TULIP-P-Perseverance of the Saints

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, "'But we did not yield in subjection to them "'for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel "'would remain with you.'".

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Spring Weather and the Tulip Illustration

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. I can't believe the sun is out today. Well, it might be raining on the day this is played, but it's out and it's beautiful, and today is Tuesday, and that means Steve Cooley's in the house.

It's springtime for Steve and Mike.

You see, there's so much sun outside. It's so spring-like today. It's a good day to plant some tulips.

You know, when I left my house today, I could actually see whatever the mountain is, alleged mountain over there, what is that? What you said?

Yeah, I could see it from my house. Wow, I wonder if they have any snow left. The reason why I talked about it's a good day for tulips is we're on the same topic that we've been on the last 14 weeks, and that is?

Botany, botany. Botany. I was thinking about Star Trek, USS Botany Bay. I almost said botulism. Well, you did get food sickness when you were going to California. Yeah, based on my recent experience. What we've been doing is we've been talking about God and His sovereignty.

Most people would believe that God is sovereign over the weather. They believe that He is sovereign over their skin color, parents, what country they're born into, what century they're born into. But people have a little rougher time, or they have a rougher time when they realize God is sovereign over who goes to heaven, and then by implication, and by some scriptural teaching, who doesn't.

And so we're going over what people commonly call the five points of Calvinism, just a theological moniker for the Bible, just a code word for what does the Bible teach about salvation? And so, Steve, we're up to P on tulip, the acronym.

Give us a brief synopsis, a brief overview, a succinct, concise description of the tuli. Oh, of the tuli.

See, I was already with the p. Total depravity means that we are sinful. We inherited our sinful nature from Adam, that we're completely unable on our own to save ourselves, to choose God, and that God must choose or must regenerate us.

I'll say that before we can believe. Unconditional election is the U, and that is that God, for no other purpose other than his own glory, chooses to save some. And they are called the elect. Other words are used like predestination, that kind of thing.

Okay, moving on. The L is limited atonement, or definite redemption, or purposeful atonement, however you want to look at that, that Christ went to the cross and actually redeemed a people for the Father, and that he actually propitiated sins, that he actually paid a ransom to redeem us.

Not that he made it possible, but that some people had all of their sins forever forgiven. And the I is irresistible grace, meaning that once God sets his affections on you and determines to draw you in time, he will do so without fail.

We talked about John 3, how the Spirit is sovereign in salvation. Other places talk John 6, where it talks about the Father drawing. And in any event, we have the Godhead, the triune God, drawing sinners unto himself irrevocably.

For those of you in New England that didn't quite understand Steve's accent, that would be the Father drawing those that he has given the Son affectionately to himself. People sometimes call these five points the doctrines of grace.

And Steve, I like that better than Calvinism, because Calvinism is so front-loaded with a lot of baggage. And in one sense, rightfully so, John Calvin was a sinful, finite human being, and he would not want us to follow him, so much so that he was buried in a nondescript grave without a marker, because he didn't want any adulation going to him.

And so doctrines of grace, I like better. Steve, what's your favorite book, besides the one I'm gonna show, what's your favorite book on the doctrines of grace or Calvinism?

Well, it would be by, it used to be Steele and Thomas, and now it's Steele, Thomas, and Quinn.

The Lancer. The five points of Calvinism. The subtitle of that book on PNR Publishing, Defined, Defended, and Documented. That would be a great book to look up on Amazon or go to Mr. Books. Defined, Defended, and Documented, the five points of Calvinism, Steele, Thomas, and Quinn.

And I just want to say another

Sounds like a law firm to me. Yes, it does. And I would go to that law firm. I just want to say one quick thing about Calvinism. You know, if you go online and you look at it and people talk about it's heretical, it's unbiblical, and all these other things, what they'll typically do is they go to, they'll say, well, John Calvin baptized babies.

He did this, he did that, he did the other thing. Cerevitas. Right, but what they won't do is look at these doctrines of grace, these five points, scripturally, and then try to debunk them.

Whosoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Well, I think you have to keep on reading. John 1, 12 leads to verse 13, and when you read that, it's not of the man who, it's not up to human will or human choice, but up to God.

I don't know why, well, I do know why, Steve, because we talked about this last time, the pride of man, the lack of humility, wanting to be God themselves, essentially, and by all practical purposes. I remember 10 years ago, I gave a little review sheet, probably 15 pages, maybe 10 pages that I did on the sovereignty of God, objections, doctrine, theology, verses, history, et cetera, and basically, I was given the paper back and having this person quote John 3, 16 to me, and Romans 10.

Well, I believe both of those passages, but that does not negate the sovereign hand of God. Either God's in charge of salvation, our humans are, and God's not gonna stoop down to cooperation or stoop down to letting sinful people save themselves.

