2 Peter 2:20 through 21, it says the following, "If you have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and are again entangled in it and overcome, they are worst off at the end than they were at the beginning. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it, and then turned their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. " Again Peter is warning believers who have escaped the corruption by knowing Jesus Christ and again choose to go back to the life of habitual, intentional and willful disobedience to Christ.
This is not talking about a believer who fell back into the sin because if you remember what we escaped from, we escape from living, practicing, willfully, and intentionally sinning and we're going back to that lifestyle. It's not the act, it's the attitude that that believer has, and then he says, "You're gonna be worse than you were in the beginning. " Hebrews 10:26-29, "If we deliberately keep sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sin is left but only a fearful expectation of judgment, and raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.
Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, and who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? " My friend, this is dealing with the believer who has had the knowledge of truth, who has experienced God.
Who continually, deliberately, willfully and knowingly practices living in a sinful lifestyle. They place themselves in a very dangerous ground. Now when the Christian struggles with sin, when a Christian is battling with sin, repents and keeps falling back.
This is not the same as justifying, condoning and living in sin. When David fell into sin, the Bible says that he said, "Lord restore to me the joy of my salvation," Psalm 51:12. He didn't say Lord restore to me salvation.
Because as a Christian who struggles with sin he may lose the joy of salvation, lose his reward, shorten his life and even open door to the demonic. But we don't lose our salvation by struggling with sin because all of us are at constant war with the flesh and sin. But it's different when we begin to call what is wrong, right.
When we begin to call sin, okay. When we begin to justify and live in that. I remember a young man who was delivered from homosexuality but he still struggled with homosexuality.
We prayed with him, we walked with him, we discipled him. We didn't judge him because the desire of his heart, there was this natural desire toward righteousness and holiness. He wasn't straight.
He didn't have desires for the opposite sex but he battled with the desires for the same sex. He served on our team for two years, genuinely pursuing God, loving God. But then there came a point where he actually went against the stance of the Scripture and he said, "God loves me the way he did and He accepts me the way I am," and he says, "I am born this way.
" So what happened to him? He went from struggling to practicing sin. He left the church soon after.
He still believes in God, he still believes in Christ. He actually still believes everything is fine with him. He lives in deception now and he is a backslider, and people like that are the people that I'm referring to.
Point number three. Christians can't lose their salvation but they can choose to forfeit their salvation by walking away from the Lord. Now I'm going to quote Charles Stanley, who is one of the preachers and there's many preachers who teach that once you're saved you're always saved.
But I'm gonna quote this phrase and this quote from him. "God does not require a constant attitude of faith in order to be saved only an act of faith in Christ. Believers who lose or abandon their faith will retain their salvation.
For God remains faithful even if a Believer for all practical purposes becomes an unbeliever, his salvation is not in jeopardy. You can give it back only if the giver accepts the return. In the case of salvation, God has no has a strict no return policy.
" Now I respect Charles Stanley but I disagree with this statement because you can return something, the receiver doesn't have to receive it back. The person who gave it doesn't have to receive it back, for you to lose it. And so the logic doesn't even work here and there's so many Scriptures that conflict with that.
So the idea that you can just pray one prayer when you were 16 and that's it, you just place your trust and then kind of do whatever you want. Serve, worship the devil, go back into your old life and that one instance simply means that you're now forever saved. Like that's not what salvation is.
Salvation is new life. Salvation is being in the family. Salvation is being a new creation.
God is a cosmic lover, He's not a cosmic stalker. He doesn't force you to be with Him. Let's look at some verses in the Bible that I believe contradict this statement and the statement that a Christian cannot walk away from their faith or from God.
Hebrews 6:4 through 6. "It is impossible for those who have been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Spirit or the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance. Because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting Him to public disgrace.
" It's actually saying it's impossible for an apostate to come back. Now it's not dealing with the backslider, it deals with an apostate and who is this apostate? Now a little background.
The Epistle of Hebrews was written to Jewish believers who have come to believe in Jesus as their Messiah. Many were under the pressure and persecution to return back to the synagogue and to the Judaism. Some actually have turned back from Christ to the law and to the legalistic fulfillment of Moses's requirements, and this passage speaks directly to them.
I mean a few things I want to highlight is that once they were enlightened by the Gospel. They tasted the heavenly gift of eternal life. They tasted the good word of God, the New Testament or New Covenant truths.
They tasted the powers of the age to come. So the future Kingdom age when Christ returns. They've been partakers of the Holy Spirit.
They've been baptist in the Holy Ghost but now they have fallen away. They've tripped up to return to Judaism by denying Jesus Christ and they have fallen away by apostasy. And once that, once you lap into that apostasy, you actually it's impossible to bring you back to repentance because people are so deceived and so stuck, that it's not that God wouldn't accept them, it's just they are disconnected and they are deceived.
In 1 Timothy 4:1, it says, "Now the Spirit expressly says that in the latter times people will depart from the faith. " So again we see that people will depart from faith. Now if you never had faith, you couldn't depart from it.
So they would depart from faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, and that's what's happening today. How many people have you seen who were worship leaders, genuine worship leaders, people that we still sing their songs. Who are either children of pastors, very known pastors, who deconstructed Christian faith, who walked away from faith, who renounced Christ.
Do you think that they're still saved because they prayed a prayer at 16? They don't want to do nothing with Christ. They think Jesus is narrow-minded, Christians are weirdos.
They departed from faith. It's possible, otherwise we wouldn't see these verses in the Scripture, that you prayed one time, you'll never be able to depart from your faith. It's like a trap, you know you can't get out.
It seems like people can because the Bible confirms it as well.
