Once Saved Always Saved??

 

Some say that eternal security  means that  "Once Saved Always Saved" or OSAS for short  is true for that is what  eternal security is. I contend and hope to demonstrate that on the contrary  OSAS is a counterfeit based on a doctrinal plank rather than a relationship with a Person.  The difference between a doctrinal plank and a relationship, any doctrinal plank, mark you, I contend to be absolutely crucial. It determines whether one is being led by the Holy Spirit or not.  As for the issue at hand, look at Hebrews 6:4-8. It warns that those who have been enlightened (can any but the born again be enlightened?), if they fall away cannot be renewed to repentance, thus there is a dire warning that if even the Born Again wander too far away from the Person who is Christ, known through His Holy Spirit  they will be lost.



As for the tree bearing  no fruit which is cut out and burned Jesus said ABIDE IN ME. Who was he saying that to?  Not to us? OF course he was saying it to his disciples, ALL of us.  He said it to us. THIS IS THE CONTEXT.  However  this abiding is not hard for his yoke is easy his burden is light and his commandments are not  burdensome. Trying to abide in him by forced works of legalism is to fall away from him, for Paul rebuked the Galatians, the oh, so devout and serious Galatians as having forsaken Christ for the Law.  Thus I hope to make it clear that denying Once Saved Always Saved is not to advocate legalism, rather it is to. highlight the deadly nature of legalism 

Staying with Christ (abiding in him) is not the same thing as believing a doctrine. It is a relationship, and the depth and reality of it  shows by our fruit, so if we know and love the lord we will show good fruit. After all  it says in I John, "how can you love God who you have not seen when you do not love your brother who you do see"  and  "he who says he loves God but loves not his brother is a liar"

 And if our relationship does not matter (that is what you are saying when you say fruit does not matter and that is what you are saying when you assert OSAS because you reduce faith to mere assent to a doctrine), why are we constantly warned to quench not the Spirit? Why does scripture say TO CHRISTIANS ( read Hebrews  a letter addressed to Jewish Christians who were in danger of falling away back to the Law) "TODAY IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE HARDEN NOT YOUR HEART"?  And why did Paul call the Galatians FOOLS because they had forsaken  Christ for the Law? If Once Saved Always Saved is true and fruit have no bearing on our relationship with God, their legalism simply did not matter, so again I ask why did Paul the Apostle rebuke them.

The need for fruit does not require forced works to earn anything, but they do show that we have continued to receive the Free gifts that the Spirit bestows to those who abide in , or in modern terms stayed with,   Him

I recently heard a christian, the late Dave Hunt refute OSAS . To him i would say

If Hebrews 6:4ff does not mean a believer can fall away to be damned what does the burning of verse 8 mean? after all such a person has tasted of the heavenly gift has been enlightened and been a partaker of the Spirit. So they MUST have been born again. But then what is the burning if they fall away to such a degree that repentance is impossible ? Purgatory? if he thinks that staying a christian, if Once Save Always Saved is false, is a work he could boast about (whereby he rejects any denial of OSAS) , why should his becoming a christian, of his own free choice not be a work to boast of either? if he chose because he could then perhaps he should boast of it i could not choose. i still cant- except the lord persuade me to change my mind on any matter, one step at a time, and i repent. Nothing to boast of here.

My will is free for i am responsible, but as i sinner my will is busily choosing evil because i am evil. The solution is that my Wonderful Counsellor speak to me one on one and persuade me to change my mind.

This is living experiential one on one personal relationship; and everything in the Christian life comes down to this. It is in fact the sine qua non

If I refuse this, if I refuse to have it out with the Lord the Spirit, my Counsellor and Healer and therefore harden my heart to his voice them i will eventually fall away to be lost, and this because there is no purgatory so the burning of Hebrews 6:8 speaks of hell and nothing else.

This is a warning not a threat. The solution is to cry out to the Lord in prayer and to hear from him direct, by His Spirit

OSAS is false OSAS is dangerous, because it offers a false security, that of a doctrinal plank and not a personal relationship. go to Christ the living person - as opposed to the doctrinal plank - and stay with Him, chiefly in prayer. Did MR Hunt not know the difference between these two?

I submit that the difference between faith and presumption is relationship with Christ. Without it my assurance that I am saved, if I have any, and many do not) is presumption.

