become one spirit with God (1 Cor 6:17). We have become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). It is God who works in us to will and to act according to His good purpose (Phil 2:13). All my evangelical life I've heard things like, "God's depending upon you to do His will." "God's counting on you to complete His work." Hold on a second! He's not depending upon us! He doesn't need us! He loves us and desires us, but AS IF He needed anything! We are jars of clay, fully dependent upon Him!

So close but yet so far...

I really could keep on posting in the series called "The Vast Sea of Grace" forever because that's really what I love to write about all the time anyway! I think a summary of it all would be that we need to be rooted, grounded and established in God's love and grace before we can begin to expect any true godly fruit to come forth out of our lives.

A branch on the vine doesn't simply figure out what kind of plant it is and then look at the vine for instructions on how to bear fruit and then simply go about producing fruit. The branch "rests" (remains, abides) in the vine and draws all life and sustenance from the vine, and eventually (not immediately nor forcibly nor due to compulsion) the branch bears the fruit that the vine itself produces. It's a natural process, and if the branch tries to "help" the vine (such as when Abraham and Sarah tried to help God fulfill His promise that they would bear a son), the fruit that is produced is not God's natural fruit, no matter how lovely it might appear.

The rich young ruler was perhaps thinking that his "fruit" (keeping the commandments) was more than adequate to justify himself in front of a holy God. Jesus, by pointing out just how far short this man fell, caused him sadness as he realized he wasn't nearly as close to the kingdom of heaven as he thought. He went away sad, because just a few moments before he had considered himself close to the kingdom, but he now realized he was a lifetime away, because he hadn't realized that in order to come to God, he must give his entire life away.

IF ONLY he'd received the revelation that the Apostle Paul would eventually receive. (And perhaps one day he did receive this revelation). You not only have to give your life away, you have to die. But this death, of course, is not a death in which you physically give your body or your possessions away. It's a spiritual death, in which you give up any and all notions that anything you do - any of your law keeping or giving away of your possessions - will bring you even one step closer to God. You must die and be born again.

This can never happen through any of our own efforts. Out of this death - in which God places us on the cross with Jesus - comes a resurrection with Christ and the born-again life of a New Creation. The problem with the rich young ruler wasn't really that he had failed to sell his possessions and give to the poor. Let's just say he'd heard Jesus' words and said, "OH, YEAH! THAT'S WHAT I'M MISSING!" and then went and sold all he had and gave to the poor. Let's just say he then came back to Jesus, thinking that now he could truly justify himself in front of the Lord. Could he? Would he now be justified? Would Jesus say, "Well done my good and faithful servant, now you can enter into the joy of your Lord?"

NO! He still hadn't died to his self-efforts. If Jesus' point about the true depths of loving your neighbor as you love yourself hadn't driven this man to grace, perhaps Jesus could have then given the man an even bigger scenario about loving the Lord your God with ALL your heart, ALL your soul, ALL your mind and ALL your strength. No matter what, I think Jesus would keep giving the man more and more and more of the Law until he would finally get the point that he could never do it.

I guess you could say that this man was "so close but yet so far away" from the Kingdom of God. Far away, because to him it was still about what he could and couldn't accomplish. But oh so close, because perhaps his next step would be to realize that all of his self-effort was DUNG and all of his self-effort was RUBBISH (see Phil 3:4-9), and if he would only chuck it away and come into the Kingdom by grace alone, then he would truly give his life away and then be given new spiritual birth - a new life as a new creation, joined to the Vine, joined to God and one with Him, and now finally able to truly begin the process of bearing godly fruit.


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Entire "Vast Sea of Grace" Series:
Prelude: Just follow the Word, right?
The Vast Sea of Grace: Part 1 -- Part 2 -- Part 3 -- Part 4
Summaries: >So close but yet so far< -- Far Cry -- Be a Man