Are Christians Denying Their Salvation? | Theocast Clips

You want him to live his life from it, in it, enjoying it, in the freedom of it, not live his life chasing after it to earn it somehow.

I think a lot of times we in the church are more like the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son than we want to admit.

Verse 31 of Luke 15, what does the father say to the older son? He says, son, you are always with me and all that is mine is yours.

We forget that because we live as though we're chasing after something. We forget that we have been united to Christ and everything that is his is ours and it's been given.

All of salvation is a gift. Jesus says that he gives us eternal life. He knows his sheep.

They know him. They hear his voice. They follow him. He says, I give them eternal life.

By grace you have been saved through faith. This is not of you.

This is not man's doing. It's the gift of God. We struggle with that to live in that gift, knowing that everything that we could ever need is already ours in the name of the

Lord Jesus. We're not chasing after something. We're living in something and living in light of something.

I can't help but think of Philippians 3 when you say this. When he says, Philippians 3, 9, being found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

What's interesting is Paul then talks about his life going forward.

What does it mean, straining towards the goal? He's talking about verse 12 that I may have already obtained, this perfection.

I'm not there yet, but let me just word it this way. We walk day by day in the position of our righteousness, or we could say it this way, positional righteousness.

When he says, we have, it means it's ours. We have a righteousness that has been given to us by Jesus by faith.

Then Paul says, walk by faith. Now you know what he means, faith in that righteousness.

What makes you acceptable before God? It's not that you are sinless, it's that you are righteous.

God demands perfection before him, righteousness. When he says walk by faith, you're walking every day in that positional righteousness.

Just to live every day trying to validate oneself, you are in essence denying your identity.

You're denying the gift that was given to you, and you're saying it's not sufficient. I need to add to it.

I agree. What we end up doing, I'm at least reflecting on my own heart and mind. I think one of the struggles that I still have,

John, is that I am so prone, and I know I'm not alone. When I read many passages in the

Bible, in particular where God is giving commands, and in particular where he's clear about the judgment and the punishment that we deserve for breaking said commands,

I am still so prone to try to turn the law into a covenant of works that needs to be kept for righteousness.

I'm haunted by the fact that I haven't done well enough. What are we doing in those moments?

We are all in ways, consciously and subconsciously, collapsing the law in the gospel, and we're forgetting that everything that God demands in his law, he gives in his gospel through the work of God the

Son who took on flesh, whose name is Jesus. What that ends up doing, to your point, it affects the way that I live, and it affects the way that I think about my heavenly

Father. It causes me to question his love for me sometimes because I am so disappointed in me.

I trust he must be too. We were talking about this analogy, and every analogy, every illustration falls apart at some point, so don't nail this to the wall, but just hear us say this, and we might talk about it for a second.

It's like if you as a loving parent were to give your child a very valuable, very expensive gift that will change the rest of your child's life.

Upon receiving this gift of such tremendous value and such tremendous impact for the rest of his life, your young child goes to his piggy bank and scrapes together a few quarters and brings them to you, and then spends the rest of his life trying to earn that gift you gave him.

There are two huge things that he doesn't understand. One, he doesn't understand that he could never come close to earning or paying for this gift because he cannot understand its cost or its value.

Secondly, the other thing he doesn't understand is that you as a loving parent don't want him to pay for it anyway. You want him to live his life from it, in it, enjoying it, in the freedom of it, not live his life chasing after it to earn it somehow.