Stay with Christ. Stay with him today as long as it is today, and by doing so you are resting in the true eternal security, which is a direct personal relationship with Christ Himself by His Spirit

"Climate Change" is junk science 1

There is an enormous bulk of rational scientific refutations of the theory that global warming is caused by man, and that CO2 is the control knob for the climate

In fact there is so much information out there that the warmists, who refuse to even look at it, can only show their intrinsic dishonesty.

They would tax you back to the stone age, have you die of cold in the winters  because they boast that energy prices will and should go sky high. and they think that reducing CO2 emissions  to zero would have any more effect than to reduce  the temperature by .001 of a degree

But then i hold the greens to be agrarian fantasists who never cared to understand that life in agrarian economies was usually nasty brutish and short. and in politics any fantasist is a dangerous fanatic

This  is merely  one of the many videos i have seen on this matter.

CO is plant food. To call it a pollutant only shows gross ignorance of basic science


https://youtu.be/GXBBNcAvCsU.

but my case, though i am gratified to know that science properly done confirms my case, was not based on science.

I am a history buff,

I knew from my own reading that there was a medieval warm period which was warmer than  today.

Greenland was called green because it was when discovered by Viking explorers, .and they settled the place for several centuries, but it was abandoned when the little ice age which was at its deepest in 1700 made  settlement there impossible.

in fact they grew barley there. in a land where the settlement is now under permafrost.

Ergo the world was warmer then than now.

Why, I ask, did Michael Mann and his ilk have to tell lies about human history which is attested to by written records?

The lie was to remove the Medieval warm period from  history, to ignore the Little ice age in order to get the flat line required for  allegedly dramatic temperature rise required the hockey stick.

I hold this against them. I reject their claims and can do so for this alone. they are liars

there is so much more to write.

They used to call it global warming until the globe stopped  warming. Then they changed to name to "Climate Change". This is a deceitful trick, for climate always changes, and Man's influence on it is negligible.

But falsifying of the past is the arsenal of the warmists and their data tampering.

Tony Heller, also on youtube  has pointed out that the 1930's were hotter than now, and that the trend  is that  days over 100 degrees F is in fact declining. no one has dropped dead in a heat wave this year. but they did by the hundreds  back in the 1930's

On sin, spiritual warfare and Pilgrims Progress

I wrote the following  in reply to a post about sin, spiritual warfare and Pilgrims Progress, a work i now reject as heresy.

But i disagreed strongly with the author of the post as I do with John Bunyan

Here it is

I have been a christian now for 40 years and have never experienced Satan.All those filthy thoughts that filled my head when i was trying to pray were ME. And all those things that went bump in the night were my superstition

As I acknowledge this and realize i would rather fantasize lustfully (nuff said) than pray, well I repented of it. No demons involved.

and as prayer is a conversation not a monologue prayer has been no problem when the Being Who answers me back in one on one conversation is wise wonderful and above all, HOLY.

As I am in fact protected by the power of God, some thing those who obsess about being afflicted by Satan will deny, even to my face, I have not encountered Satan.
And why?

Firstly i doubt any of us could last more than 5 seconds in the presence of the Usurper. And secondly, and most importantly, God will not allow any of us the excuse that "The Devil made me do it." and the Bible says we are tempted by our own lust. no demons required

Let none of us think that we are so mature in Christ as to be qualified to go out and battle real demons. There are cranks who will battle the imaginary, and as an ex charismatic i know that type well. But we are mewling and puking babes not fit for real spiritual warfare. let us look at our fruit and see this is so .

Also, to overdo the seriousness of sin - yes it can be overdone, is to make obedience a huge and terrifying ordeal. this is to forsake Christ for the Law, something i did.

As for Pilgrim's Progress, someone wrote that puritans were inveterate self dramatizers, That book is full of it. it is also riddled with Pelagian heresy, endless invocations to willpower. This is the very essence of the sin of legalism

and the cruellest thing in the book is the dictum, the bitter must come before the sweet,

so I forsook the sweet with which Christ introduced Himself to me and lived in bitterness for nearly 40 years.

legalism is the MOST dangerous of all the heresies for it masquerades as the holiest and most perfect obedience. But it is in fact backsliding if not outright apostasy

and it destroys people, either through smug self satisfaction or, for those with consciences, utter despair

The Impeachment of Donald Trump

Anyone who cares to follow  context will see that as the Democrat Party of the USA and its far Left allies have hated Donald Trump since the very start, there is no good faith  reason to believe that they are motivated by anything other than this hatred as regards this impeachment. This is therefore a malicious and frivolous prosecution  and shows the lawlessness of those participating in it.