We're here for the boasting and praise of God alone, and that's why they're called the doctrines of grace. You don't merit them, you don't earn them. He didn't even have to give them to anyone.

Well, and when somebody thinks that hundreds of years of expositional and exegetical work, in other words, really digging deeply into the Bible and the original language and everything else can just be refuted by simply saying John 3, 16, as if that ends the story, without even knowing what's in John 3, 16, without even putting it in context or even attempting to wrestle with the issue, as if one verse can negate all of the sovereignty in the Bible, and it does not.

And actually, those verses help the cause of the doctrine of grace, and so when people just spout those verses out, sadly, they show their biblical ignorance, their theological ignorance, and their lack of any kind of cohesive, systematic theology that's woven throughout the Bible from Genesis to Revelation that shows, from the beginning to the end, God is the Savior.

I think he's called that, don't you? Yes. I don't think he's like Mary, the co-savior, the co-redemptrix. Steve is turning away from the microphone. I just laugh heartily into the microphone, hearty-har-har.

The book that I want to recommend on the doctrines of grace is by James Montgomery Boyce and Philip Ryken, two pastors, both from 10th Presbyterian, now no longer at 10th Presbyterian, because James Boyce died, and then Ryken took his spot, and Ryken is on his way to Wheaton later this summer to be the president.

Can I just say what my absolute favorite book on the five points of Calvinism is? My, you know what my favorite book is? The Bible. Yeah, I was going to say Romans.

I love the Bible. But a book about the Bible on this topic. I love Boyce and Ryken, the doctrines of grace, subtitled Rediscovering the Evangelical Gospel. I want to say it's Crossway, but I could be wrong.

It is Crossway. Did I tell you that MacArthur announced he's got a book coming out on Calvinism next year? I didn't know that. Yeah, he does. I think I'll probably read that. And you know what the title of it is?

He's taken a little different, I mean, it's, believe me, when I say a different view, he's just taken a different kind of facet. Yeah, it's going to be called Slave. Oh. And he's, because he's using all the terminology, redemption, and all these kind of things, and they said, oh, that doesn't test well, and we don't like that title.

And he said, well, there are other publishers. And they wrote back and said, that's a great idea, great title, we love it.

See, John's got that kind of clout. I've got a book that I wrote last year, finished it, and I'm shopping around to publishers, and I can't find one. I'm about 0 for 8 so far, with about three to go. And they basically say that it won't sell well, and hardly any books now are published on the person of Jesus, in evangelicalism.

It's okay to have all kinds of social justice. You know, you've got these publishers who are mainstream and mainline that are publishing all the emergent stuff, and we're digressing. But we better get back to P.

And we'll do two parts on this, maybe three parts, since we're just kind of waxing away. Maybe five parts. P is called the preservation of the saints. Probably most people call it perseverance of the saints.

And some might call it eternal security, once saved, always saved. I guess the real question is, you could ask with Doug Wilson or Kurt Daniels, can a Christian lose their salvation? Better put, can God lose a Christian?

Perseverance of the Saints and Eternal Security

Well, and Jesus himself said, you know, no one can snatch him out of my hand. He, talking about the Father, I think he says nobody can take him out of the Father's hand. I mean, these, can anybody lose their salvation?

Well, it depends. Now, here would be my challenge, and just to kind of think about it this way. If you say that you have free will, you know, and you're out there, you're listening to us on NoCompromiseRadio .com, and you think, well, I do have a free will, and I did believe on my own free will.

Well, then don't you also have the free will to unbelieve, to walk away from the Lord, to somehow unsave yourself? And in that case, a true Arminian would have no security, no eternal security whatsoever.

That's a good point. And if you can save yourself, then you can lose yourself. And so at least with the Methodists and the Nazarenes and the Pentecostals and Assembly of God folks, they would be consistent there because they would have a high view of the will of man, and they would have a view of man that could lose his salvation because he, in essence, has earned that salvation.

They wouldn't say earned, they would cooperate with God. They supplied the faith. And so my question, Steve, is why do people who believe all the other, I mean, don't believe any of the other points, but they like to believe this last point?

That is, typical Baptist churches believe that you can't lose your salvation, but when it comes to depravity, election, the atonement, and the call, they don't go for those. They're not down with those, but they are these one-pointers.

How can you have this one without the other?

Well, I mean, it almost gets down to this. Once you make the decision, they would argue, then it's once saved, always saved. It's as if once you make that assent, once you say, yes, I believe, then God is somehow obligated to keep you.

I mean, it's kind of like the son who returns home after rebelling, rebelling, rebelling, and says, okay, yeah, I'll go with your rules. Well, it doesn't matter what he does after that. The father stuck with him because he let him back into the house.

