[Music] thank you 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 all together 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 hold over 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 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 till 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 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 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 kadra 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
involved visible body of the invisible Church and 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 in not
only into sin but in the serious sin and we say that that it is possible for a Christian to be engaged in a very serious fall and 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 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 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 you remember the warning of Jesus Simon Simon Satan would have you and sift you like wheat but I have prayed for you so that when you turn 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 sin so serious that they are
involved in church discipline and even with the process of church discipline that 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 the 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 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 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 now two important terms are told with respect to the work of the spirit in the Christian's life that are related to this idea of 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's going to purchase a home that when you make the initial contract you give a little bit of money as a 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 the 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 was 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 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 the throne is 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 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 and sift you like wheat and so on do you remember what
he said but Simon I have prayed for you so that when you turned 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
