Can a Christian lose salvation?

But, besides this, the unbelief of the Jews brings out another thing; that is, the perfect security of the sheep — a very important question, because He was going to die. His death is in view: what will the sheep do then? Would the death of Christ in any way imperil the sheep? The very reverse. The Lord declares this in a most distinct manner. He says, "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand." (Verses 27, 28) First of all, the life is everlasting. But then it is not merely that the thing itself is eternal, but they shall never perish; for it might be pretended, that though the life lasts for ever, this is conditional on something in its recipients. Nay, "they shall never perish" — the sheep themselves. Thus, not merely the life, but those who have it by grace in Christ, shall never perish. To conclude and crown all, as far as their security was concerned, the question is answered as to any hostile power. What about some one external to them? Nay; there again, as there was no internal source of weakness that could jeopard the life, so there should be no external power to cause anxiety. If there was any power that might do so righteously, surely it must be God's own; but, contrariwise, they were in the Father's hand, no less than in the Son's hand — none could pluck them out. Thus the Lord fenced them round even by His death, as well as by that eternal life which was in Him, the superiority of which over death was proved by His authority to take it again in resurrection. This was the life more abundantly which they derived from Him. Why should any one wonder at its power? He was, for the sheep, against all adversaries; and so was the Father. Yea, "I and the Father are one." (Verses 29, 30)

And, again later on, see the full security and extent of blessing they have in virtue of the Shepherd's title and power. "I give unto them eternal life." It is a life that is eternal, not that which is to be taken away again. Whoever has heard Christ's voice has eternal life. It must be eternal life that Christ gives; for if one of His sheep could perish, Christ must perish. And it must be a holy life, too, that He gives, for the same reason. What Christ gives must be holy, for He is holy. "They shall never perish." A sheep is a perishing thing; but His sheep do not perish. We may fall asleep, or we may be changed; but the same life that we have now in Him and with Him we shall have then at His coming. There are two points in which this blessed security consists. First, Christ is in them, as their life; secondly, "None shall pluck them out of my hand." They are in His hand. The Father has given us to Christ, and He is to do the work for us. The Father's love is concerned, and He is able to do it all. You must get some one more powerful than God, if you can be plucked out of His hand. The Father sent the Son and the Son has sent the Spirit, so that all three are concerned in our salvation.

At the Feast of Dedication, commemorating the cleansing of the Temple and rededication by Judas Maccabaeus after the desecration by Antiochus, (See Daniel 8:9-14) the Lord continued His blessed teaching, ending it once more with a great revelation of Himself. He makes a most blessed addition to His previous instructions concerning Himself and His sheep. "I give unto them eternal life and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand." Here we have the comforting assurance of the absolute security of every sheep of Christ. Eternal life is a present and personal possession, not something which comes after death. It is therefore an abiding possession and cannot be lost. Then He Who is the Life and the Light, the Way and the Truth, assures us that His sheep shall never perish. Some say that He said "no one can pluck them out of His hand" but we can do it ourselves by living in sin, etc. This is fully answered by the correct rendering of His words, "they shall never perish." It means literally: "they shall in no wise ever perish." This is absolute; it covers everything.

That is it, friend; when God saves, God keeps, and not one of those who are washed in the precious blood of Jesus will ever perish. We once said to a Christian, who believed in the falling-away doctrine (this doctrine is very prevalent in England), “Do you believe that a man can be a Christian for sixty-eight years, and fall away, and die when he is seventy, and be compelled to go to hell for two years’ sins?”

People say, “I see you believe in that old Baptist doctrine of ‘once in grace, always in grace.’” Or another says, “I understand you hold that old Presbyterian idea of ‘the final perseverance of the saints.’” I do not know why this should be called either Baptist or Presbyterian, only to the extent that Baptists and Presbyterians agree with the Book, and the Word of God clearly shows that once God takes us up in grace nothing can separate us from the love of Christ so that evidently the expression, “once in grace, always in grace,” is a perfectly correct one. But, on the other hand, I am not so enthusiastic about the other expression, “the perseverance of the saints.” I believe in it; I believe that all saints - all really belonging to God - will persevere to the end, for the Book tells me, “He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved” (Matthew 24:13), and if a man starts out and makes a profession but gives it all up, he will never be saved, because he was never born again to begin with, he was never truly changed by grace divine. On the other hand, the reason he endures to the end is not because of any particular perseverance of his own. What I believe in, and what the Word of God clearly teaches, is the perseverance of the Holy Spirit. When He begins a work, He never gives up until it is completed. That is our confidence.

There are some other texts, nearly akin to the standard passage in Corinthians, which we may now take up. I believe we shall find, if we have got hold of what has now been before us, that we have already the key to the understanding of these also. In Col. 1:22-23, for example: "To present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in His sight: if ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel" or again, in Heb. 3:6: "Whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end;" and verse 14: "For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end." Addressing a number of professed Christians, these "ifs" had their right and necessary place. Men were giving up faith in Christ, as this epistle to the Hebrews conclusively shows. The warning was perfectly in place. Nor could men be saved while giving up this faith; drawing back from Christ would be drawing back unto perdition. Yet this same apostle could in the selfsame epistle put those who had believed unto salvation in a different class altogether from those who could so apostatize: "We are not of them who draw back unto perdition" — not simply, "who have drawn back," which there could be no need to say, but "who draw back;" we are not the sort of people who do that — "but of them that believe to the saving of the soul;" that is the class to which we belong, and it is a different one to the other.

