What Is Reformed Theology? with R. C. Sproul, Perseverance of the Saints, 12

The Transition from Irresistible Grace to the Preservation of the Saints

We come now to our last session in this series on the nature of Reformed Theology, and we've been looking at the acrostic tulip over the past few days, and we've made adjustments to the terms that are incorporated in it.

In our last session we looked at the concept of irresistible grace, and I mentioned that I preferred the term effectual grace. And before I leave that altogether, I just want to add a little concluding unscientific postscript to it by reading a brief entry from the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is a historic doctrinal standard of Reformed Theology dating back to 17th century England, where we have this reference to the doctrine of effectual calling.

It reads as follows,. All those whom God has predestined unto life, and those only, he is pleased in his appointed and accepted time, effectually to call by his word and spirit, out of that state of sin and death in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ, enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God, taking away their heart of stone and giving unto them a heart of flesh, renewing their wills and by his almighty power, determining them to that which is good, and effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ, yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by his grace.

Now I make this reference once again to the efficacy of the grace of regeneration, not to continue holdover from our last session, but as a bridge, a transition to the final point of the acrostic TULIP, which brings us to the P in TULIP, and now I'm sure you'll be delighted to know I'm not going to change this letter.

Why Perseverance Is Better Described as Preservation

And the letter stands for the perseverance of the saints. However, even though I'm not changing the letter, I'm going to make a change in the word. I also think that that little catchphrase, perseverance of the saints, is dangerously misleading because again it suggests that the persevering is something that we do perhaps in and of ourselves.

Now I believe of course that saints do persevere in faith, and that those who have been effectually called by God and have been reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit endure to the end so that they do persevere.

But they persevere not simply because they are so diligent in their making use of the mercies of God, but the only reason we can give why any of us continues on in the faith even until the last day is not because we have persevered so much as it is because we have been preserved.

And so I prefer the term the preservation, the preservation of the saints because this process by which we are kept in a state of grace is something that is accomplished by God. We read this statement from the Confession about God's effectively calling us to faith, that regeneration we call the divine initiative, and it refers to the first step in our transformation just as we enter into this world through the process of biological birth.

Rebirth does not refer to the whole of the new Christian life, but rebirth refers to the beginning of it, the very first step, the step that is accomplished by God's initiative when He quickens our souls from spiritual death to spiritual life.

And so we call this divine initiative the beginning point, and it's a beginning that is performed, again as I say, by God. Now what does Paul write to the Philippians? He says that he who has begun a good work in you will perfect it to the end.

Therein is the promise of God that what God starts in our souls He intends to finish. And so the old axiom in Reformed theology about the perseverance of the saints is this. If you have it, that is if you have genuine faith and are in a state of saving grace, if you have it you will never lose it, and if you lose it you never had it.

False Professors, Apostasy, and the Warning Passages

Now we know that there are many, many people who make professions of faith who then turn away and repudiate or recant their profession of faith. As John writes in the New Testament, there were those who left the company of the disciples, and John says of them, those who went out from us were never really with us.

Now they were with them in terms of outward appearances before they departed, before they left the cadre of Jesus' disciples. They had made an outward profession of faith, and Jesus makes it clear that that's possible to do even when you don't possess what it is you're professing.

Remember Jesus says, this people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. And He even warns at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that at the last day of judgment many will come to Him saying, Lord, Lord, didn't we do this in your name?

Didn't we do that in your name? And He will send them away saying, Depart from me, you workers of iniquity. I never knew you. Not that I knew you for a season, and then you went sour and betrayed me. No, no.

You never were part of my invisible body of the invisible church. The same kind of comments are made by Christ with respect to Judas who is called the son of perdition from the beginning. And in his high priestly prayer, Jesus prays that those whom the Father has given Him will never be lost, and that no one will ever snatch them out of His hand.

