God kept me saved because I was faithful.

God kept me saved because I was faithful.

God kept me faithful because I was saved.

Before you accept Jesus as your savior, you have
free will: you can accept Him or not.
After you accept, after Jesus saves you,
you have no free will. You become the slave
of Jesus and do His bidding.

If you say you are saved, and don't do His
bidding, you weren't
very saved, were you?

Justification:
for the Christian: past
the forgiving Jesus does when you are first saved

Sanctifiation:
for the Christian: now
the daily cleansing Jesus does for you day to day

Glorification:
for the Christian: future
the future rapture or resurrection Jesus will do for you

 

It makes very little sense, either logically or biblically to say that we have free will before we are saved, and that we lose it once we are saved. The ability to lose ones salvation is the logical conslusion that must be drawn from a free will salvation theology

The Bible is fairly clear that there is none that seeketh after God.

No one comes to the Father except the Spirit draws him.

We are held responsible for the choice we make regarding Christ, but it is God who enables those who he knows as his to have the spiritual insight required that they can choose eternal life.

To imply that man can on his own choose to accept Christ, is making it a salvation by works. Whether the works are accepting Christ, or Baptism, or Penance, or Soul winning, what have you, it is still believing in the work of man saving the soul.

I firmly believe that it is only by the grace of God that I am able to recognize my own depravity and inability to follow Christ. Is it compulsion? no, but I have no other choice. God has called me to the adoption of sons, and has elected me to be conformed to the image of His Son! We used to sing that song when I was a kid. "He doesn't compel us to go 'gainst our will, but he just makes us willing to go."

The free will is a matter of perspective, and responsibility. Salvation is a choice from man's viewpoint, and God will hold us responsible for what we do with his Son. Do I totally understand how God could elect people to himself, and at the same time hold those who reject him responsible for their choice? No, but I can clearly see it taught in the Word of God, so what choice do I have. When my experience and logic don't totally align with my theology, I have to follow the Word, every time.

 

No one who is in heaven will not want to be there and no one who is in hell will have wanted to be in heaven. Free will is illusory. We don't have the free will to do 99.9% of what we want, yet we still claim we have free will. Libertine free will is not logically possible, it only feels possible.

I find that it is ironic that when we get saved we are try to give up our free will by saying things like, "God change my heart," or "God make me willing" or "God give me the ability." We pray those things because we are not able to perform them -- because we have no free will to do anything but sin!

And even afterwards we continually are striving to put our will in line with that of God's. Hence we are trying to die every day to our will in order to be in His. So why do Christians then still insist on free will when the object of the Christian life is to have none?!

 

we have seen examples of man having his way against God's will. say Adam. he had a perfectly able condition to go for or against God. yet God respected his volition. in this case God's will was disappointed.

 

the thought seems to lead that God had planned man to sin, when in fact it's only that God allowed man to.

does God want man to commit sin? no.

does he allow? yes.

did God made man to do sin?

it's either God made man to sin in order to be sovereign or that God does not want man to sin yet they do.

 

as to the topic, here is one way to view eternal security.

God kept me saved because He always sees His own righteousness in me. while that righteousness is still in me, God will consider me acceptable in His sight.

when did i so became perfectly righteous? actually, i did not! i was only declared to be, by God the Father, upon faith in His Son Jesus Christ. seeing Christ's rightouesness in me, His blood covering my unrighteousness, God is happy to share His salvation with me.

and even with my unrighteousness or sins beyond the time of my justification, Christ's blood does not get covered or bumped-out with it. rather, it only shows more how effective Christ's sacrifice for me is! thus, i am still in the state of perfect righteousness, as far as God the Father sees me through Christ.

Christ's righteousness imputed in me is in me to stay, regardless of my unfaithfulness, though it may be difficult to accept for others who would want to have something done to have God save them or keep them saved.

it's so simple, it keeps away pride, and it shows God's love, sovereignty, righteousness and justice at their effectivity and ingenuity.

 

God did not create man in order for man to sin so He can be sovereign, He had no need for man, the angels, or any of His creation to be sovereign. He IS sovereign, with or without us.

He is an infinite God, and had already looked beyond man's inability to be holy unto Him, and had planned all that He was to do way before the foundation of this cosmos, executed His plan in this finite plane we call time, and had moved past on to eternity future. He is where we are not yet.

 

If a man is saved by his free will, he can be unsaved by his free will. That is only consistent. Besides, the salvation of the elect is complete in Christ, not them. Salvation is not some tangeable good that goes into affect when we "accept" it. Jesus said, "It is finished." Salvation was as complete at Calvary as it ever will be. No man is saved eternally when he believes, repents, etc. All the elect were legally everthing they need to be when Christ died. Our being born again and coming to the enjoyment and knowledge of it saves us practically and experimentally, but it was all finished, completely finished, at the cross. We are justified by faith, that is, proven to be righteous by faith just like Abraham. The JUST shall live by faith. Show me a man of faith, and I will show you a justified man.