The latest attempt, after the Mueller Report showed that there was no evidence of Russian collusion (that there was no evidence of crime never stopped them in their determination to  seek other excuses to accuse) is an allegation of Trump's illegal interference in another country's politics, and the basis of impeachment proceedings itself,  to wit his alleged  asking  Ukraine's President to find dirt on Joe Biden (a prospective Democrat Presidential Candidate) in return for Aid to  Ukraine.

The White House published the transcript  of the allegedly criminal phone call,  and this  is a video on BitChute which read out the salient  passages and analysed the whole sordid affair in the light of a malicious hit piece by an organ which should know better, namely Christianity Today, a magazine founded by Billy Graham, calling for Trump's removal and endorsing the malice and lies of the democrats.

The video shows that the quid pro quo was done by Joe Biden, not Trump  to protect his own son who was involved in illegal activity in a  company  in Ukraine on the board of which he sat. Biden asked some official to stop an investigation which would indict his son, in return for said aid.

President Trump was merely asking that  this investigation should be resumed. Was there political  motive? Probably, but was a request for an investigation that was illegally shut down to be resumed itself illegal?

But the democrats in their insane rage  have to twist words before their very eyes.

If they do not care about the reputation  of the democratic process or their own country that is on them, but for them to accuse Trump of these attitudes is sheer effrontery. Jung the psychologist called it projection and it is increasingly the Left which do this these days.

Donald Trump is no scholar, no gentleman and no saint. I know this.

but since when did the democrats become such  champions of petit bourgeois sensitivities?

only when it suited them to  invoke such in order to "roll" an office holder they personally hated.

After all Democrat JFK was a notorious womanizer who would so the saying goes, chase anything in a skirt.  Clinton lied to Congress about having sex with an intern - and he was in fact guilty of these charges; and IMO the worst of them all was the smooth talking hypocrite Barak Obama. the promise breaker who never closed down the torture centre at Guantanamo Bay, expanded Americas involvement in wars and after condemning Bush Jr's  use of signing statements fell to making some of his own.

All without a peep from these so moral and righteous Democrats so passionate for the rule of Law

The scandal is not the things Trump is charged with but the fact that the democrats are so convulsed with the  delusions that  spring from hatred as to bring a frivolous prosecution to either remove or influence an upcoming election.

Such corruption of due process and politics will indeed contribute to the growing mountain of iniquity whereby God will punish the US of A.

But this iniquity is not complete, the time of wrath which may have the country split asunder is not  yet

if the embedded link does not work (I am not a tech head and have little patience or confidence with such things) please manually enter this below

https://www.bitchute.com/video/nVNqXOI2Imr7/

Folau's Settlement

I have no interest in sport of any kind.

But i was following with some interest the Israel Folau saga when he was sacked by Rugby Australia for daring to express a religious opinion online.

He sued them and settled out of court. It is clear that Rugby Australia knew they would lose, for there is much support for Mr Folau.

the arrogance of these people for excluding a christian while daring to claim "inclusiveness " shows the rank hypocrisy of the so called Progressive Left

So, the theological opinion I draw from this is that,  well if a christian can sue someone for religious discrimination and actually win the times are not yet at the very end where it is prophesied that we Christians wills be hated by EVERYONE.
i m not one of those haters who looks forward to the end of the Age chiefly as i know we will not be conveniently teleported out (known as the pretribulation rapture) before the trouble starts, but will have to endure it and will be massacred almost to a man. so i will rejoice in small things and be pleased for free speech and for Mr Folau, but know it wont last long. but maybe it wont crumble to dust in my ;lifetime. i am 61. here's hoping

"Filioque" Does It Matter?

I watched a video in which a Greek Orthodox priest looked at Catholicism.

and i was stunned to hear what they regards as the chief heresy of Catholicism,

Filioque

I will explain

The ancient creed of the Church says that the Holy spirit proceeds (ie comes from) from the Father. some time in the mid middle ages someone added the word filioque to make the passage say that the Spirit proceeded from the Father AND the Son.

and this piece of trivial minutia the Greek Orthodox are idolatrously obsessed about to the point of mania and they will not let it go. Even after more than a thousand years.