And He thanks the Father that all that the Father gave to Him came to Him, and not one of them had been lost. And we could enumerate for the next several minutes a host of similar passages in the New Testament where that assurance is stated by the apostles that the people who are dwelling in Christ have a future, a future inheritance that has been established from the foundation of the world, and that someday we will hear the Father say, Come, my beloved, inherit the kingdom which has been prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

But again the point I want to stress is that this enduring in the faith is not something that rests upon our strength. Even after we're regenerated, we still lapse into sin, and not only into sin but into serious sin.

And we say that it is possible for a Christian to be engaged in a very serious fall. We talk about backsliding, we talk about moral lapses, and so on. I can't think of any sin other than blasphemy against the Holy Spirit that a truly converted Christian is not capable of committing.

David, Peter, and Serious Falls from Grace

When we look, for example, at the model of David in the Old Testament where David was surely a man after God's own heart. He was certainly a regenerate man. He had the Spirit of God in him. He had a profound, passionate love for the things of God, and yet this man not only committed adultery, but he also was involved in a conspiracy to have his lover's husband killed in war, which was a conspiracy really to murder.

Now that's serious, serious business, and we see the serious level of repentance to which David was brought as a result of the words of the prophet Nathan to him. But the point is that David fell, and he fell seriously as the Apostle warns us against having a puffed up view of our own spiritual strength by which he says, let him who thinketh he stands take heed lest he fall.

And we fall, and we fall away from grace, not that we fall out entirely, but we do fall away into very serious activities, none more serious than that of the Apostle Peter who publicly with cursing, even after being forewarned, rejected Jesus Christ, swearing that he never knew him, a public betrayal of Christ.

He committed treason against his Lord. Do you remember that before that occasion when he was being warned of this eventuality, you know, Peter said this would never happen. He would never behave in such a manner.

And do you remember the warning of Jesus, Simon, Simon? Satan would have you and sift you like, but I have prayed for you so that when you turn in, strengthen the brothers. Now he fell, but he returned.

He was restored, and so his fall was for a season. And that's why we say that true Christians can have radical and serious falls, but never total and final falls from grace. Even in the church when people profess faith and become involved in very serious and egregious sins, sins so serious that they are involved in church discipline.

And even with the process of church discipline, it goes through several stages. The final stage of which is what? Excommunication. And I think that it's possible, I think we know that it is possible for a person who is truly regenerate, a true Christian, to be so caught up in sin that that person is called to the church, is involved in discipline, they're suspended from the sacraments, they still don't repent, all the way to the end of the list which is excommunication where they are shut off from the fellowship of the body of Christ and are to be treated as unbelievers, to be declared as unbelievers by the church.

But even that act of excommunication is done with the hope that the person is a true believer who is now engaged in a very persistent state of sin, and that this final discipline of being cut off from fellowship in the body of Christ will be that which the Spirit of God uses to bring them to repentance.

And we see that example found in the New Testament in the Corinthian situation with the incestuous man. You recall how the church was doing nothing about disciplining this man who was living a scandalous life until the apostle had to rebuke them and admonish them and command them to excommunicate him.

Well, what happened when he was excommunicated? He repented, and he applies for readmission to the church, and now the church won't let him back. And so Paul had to go back again and say, Now look, the whole purpose of that excommunication was to provoke him to repentance.

Now that he's repented, let him back, even as Christ welcomed Peter back into the fold after his treacherous act of treason. So again, the sin of the Christian can be radical and serious, but never total and final.

Judging Professing Christians with Charity

So how do we judge people who have made a profession of faith in our presence perhaps, and then we've seen them later repudiated? Well, the first thing you do is you make a judgment of charity, because you don't know the real state of their souls.

That's the one disadvantage we have. I can't read anybody's heart. You can't read my heart, and I can't read your heart. We're called to be discerning and wise and look at each other's actions and evaluate and discern accordingly.

But even by the best of your actions, I don't know what your soul is, and you can't know what is in my soul. And so we are called to be exceptionally forbearing with one another, and to have that charity that covers a multitude of sins among ourselves in the fellowship of the church.

But God does read the heart, and when God says that a certain person never was in a true state of faith, we can rest assured that that person never was in a true state of faith. Now, but what about if we happen to encounter somebody who is in the midst of a serious protracted fall where they have repudiated the faith publicly?