Most clearly, then, the apostle did not mean that such believers, positively saved ones, could draw back unto perdition. It was needful, on the other hand, to warn professors about it for two reasons at least. First, because the giving up of Christ put outside the possibility of salvation altogether, for none else could save. Secondly, because it was and is important, that men should not rest in a faith they had, or thought they had, in times past, which was not true for the present moment. Faith that I had faith once is not faith in Christ, and may be a dream of my own. Just so, the vain argument that "I was converted once, and therefore" — which is vain because it is a mere belief in what my heart may have deceived me. If I am trusting my conversion or my faith, the result may prove I had neither. If I trust Christ, He cannot deceive, and so I am safe. "Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him." (Ps. 2:12.)

A. Always in Philippians salvation is looked at as with glory at the end. It was not the mere salvation of Paul's body in chapter 1:19. We always have that truth in that epistle founded on redemption; the cross has laid hold of me for the glory, but I have not yet laid hold of it, and what I ought to apprehend is that for which I have been apprehended. And God's way was when He laid hold of Paul to put him through the wilderness, and make him work out his salvation to the end. When I say God is keeping His people, I ask too, Why has He got to keep them? Because they want keeping, or they would fall. You have the two things in John 10: "They shall never perish" inwardly, nor be "plucked out of my hand." But this is not to weaken the plain positive passages which are given as warning, and meant to be as warning. You get the "ifs" in Hebrews and in Colossians 1: "If ye continue," and so on. Now suppose I believe that God is keeping His saints, and still I say to you, "If you continue to the end you will be saved." I get a Methodist who thinks and will say the same, but he thinks such an one might be lost after all, while I am perfectly certain that he will never perish, that is if he really has life at all.

It is certain that no soul that God has quickened unto life eternal can ever abdicate its title of salvation by a deliberate repudiation of the cross. The power which begets the children is pledged in Christ to their eternal preservation. No sheep of Christ will ever perish, because He is competent to save His flock. Nor is it possible that one alive to God should ever heartily despise His grace. Yet is it well that warning should be added to instruction. For it is thus that our feet keep practically the sure ways of life. No Christian is exempt from the danger of a large departure from the truth of God, although he is kept from drawing back unto perdition by His faithfulness who has otherwise appointed him (1 Thess. 5:9). If faith and patience be not kept in exercise by a continual minding of the things of Christ, it will soon be forgotten by the negligent believer that the friendship of the world is enmity with God. God's Holy Spirit will be grieved in those whom He has sealed, if He be not hearkened to with diligence as the alone Conductor of the children through the present evil world.

This passage, therefore, like the one of similar drift already noticed (Heb. 6:4-8), is a word of stern yet necessary warning to the saint. Like that, too, it is a prophetic portraiture of the conduct and eventual destiny of those whose knowledge of the truth is not in power, but in word alone. Departure from the faith, and, therefore, enmity against the cross of Christ (Phil. 3:18-19), may reach a fatal and irremediable pitch, while outwardly His name is not denied. Nay, the most bitter execration of God's saving truth has proceeded from the very men who claimed to be the keepers of the faith of God's elect. In our own eventful times two opposite phases of the same apostasy are manifest. We see men, on the one hand, giving up sound doctrine to return to the lying delusions of a former age, and seeking to impose men's vain traditions, with ostentatious pretensions of authority, upon the flock of God. On the other hand, there is a far-prevailing spirit of natural presumption which derides the fundamental doctrine of salvation, while the sanction of the name of Christ is claimed without misgiving for the ways and works of an unregenerate world. Christ's precious blood is desecrated indeed, when all that men discover in the Gospel of God's grace is a freer and safer license for the human mind and will. Christian profession, if it be not coupled with the love of Jesus, is but a swelling word which prefaces the sure destruction of those who dream of concord between Christ and Belial, and strive to make the Spirit's things a nourishment and comfort to the flesh (2 Peter 2; Jude passim).

"He that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved." Some say, Oh! that is said to the Jew. True, it is so: but it is as true of you and of me as of the Jew. Do you understand scripture so little as not to see that while there is a present salvation there is also a salvation which is future; see, for instance, 1 Thess. 5:8-9. Who are the people who get this? Are they the ones who prove their reality by continuance or the reverse? The passage is as true of me as of the Jew, and I say, If I remain to the end I shall be saved. Does this disturb me? Not at all. I know God has wrought in me, and I know that He will continue to do so. I am quite at rest about it. If, however, a professed believer turns away, and does not endure, but lives in sin, can we say that it is sure to be well with him? Never. The proof of reality is continuance. The proof that it is going to be well with you at the end is that it is well with you to-day. There is every comfort in scripture for the man who is connected with Christ to-day. I believe we do not half enough press the living present reality of God's blessing, but rather try and rest on the past.

Well, you say, I have not been brought up exactly in that impervious darkness. But really, I must say, not much better. The sum of the preaching I have heard is this: salvation by Christ is a sand-bank; to-day it is high above water mark, and all is safe; to-morrow the waves of temptation and dark billows of sin may have swept it away, and I, poor soul, may sink in the unfathomable depths of perdition. And I have been taught to regard as the most dangerous error the doctrine of the believer as a stone built on Christ the immovable rock. Now for the strengthening of my faith in Christ, and the value of His precious blood, I will put out some of my old difficulties, and, I may say, the present difficulties of thousands I love and believe to be Christians. This is one. I have known many most zealous members of the professing church, who appeared, so far as one could see, to be sincere Christians; yet at last they have been found to be practising sins, have fallen away, given up all profession, and have never, to their dying day, been restored. Does not this look like the Roman Catholic unsteady plank, or with some Protestants the shifting sand-bank? How is this?