And I don't think that would fly. And again, I'm speaking in human terms, but it's foolishness. We could say, if you believe.

That you can lose your salvation, as Kurt Daniels talks about, you could believe in not eternal security, but how about this one, Steve? Eternal insecurity. Or he has another one, temporary security.

Temporary, yep. For as long as you maintain your faith, you are saved.

Let's have a definition here in Westminster Confession of perseverance of the saints. They whom God hath accepted in his beloved, effectually called and sanctified by his spirit, can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end and be eternally saved.

We believe that if God the Father chooses before time a group of people, the elect, Jesus in time, 2 ,000 years ago, died for those exact people, and he took all their sins, past, present, and future.

And the spirit then regenerates them to the day of redemption. That's Ephesians 1 .14 and Ephesians 4 .30, sealed to the day of redemption, that what man can do could never undo the work of God. That is to say that man can't unwind the clock that God has wound up, that God will eternally save someone.

But here's where the trouble comes, and Steve can elaborate on this. People say, I knew a guy, I knew a lady, she believed and then she walked away from the faith. And then they take subjective, personal experience and reinterpret the Bible and say, see, you can lose your salvation.

That's the problem. Yeah, well, and what typically happens, what do we have? We have a parable, the parable of the soils, where Jesus says that some readily receive the word and then they sprout up. In other words, he's talking as if they are plants and they sprout up and then the troubles of life come along and eventually those plants are choked out.

And what he's saying is not that they were believers, it's just that they had no roots because they were not really saved. And ultimately, when we see people make a profession of faith and then sometime later, whether it's weeks, months, or years, and they just walk away from it entirely, there's reason to question whether that person was ever saved or not.

Good, how about this, Steve?

When does eternal life start? John 3 .36, he who believes in the Son has eternal life. Already. When you believe, if it's true saving faith, if it's believing with the right object in mind and it's faith granted by God, that eternal life starts?

No. That second? Yeah. Absolutely. How about this, for God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have? Eternal life. Until you backslide.

Until you don't believe. Until you have a beer. Until you get a tattoo.

Yeah, and I mean, there are situations, I mean, you have situations where a spouse leaves another spouse. Allegedly, a believing spouse leaves one other spouse. And, you know, how do those situations happen?

Or, I mean, there are any number of examples where you just give, you go, what happened? And in the end, you can only say, well, as far as we can tell, either that person's going to repent or perhaps they were never really of us.

They went out from us because they were not of us.

Yeah, that first John 2 passage, talking about false teachers, but applicable to unbelievers. When they walk away, and it's a long-term walking away, and sometimes we don't know the date, it's not 18 months or two years, but when people roll through time, one year, two year, three year, four years, not following Christ, then we can say, based on what you're doing in life and your actions and your attitudes, you ought not to call yourself a Christian.

And so they've proven that they never were of us. What we have to do is go to passages like 1 Peter 1, that people, Christians, are kept by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

How about 2 Timothy 1 .12? I know whom I have believed and am convinced that he is able to guard that which I have entrusted to him until that day. How about the pastoral prayer of Jesus, the ultimate pastor, the ultimate shepherd in John 17?

Holy Father, keep them in thy name. Do you think that prayer's answered or do you think maybe Satan's so strong he can undo the prayer request of Jesus?

Well, I think you need to ask Mary and then she'll go and then it'll be a sealed deal.

Don't, I'm going to do a show on Mary here soon enough. I'm just waiting for the hate mail to come. You know, no one could say no to his mother.

How about no one could say no to his son who did exactly what he asked them to do. But you know, another passage, I mean, these passages are just all through scripture. We, again, like all these other doctrines we've been speaking of, it's not just one verse that we're hanging our hat on.

This is the consistent record of the New Testament. This is what Jesus said. This is what Paul said. This is what Peter said. This is what the apostles wrote and taught and believed because they were instructed by the Lord Jesus himself.

Listen to Paul in Romans 8 at the end of the chapter here. Verse 37, knowing all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Well, nor anything else in creation. I guess that might include ourselves. There is nothing we personally can do that will separate us from the love of God in Christ. Nothing, zero. I mean, you could look for loopholes in there all day long.

Well, what if I exercise my free will? It is not there.

When God starts a work, he finishes that work. Philippians chapter one, verse six. We could go to almost every book of the New Testament, especially the epistles, and find what God does you can't undo.

I love what Spurgeon said, Steve. And by the way, there are some people that love Spurgeon that don't like his doctrine. They just find other great quotes. But here's what Spurgeon said, that this doctrine is like a man on board a ship.

