Beware of dangerous errors in understanding perseverance | Clip from Perseverance of the Saints

Hi, welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm John Snider and with me again is Chuck Baggett, and we're looking at the book, Salvation in Full Color. Twenty sermons by the Great Awakening preachers on the doctrine of salvation.

It really is quite a wonderful book. It does take some earnestness to make it all the way through. It's 20 chapters and they're not light and fluffy chapters, but it really does prove worth your time.

This week we're looking at the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, and this is a topic that we feel is very important, so we want to stop and talk about that a little bit more in a minute before we work through the sermon.

But Chuck, why don't you introduce us to the preacher?

Yeah, the preacher is William Tennant, and this is not William I, but William II. So it's William Tennant's son, brother to Gilbert, John, Charles, and maybe others, but at least those who are also all preachers.

Their dad is the guy who had the law college, and so they all studied under him. William Tennant also did, became earnest, I guess a Christian, and wanted to be in the ministry as a young man. So studied under his father, then went to study under his brother Gilbert.

And as he was studying, preparing for examination for ordination, he suddenly fell sick and they thought he had died. I mean, they were ready to bury him. And a friend who was a doctor, there's no evidence of life except for a tremor under like his left arm, and so he pleads with them to wait.

And brother Gilbert's like, he's dead, he's stiff as a stake, you know, you tell me he's alive. And so the doctor urges them to wait, they wait for like four more days, come back, he's still out, they've tried whatever they can try.

The doctor pleads with them for another hour, hour comes and goes, pleads for half an hour, pleads for a quarter of an hour, and the quarter of an hour is almost up, and all of a sudden he stirred, and they got him something to drink, and he was alive.

Kind of remarkable. He forgot how to read and write and all past memories, but regained those things fairly quickly. And soon after that was able to preach for his brother John, who had taken ill and eventually passed away.

He lived to the age of 72, and I believe pastored for like 44 years, so it's just kind of an odd situation there at the early stage of his life. But the folks who knew of him said that he hated sloth and was always in action.

Kind of a good sermon for him about walking and being persevering. Here's a man who was always busy, and evidently busy about the.

Good things. The sermon is on the perseverance of the saint, and it is the kind of a doctrine, I think, that is...of all the doctrines in the book, other than the doctrine of regeneration, I think this is one that we could say that evangelicals today have...it's kind of like we have a near-miss, which I think, and we were discussing this earlier, I think is almost more dangerous than some of the doctrines in this book that people reject.

So maybe the doctrine of election. And they say, well, I don't agree with that. I didn't grow up believing that, or that's Calvinism, or whatever. And so they reject that, and there are consequences when there are errors in our biblical understanding.

Just like there are wonderful impacts, every truth has a beneficial impact on the believer, and every error, to some degree, has a negative impact. But there are some errors that are, you know, heresies, that you can't be a Christian and believe this.

You know, you can't deny the deity of Christ. But there are some errors that aren't really heresies, but they are errors that are so close to truth that you don't know you have an error. And therefore, I find them to be, in our church setting today, some of the most dangerous.

And we talked about this, you know, there's...think of the Christian life as a race. We have a race, and the starting line, we get wrong, and the finish line, we're getting wrong. So the doctrine of regeneration is often, almost correctly understood.

People say, well, you know, you have to be born again. Well, right. But when they go to define that, it's so far from what Scripture says. They think they have the truth, but they don't. So it's almost as if they're at a starting line of a different race.

Like, hey, guys, you think you're at the starting line. It's not. And then the finish line, we say, well, once saved, always saved. And there is a lot of truth in that statement. The security of the believer, there's a lot of truth in that statement.

And those are precious truths for the Christian. But if we're not careful, we can get really close to the right answer. But if we don't have the biblical picture of the perseverance of the saint, what if we don't end at the right finish line?

Yeah. If you think of the Christian life.

As a marathon, but you line up to run a hundred yard dash, you may outpace the Kenyans and the Ethiopians in those hundred yards, but you stop at the wrong place and you don't run the race that's been set before you.

You don't finish the course. And so you're in danger of being.

Disqualified. Thank you for watching the clip. We hope that it was helpful for you. If you want to hear the full audio of that podcast, you can find it on any of your favorite podcast apps.