Hi, I'm David Bercot, and today we're going to be talking about what the early Christians believed about assurance of salvation. Even though this is a topic on so many people's minds, I've never recorded a message about it before now because of one simple reason. That is, if you had asked any of the early Christians what they believed about assurance of salvation, they wouldn't have known what you're talking about.
You see, assurance of salvation is not a term that is used in Scripture, nor is it a term the early Christians ever used. I'm not sure exactly when the phrase was coined and who's responsible for it, but I can almost guarantee that it was sometime during the last 500 years. So when we use the phrase assurance of salvation, we're using a term that is neither biblical nor part of the historic faith. I'm just talking about the term itself.
Nevertheless, even though neither the Scriptures nor the early Christians ever use the term, there are clear teachings in both the New Testament and in the early Christian writings that clearly demonstrate what the apostles and the early Christians did believe on the subject of assurance of salvation. So we're going to talk about that. But to understand what the early Christians have believed about assurance of salvation, a person first has to understand what they believed about salvation itself.
Otherwise, you're not going to grasp their understanding of assurance of salvation. Now they believed that there are two distinct stages of salvation, a past stage and a future one. Actually, there's a third phase, the present one, but we can ignore that for the purpose of this discussion. Okay, so the first stage is the past stage of salvation. We become saved. We enter into a saved state. And we do this through faith, conversion, repentance, and baptism.
The first new conversions we read about in Acts are in the second chapter of Acts, and we see that they followed those steps. We go to Acts 2:36 through 41, and Peter has just concluded his preaching to the Jewish crowd before him, explaining to them that Jesus had been raised from the dead.
He then says, beginning with verse 36," Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ." And then the account says," Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles," Men and brethren, what shall we do?" Then Peter said to them," Repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
For the promise is to you and to your children and to all who are afar off as many as the Lord our God will call." It says," And with many other words he testified and exhorted them saying," Be saved from this perverse generation." Then those who gladly received his word were baptized, and that day about 3,000 souls were added. End quote. So now let's analyze what happened there in that account. There are five distinct steps that go into a person becoming saved. The first one is the preaching of the gospel.
Peter told his listeners that Jesus had been resurrected from the dead and that he had ascended to heaven. Furthermore, he told them God had made Jesus both Lord and the Messiah, or Christ. So they heard the preaching. Secondly, there came faith and belief. The people believed what Peter had told them, even though it was a marvelous claim.
And even though they had not personally seen the resurrected Jesus, yet they had faith that Jesus really is the Christ, that He was resurrected from the dead, that He now sits in heaven at the right hand of God, and that He is our Lord. Now, interestingly, there was nothing there in that gospel message that included any of the things that Luther said constituted the gospel, and that's usually thought of today as being the gospel. Okay, number three, conversion. The account says they were cut to the heart.
This was not some simple acknowledgement that they were sinners. It was a heartfelt desire to do something about their situation, to turn their lives around. So they asked the apostles what they needed to do. And Peter told them to repent and to be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins. I think there's no question about their repentance from what we read there. And in coming forward to be baptized, they were publicly declaring that they had indeed believed and repented.
And then finally, the whole thing was capped off with water baptism. The people didn't say the sinner's prayer, or they didn't come forward to invite Jesus into their hearts. No, they came forward to be baptized just as they were instructed to do. So, there were five steps. We'll go over them again. Number one, preaching of the gospel. Number two, faith and belief. Number three, conversion. Number four, repentance. And number five, baptism.
Now, one of the important things to note about all this is that this process of getting saved, the biblical process, was an objective reality, not a subjective experience. That is because it included water baptism. For example, for a man to become a converted Jew, he had to become circumcised. It was an objective reality, not just something he did mentally. It was the same with becoming a Christian.
It too involved an objective reality which removed the possibility of any later doubts of whether a person had really been saved, whether he or she had really become a Christian. And this didn't just happen with those first conversions on the day of Pentecost. All throughout the Book of Acts, there are accounts of numerous persons being saved, and they are always baptized as part of the procedure. You have the Samaritans, the Ethiopian eunuch, the Philippian jailer, Lydia, and Paul himself, among others.
Now, to be sure, the objective reality, which is the five steps I've mentioned above, may also be accompanied by a subjective experience. It often is. But the objective reality does not depend upon having a subjective experience. And a subjective experience without the objective reality does not get you saved. Now, what happens at this first stage of salvation? Well, actually, a lot of things happen. Number one, our sins are forgiven.