He may be knocked down on deck by the waves again and again, but he is never washed overboard. Christians struggle. Christians have times of doubt and sin, but God will never lose them. If they have really believed, if they have saving faith, it will endure till the end because God will have it endure.

When God starts something, then he finishes it. And that's exactly what Pastor Steve was talking about with the golden chain of redemption. There's nothing in there even about sanctification because it's all things that God does.

He starts it and he will immutably, he will, with his omnipotence, glorify Christians.

And you know what the key though is, Mike, if you want to know what your This is going to be a joke right here. Eternal preservation, no, no. This is a serious business, always serious, on nocompromiseradio .com.

You know, the key to any of these things or even Satan's accusations is knowing the date of your salvation.

Yes, if you don't know the date of your salvation, if God doesn't know the date, you're in big trouble. But if you don't know the date, it's okay. You know, amazing grace, you know, I once was saved, but now I'm lost, once saw, but now I'm blind.

Well, and I mean, we love Baptists. Some of our best friends are Baptists. Wait a minute, we're Baptists. And the whole idea that you have to know the day of your salvation, if there's not an hour and a minute that you can attach the date of your salvation, you may not be saved, or that that somehow kind of rebuts all of Satan.

I don't know when Satan has ever accused me of anything. He's never talked to me personally. But you know Well, until now. When we doubt our salvation, it's not a matter of, you know, looking in our calendar, looking back to that date and go, oh, yes, I remember walking the aisle.

I remember signing that card. I remember making that profession of faith. I remember being baptized. It's none of those things that save us. But once we are saved, once we can look back and think, it wasn't just a decision I made.

It was my life changing. It was God transforming me. It was a complete shift in my outlook. The way I thought, the way I talked, the way I believed is so much different than I am today by the grace of God.

That's salvation.

Well, Steve, if I believe that I could lose my salvation today based on what the New Testament teaches, would I have any reason to believe I couldn't lose my salvation in heaven?

No. I mean, why wouldn't you? You know, as if there's some kind of constraint on you then that there wouldn't be now. Well, there is a constraint on you in the future that if there is now, you won't be able to sin.

But the whole idea of God being sovereign, well, when does that start? You know, if God sovereignly keeps me in heaven, well, why doesn't he sovereignly keep my salvation now? The Bible again and again affirms eternal security.

Well, these things are all tied together. If you understand justification by faith alone, you will believe in eternal security, that Jesus Christ lived a life in your place and died for your sins in your place.

And we talk about that great substitution. If you believe in substitutionary atonement, you'll believe in this. I've got a question for you, Steve. If someone becomes a Christian and you think you can lose your salvation, how many sins would it take?

What would be the number before God would say, you've lost your salvation? Would that number be one sin? Is that enough to lose your salvation? Or is there a special number, the magic number seven? No.

Would it be a baker's dozen?

Would that be a gross? It would be a baker's dozen. Any prime number over 12, because 12 is the number of perfection. So any prime number over it. So 13, 17, 19, any of those sins, you know, that would...

I think seven is the number of perfection. Steve, there are seven dispensations. Yes, but there were 12 apostles. I think if you have a struggle with eternal security and preservation and assurance, I did a show on assurance, I'd have you read 1 John.

And if you're believing in him right now, that's a good sign to say that you're saved and you will believe till the very, very end. You can't say that God holds us securely and then we can jump out. You're just not going to find that at all.

True or false, listening audience, the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable. May I speak for the listening audience? Please do. That's true. Romans 11 .29. We have to believe that. We have to believe in Romans 5, where it says, much more than having been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through him.

There's not some kind of three categories here. You're either saved or you're not, but you're not in the middle, somehow formerly saved and now lost. So you have saved, lost, and formerly saved and now lost.

Formerly saved. I like to introduce the formerly saved pastor of, you know, blank shirts.

What we're doing today is we're talking about perseverance of the saints. How saints have eternal life given to them at regeneration. You can email us at info at nocompromiseradio .com and ask us a question if you'd like specifically to talk about it.

And next show for us, it'll be in about two minutes, but for you next week, we're going to do a show on some of the verses like Hebrews chapter six, that seem to somehow suggest that you might be able to lose your salvation.

But in the meantime, if you don't believe right now, you will not have eternal life and you have no hope. And so you're not to be thinking, you ought not to be thinking about eternal security. You ought to be thinking about you'll live forever someplace.

And so if you're listening today, maybe you're a Baptist, maybe you're a Catholic, maybe you're a Mormon, maybe you're a pagan. You must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and in his substitutionary death.

Jesus has died in the place of sinners just like you. He's been raised from the dead and you must believe. You must repent because you are a sinner in need of Christ Jesus. Preach it. And this is NoCompromiseRadio .com.

See you next Tuesday.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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