 

AMEN and AMEN!! Thank You Lord Jesus!!

 

Primitive Baptist: "If a man is saved by his
free will, he can be unsaved by his free will."

A man is saved by Jesus; he can only
be unsaved by Jesus. Let me see, if a
person is born again because of Jesus
rising from the grave; does he get
un-born again by Jesus getting backin the grave?

Look at all the salvation pictures of the
scripture, only "saved" ever gets talked
about in the same sentence with "unsaved".
None of these are ever undone:

bought with a price
redeemed
born-again
made a Son of God
made an heir to the Throne
joined to the body of Christ
joined to the Bride of Christ

My challenge still stands:
post the plan of unsalvation.
Thank you.

 

If anyone is kept saved by their faithfulness, then it is not God keeping them saved but themselves.
Salvation, or contining to be saved is not based on man, but God. God's the one in charge of my salvation, not me.

 

if you want a possible reason for God decreeing the fall of Adam, which clearly he did, or he would cease to be God, you could look at the fact that we would know nothing of the grace and mercy of God without a need of it. That being said, we do not have to know the reasons or motivations of God, besides the fact that we could not comprehend most of them being finite beings.

God fortunately had more than just the fall decreed, but also the remedy for our inherited sin.

His perfect will is being carried out, and we are allowed to be used as instruments of God's will, what a priviledge!

 

God knew Adam would fall but he did not make him fall. God gave man a free will. otherwise we would be nothing more than robots. because God knew that man would fall a plan for redemption was begun from the beginning. that is why we see types of Christ and salvation from the beginning of scripture.

 

Wow, awsome topic,

DD - Thanks for the post, you mentioned something that had never crossed my thought process before. To say that Christ is capable of being trusted to save me is truth, but to say that I am the one that has to keep me saved absolutely scares me to death. It is like saying that God created the world but it is up to us to make sure that it does not collapse back into nothingness.

On the subject of Free Will (which we all have), Free Will is not an action of man seperate from God. We are all 100% depraved sinners, dead to the righteousness of God. The Word is the truth that we all need and gives avenue for the Holy Spirit to do His work in our hearts. It is the Holy Spirit that allows us to each understand what the scripture has said to us and brings us to the point to make a choice. The Spirit never makes the choice for us, it brings us to the point to choose for ourselves.

To say that we cannot choose is to make us a robot. For those of us who are married, what is the sweetest part of the relationship? The fact that our spouse CHOOSE to love us and marry us and stay with us in spite of all our weirdness and goofy habits and stupid ideas. It is the same with God, the relationship for Him is so sweet not because of who we are or what we have done, but because after the working of the Holy Spirit in our life, we made a choice to choose God and His offer of salvation.

Does that mean that we lose our free will after salvation? Absolutely not (read "God Forbid" for those who are KJVO) we still have the free will to choose to sin or to follow after the righteousness of God, now God has the priviledge of correcting our errant behavior just as a father has the right to correct the errant behavior of his child. After salvation, God does things for us to help us to choose to do right and to encourage us to do right, that is one of the purposes of blessings as well as the purpose of correction.

 

Amen, Brother Ed - Preach it!

 

If God knew Adam would fall, but didn't decree it, you are abandoning his sovereignty. He either is God or he isn't.

Jshurley,
I am very much in agreement with how you explain it. I even said it in an earlier post much the same way. God does not compel us against our will, the Spirit brings us to the point of being willing to obey.

It comes down to viewpoint. As a theological truth, my salvation is completely a work of God, including the work of enlightening my understanding to be able to accept Christ, but from man's perspective it is still a point in time decision, I still have to "walk the aisle" so to speak (although the deed is done most of the time by that point!, but thats another topic)

Interesting points about the work following salvation. Even progressive Sanctification is a work of God. We cannot do anything to be worthy of our salvation, even after we are saved. God still has to work in our lives through the Spirit, circustances, and other christians to make us into the image of His Son. We overwhelmingly choose sin, because we still struggle with the sin nature, in Ephesians where Paul explains the process of putting off, renewing, and putting on, he clearly gives us a stake in the process, but affirms the transformation is God's doing.

Interesting that many of the verses used to support Election, are addressing Sanctification. We are called to become more like Jesus Christ. Not just to be "Saved yet so as by fire"

Praise the Lord for what he continues to do in the heart of this chief of sinners