Peter had told them," Repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins." Number two, we receive the Holy Spirit. Usually, this is through the laying on of hands. That's how it was normally done in Acts, but it doesn't depend on that. Again, Peter had said," Repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." So it is a definite promise.
Number three, in this initial phase of salvation, we become a member of Christ's Church. It says," And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved." Number four, we become a child of God. Paul wrote to the Romans, he said," The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. If indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together." So we become a child of God and a joint heir with Christ.
But there is an if connected with that. We will eventually become an heir, receive our inheritance. It says," If indeed we suffer with Him." Number five, we become a branch on Christ's vine. Jesus told us in John 15," I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without me you can do nothing.
If anyone does not abide in me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered, and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned." So, we become a branch on the vine, but again, there are conditions. There's no condition about becoming a branch. That happens when we are saved, this first stage of salvation. But we can be cut off of the vine, he says, if we do not abide with him. Number five, we pass from death to life.
John writes," We know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brethren. He who does not love his brother abides in death." So we already enter into eternal life right now, but it's not a final thing yet. Even there, John says," We know we've passed because we love our brethren, but if we hate our brother, then we are abiding in death." In the same letter, 1 John 5, he says," He who has the Son has life. He who does not have the Son of God does not have life.
These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God." So, again, the promise that we have already entered into an eternal life, but there's that condition that we need to continue to believe. And as the early Christians say in the Scriptures as well, to believe in Christ means to obey Christ.
All right, number six, another thing that happens at that first stage of salvation is that our names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life. In Philippians 4, Paul says," And I urge you also, true companion, help these women who labored with me in the gospel with Clement also and the rest of my fellow workers whose names are in the Book of Life." So Christ doesn't wait until we die to write our names in the book of life. It happens right when we are saved at the very initial stage of salvation.
But again, there's that later condition. When we go to Revelation 3:5, Jesus tells the church," He who overcomes shall be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot out his name from the Book of Life, but I will confess his name before my father and before his angels." So, we have to overcome. We have to have a victorious life to the end of our life. Otherwise, our name can be blotted out of the book of life. It's not there indelibly until we have endured faithfully until the end.
So, in summary, a lot of things happen at the first stage of salvation. If a person dies five minutes after he has been baptized, assuming the five steps were followed, he is assured of eternal life with Christ. And so as to this first stage of salvation, assurance is absolute. There wasn't a" maybe" or a" kinda" about salvation to the 3,000 who were saved on the day of Pentecost. They had been saved. They had been rescued from this perverse generation.
As I've said, it was an objective reality, not a subjective experience. So you won't find a single person in the entire early church ever saying," You know, I'm not sure if I was really saved." You don't ever find anyone saying," Well, I thought I was saved," but then I discovered I really wasn't. Of that first stage of salvation, the past event, there could be no doubt. Because once again, it was an objective reality, which included water baptism. It wasn't just a subjective experience.
And so the early Christians never rebaptized anyone unless that person had been baptized by heretics who were outside the church. And even then, not all of the churches agreed that such people needed to be rebaptized. Paul likens our salvation, which is accompanied by baptism, to the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites.
In 1 Corinthians 10:1 through 4, we read," Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank of that spiritual rock that followed them and that rock was Christ." Now, can you imagine an Israelite wondering if he had actually passed through the Red Sea?
Whether he had actually been baptized into Moses? Of course not, because it was an objective reality. They knew beyond any doubt that they had been saved from Egypt. That didn't mean they made it ultimately to the Promised Land. Most of them didn't. But there was no doubt that they had been saved. It was now a matter of maintaining that salvation. So the early Christians would have found it very strange for someone to say," You know, I doubt my salvation.
I'm not sure I was ever saved." I mean, the only time such a thing happened in the New Testament was when certain believers did not fulfill the requirements of the objective reality. Paul discerned that these men hadn't met that objective reality because they hadn't received the Holy Spirit. But interestingly, he didn't ask them whether or not they had experienced a certain subjective experience. Instead, he asked them about their baptism.
He felt certain there must be something wrong with their baptism if they hadn't received the Holy Spirit. We read in Acts 19:3 and Paul said to them," In what then were you baptized?" So they said into John's baptism. Then Paul said," John indeed baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying to the people that they should believe on Him who would come after Him." That is on Christ Jesus. Well, it says then when they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.