I wrote the following in reply to the video:


So. we Christians actually know enough about the inner workings of the Holy Trinity such that we can dare pronounce with certainty EITHER WAY whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son. Really? This is itself a self willed and daring speculation i would not even dream of making, and i certainly would not require others to hold it on pain of damnation. I know I have the Spirit for I was an atheist; and only by the power of said Spirit could I ever declare that Jesus Christ is Lord. This same spirit testifies to me of the divinity of the Son, the Trinity, faith, redemption and all the rest. And he convicts me of sin that I may repent of it. Do you know any other Spirit who would do this? But the question of filioque has never come up in 35 years of dialogue with the Holy Spirit of Christ. I neither know nor care which it is, though i am adept enough as a thinker to be able to argue both ways, coming up only with an idea not any real knowledge of a mystery we all should deem too sacred to dare interfere with and if i have the spirit what matters is having the spirit, seen by other things, and certainly defying St Paul by wrangling about words to the ruin of the hearers is not one of them

If some church is going to draw a line in the sand over a piece of trivial theological minutiae it shows it s own presumption and arrogance and i for one will not seek them.

it seems to me this arose when someone altered a piece of church tradition, some recitation of doctrine which had become hidebound dead and legalistic; and in their fury at something they thought was time honoured being defaced they declared this alteration a heresy on a matter where the Bible is largely silent or at least ambiguous.

but Greek quibbling over trivia is not new.

you have heard of the Old Believer Schism in 17th century Russia? they quarreled over such mind numbing trivia as to whether to cross themselves with two fingers twice or three fingers three times, and one side savagely persecuted the other side who were too hidebound to give way over a complete trivium.

And we wonder why the world looks at us quarreling over such stuff and blaspheme the name of God because of US (also a scripture quote) and decide that the gospel of Christ is nonsense and the stamping ground of bigots.

Here my post ended.

If I have the Spirit I do not need to know the details save that He came through Jesus Christ and witnesses to Him. , in fact what is more important to all of us is believing him. confessing our unbelief when he makes it clear to us, repenting of our sins, both of thought and life as He leads , and obeying His promptings, which , unlike the impossible Law of God, are the nature of the yoke which is easy and light.

Such violent and arrogant quarreling over Who sent the Holy Spirit is proof of not having Him at all, or of having forsaken Him for self perfection in the flesh.

Speech is violence?

These days the New Left claim that speech is violence - or, more precisely, that it can be.

So, true to form, in typical reaction, the Right claim that as a matter of fact it is not

Speech is not violence? the trouble is the Bible says something quite contrary: Life and death is in the power of the tongue: Proverbs 18:21. As this passage does not mean that the tongue is the conduit for supernatural energies which absurdity is what the positive confession types say, it has to mean something else.

And what? That you can destroy a person with cruel words or build them up with kind words.

Anyone who has felt the agony of cruel verbal rebuke knows this, and it is only indicative of the callousness of the Right that they deny this - unless of course they are so perfect and well beloved as to never have been bawled out, rebuked etc etc or have never been harassed online, or bullied in anyway that stopped short of physical beating

Scripture also adds James chapter 3, all of it - including this So also the tongue is a small part of the body, and yet it boasts of great things. See how great a forest is set aflame by such a small fire!(verse 5) Also the Sermon on the mount - he who calls his brother raca - any term of contempt -   is guilty of (ie worthy of - hellfire Matthew 5:22 IOW speech IS violence. The Bible says so. What then is wrong with the Left when they state this? they define violence only to suit themselves, to excuse and exempt their own violent speech; and they think that legal stricture will correct it when it appears in anyone else other than themselves. But of course they hold their violent speech is righteous and this excuses all things. If those of the Right call themselves christian and profess to believe the Bible to be the word of God then they really have no right to deny this fact here. If some are atheistic and Right Wing - rare perhaps but they do exist - , well that is no business of mine' As for the Left's wanting to legislate hate speech: if Law could solve anything there was no need for a New Covenant. if the Right had any sense at all they will oppose the Left's legalism, not its more or less valid appeal to a true fact, namely that speech is - ie can be - violence. But if they, the Right want to blaspheme the name of the Lord, a Right Wing predilection and this because they confuse Right Wing politics with godliness and the left being mostly atheist, do not , well . . . . .

Be my guest