Can we then know that they're not Christians? No, because we don't know tomorrow. We don't know if they're still like David was before Nathan came to him. If anybody would have been by that bonfire when Peter says, I never knew the man, they certainly wouldn't have made the judgment that Peter was a Christian because they were catching him while he was in the midst of this serious protracted fall.

But we can still hope with people who have left us that it's temporary and that they'll be back. And we just have to acknowledge that one of two things can be the case. One, either their initial profession was not authentic and not genuine.

It was an empty profession of faith and that they never were believers. Or that their faith profession was genuine and they'll be back. But we leave that to God at this point. But what the New Testament teaches us is that it is the Holy Spirit, again, who alone raises us from the dead, and He raises us unto eternal life.

The whole purpose of God's election is to bring His people safely to heaven so that what He starts He promises to finish. And He not only just initiates the Christian life, but the Holy Spirit as the sanctifier, the convictor, and the helper is there to help in our preservation.

The Holy Spirit as Earnest and Seal

Now two important terms are told with respect to the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian's life that are related to this idea of the preservation. The one is that we are sealed by the Holy Spirit, and the second is we are given the earnest of the Spirit.

Let's take the second one first. The term earnest of the Spirit is drawn from the commercial language of Biblical days, and the only thing I can think of that's a parallel in our own day would be what we call earnest money when somebody is going to purchase a home, that when you make the initial contract you give a little bit of money as pin money or as a down payment, which is a promise that you intend to get your loan and close the deal and pay the rest of the balance due.

And to show that you're in earnest, you give this down payment. Now I know that there are people who have paid earnest money who failed to follow through. Maybe they weren't earnest in the first place, or maybe circumstances came along that made it impossible for them to go the rest of the way.

But beloved, when God the Holy Spirit is given to you by the Father as an earnest, when the Spirit Himself who is indwelling you is the Father's earnest for your future, do you really doubt that the Father is going to fail to bring the final payment?

We possess not a handful of dollars, but the indwelling Holy Spirit of God Himself as God's promise to finish the job. And not only does He give us the earnest of the Spirit, but He seals us in the Holy Ghost.

When God writes our names in the Lamb's Book of Life, He doesn't do it with an eraser handy, that He does it for eternity, and that He seals us in the Beloved for all time. Now finally, one of the reasons why we have confidence in our future is not only because of the ministry of the Holy Ghost that I've just mentioned quickly in passing, but most importantly because of the ongoing work of Jesus.

Christ's Intercession and the Confidence of Final Salvation

Somehow we have a tendency, or sometimes I think we have the tendency to think that when Jesus came and lived His life of perfect obedience and fulfilled all the demands of the law that we have failed to fulfill, and then by His passive obedience paid the price for our sins with His perfect atonement, that He's done everything that we ever need Him to do for us.

But we forget that when He ascended into heaven and was seated at the right hand of God and enthroned as the King of kings and the Lord of lords, He was not just going for His royal realm, but He also entered into heaven as our great High Priest.

And the chief function of our High Priest, as He tells us, is to intercede for us daily for the Father. Jesus prays for me, for my ultimate salvation. Not only did He pray for His disciples in John 17 that they would never be snatched out of God's hand, but He prays for us that we would be preserved.

Now again, look at Judas and Peter. Both betrayed Christ. One was a believer, the other one wasn't. Both of their actions were repugnant in the extreme, total betrayal of Christ. Both were predicted by Christ, and when He told Judas what He would do, He ended those comments by saying to Judas, What you have to do, do quickly.

And He dismissed him. But when He made the same type of prediction about the behavior of Peter, as we've already mentioned, Satan would have you in sifty like wheat and so on. Do you remember what he said?

But Simon, I have prayed for you so that when you turn, not if you turn, so that when you turn, strengthen the brothers. My confidence in my preservation is not in my ability to persevere, but my confidence rests in the power of Christ to sustain me with His grace and by the power of His intercession for us that He is going to bring us safely through.