So these brothers had not been baptized into Christ. They had only undergone the Jewish baptism of John, a baptism of repentance. The criteria of the objective reality, which includes baptism into Christ, had not been met. And so Paul immediately gave them a Christian baptism. And once the objective reality had been met, then they received the Holy Spirit.
The first stage of salvation was such an objective certainty that even if a person later turned away from God, so long as he had received a proper Christian baptism, no one questioned that he had been initially saved. Think of Simon Magus. He had believed and had received a proper Christian baptism. When a short time later, he asked Peter to sell him the power to bestow the Holy Spirit, Peter strongly rebuked him.
But Peter did not say," You must not have been really saved," or else you wouldn't have asked me to do this. No, there was no question about the fact that Simon had been saved. But that didn't mean that he was assured of future salvation because, in fact, later he totally turned away from Christ. So in short, the early Christians believed in the assurance of salvation as to the first stage of salvation.
To question the fact that a person had been saved and had become part of Christ's vine would have seemed strange to them because, as I keep saying, the initial stage of salvation was an objective reality. But this was simply a given thing, something the early Christians took as an established fact. It's not something they talk about all the time in a direct manner. But it's everywhere indirectly in all that they're saying.
As I had mentioned at the beginning, they all believed in assurance of salvation of that initial stage, but they never used that precise phrase. And it's not part of the apostle's creed or included in any other formal statement of faith. Well, enough about the past stage. What about the future stage of salvation? Now, today, when people use the term assurance of salvation, they're usually referring to the past stage of salvation, not the future stage.
When they're talking about the future stage, the theological term they normally use is eternal security. Of course, to evangelical Protestants, the two stages are essentially one and the same. They tend to merge them together. In fact, a lot of Protestants wouldn't even acknowledge that there are two stages. Because most evangelical Protestants believe that once you've met the first stage of salvation, then you're guaranteed into heaven. But is that the historic faith? No, it is not.
Once we have entered the first stage of salvation, we do not have a guarantee that we will pass the future stage of salvation. We must endure faithfully to the end. About 25 years ago, I recorded a message on what the early Christians believed on eternal security, which is still a message that we offer. And in that message, I demonstrate from both Scripture and the early Christian writings that we do not have a guarantee that once we pass the first stage of salvation, that the second one will automatically follow.
So, in this message today, I'm not going to repeat all of those scriptures and all those early Christian quotations. Instead, I'm going to refer you to that message on what they believed on eternal security. However, I do want to read to you just some sample New Testament passages that do show we must endure faithfully to the end in order for our future salvation to be fully established. Jesus said," You will be hated by all for my name's sake, but he who endures to the end will be saved." That's Matthew 10: 22.
Paul says," If we endure, we shall also reign with Him. If we deny Him, He will also deny us." 2 Timothy 2:12. Again, Hebrews. We read Hebrews 10:26," If we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment." Peter, in 2 Peter 2:20 and 21, writes," For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome.
The latter end is worse for them than the beginning, for it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than having known it to turn from the Holy Commandment delivered to them." So after we have been saved, after we have escaped the pollutions of this world, if we get entangled in sin and are overcome by it, then he says our latter end will be worse. It'd be better not to have known the truth.
Okay, now I want to read you some representative quotations from the early Christians to demonstrate that they believed exactly what those Scriptures we have just read, what those Scriptures teach. Now, in these quotations, the writers are all talking about the second future stage of salvation. Clement of Alexandria writes," It is neither the faith, nor the love, nor the hope, nor the endurance of one day.
Rather, he that endures to the end will be saved." Cyprian writes," There remains more than what is yet to be accomplished. For it is written," Praise not any man before his death.
And again, be faithful unto death, and I will give you a crown of life." And the Lord also says," He that endures to the end, the same will be saved." Cyprian writes again," Whoever that confessor is, he is not greater, better, or dearer to God than Solomon." Solomon retained the grace that he had received from the Lord as long as he walked in God's ways. However, after he forsook the Lord's way, he also lost the Lord's grace.
For that reason, it is written," Hold fast that which you have, lest another take your crown." Assuredly, the Lord would not threaten that the crown of righteousness might be taken away if it were not that the crown must depart when righteousness departs. He that endures to the end, he will be saved. So whatever comes before the end is a step by which we ascend to the summit of salvation. It is not the finish where the full result of the ascent is already gained. Second Clement.
Let us then practice righteousness so that we may be saved until the end. And finally, Hermes, if you do not guard yourself here he was talking about anger, you and your house will lose all hope of salvation. And I could easily fill a two-hour message with similar quotations from the early Christians. So, if you had asked any of the early Christians," Are you assured that you will definitely go to heaven when you die?" The universal answer would have been no.
Now, perhaps you're wondering about the verse in Romans 8:35 that says," Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" You might ask," Doesn't that prove that nothing can cause Christ to stop loving us can cause us to lose our salvation?" The answer is no. That verse does not say that. In fact, that verse is one of the most misunderstood verses in all of Scripture.
Actually, I've just recorded a message on the five most misunderstood verses in Scripture, and that verse is the one that I discuss in the most detail. In the message, and I hope you will listen to it, I show the listener that the early Christians did not understand that verse in the way that it is so often applied today. In fact, when you carefully examine the passage itself, it becomes clear that Paul is not saying that we cannot forfeit Christ's love.
For Christ Himself said back in John 15, as we've read, that we can. We can be cut off of the vine. Now, listening to all those quotations from Scripture and from the early church about the danger of losing our ultimate salvation, you may be wondering, well, what advantage is there to having assurance of our past salvation if everything in the future is so tentative? What have we gained by being saved? It seems like our future is just as uncertain as it was before we were saved. But no, it's not that way at all.
We aren't finished with the subject yet. As I've said in so many of my messages, if you want to know what the early Christians believed on any subject, you have to start off with a blank slate, and then you have to look at every scripture that pertains to that subject, taking all of the Scriptures seriously and literally that is taking them at face value. Now, when we do this with regards to the future aspect of our salvation, we find that the New Testament is filled with two distinct types of messages.
Number one, there are a lot of verses that warn us that our future salvation is not guaranteed. We've read those. They tell us that we have to run the race faithfully to the end. They tell us that our names can be blotted out of the book of life if we are not overcomers. But then there's a second group of verses that give us lots of encouragement that no doubt we will reach the finish line. Now, evangelical Protestants tend to want to take just that second group of verses and ignore the rest.
And this gives a very distorted, easy believism view of what the Scriptures teach about salvation. But we can also overemphasize the first group of scriptures about running the race, and we can make the picture look overly bleak and discouraging. So it's important that we balance both groups of scriptures, giving full weight to each group. Now, I've just read you a number of scriptures that warn us that we must run the race faithfully to the end. But this isn't some horrible burden or arduous undertaking.
The reason is that God is on our side. He is not only rooting for us to successfully finish the race, but he is also helping us all along the way. When the apostles wrote their letters to various churches, they did give plenty of warnings and exhortations. But they usually also wrote with a confident expectation that those churches as a whole would be victorious and that the majority of them would finish the race. Let me read you some examples. We'll start with Paul's letter to the Corinthians.
In that letter, he gives the Corinthians a lot of correction and admonition. In fact, you might think that their church was a lost cause, but by no means. Notice what Paul said about the Corinthians at the beginning of his letter.
He wrote chapter 1, beginning with verse 8," I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given to you by Christ Jesus, that you were enriched in everything by Him in all utterance and all knowledge, even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you, so that you come short in no gift, eagerly waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will also confirm you to the end that you may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
So Paul had confidence that that church as a group would be successful would be confirmed in the end. To the Philippians, he wrote," I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine, making requests for you with all joy. For your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this very thing, that he who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. So again, look at Paul's confidence in them.
Now sadly today, that last verse, the one in Philippians, has become one of the most overused and misapplied verses of Scripture. Paul spoke those words to the Philippian congregation as a whole, and his confidence was not misplaced. That congregation did endure. The work that God began there did not fall apart. But today, that verse is quoted as though it applies to each individual Christian, as though we each have a personal guarantee that we will run the race successfully. And that's not what Paul was saying.
Now let's go to Hebrews, Hebrews 10:37 through 39. There we read," Yet a little while and the coming one will come and will not delay. But my righteous one shall live by faith. But if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their soul." So there is a warning in that passage, but Paul shares his confidence that the Hebrews as a whole are not the kind who will shrink back.
Now those verses are just three examples. There are many similar verses in which the New Testament writers expressed their confident hope in the salvation of most of the people in the New Testament churches. Now, why could Paul be so confident in those churches? As I said before, it's because God is on our side. He's not an unmerciful, harsh God who's sitting back and waiting for us to fail? No, He wants us to prevail. He wants us to finish the race victoriously.
Jesus said," It is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish." Matthew 18:14. Paul writes," For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." 1 Timothy 2, 3, and 4." For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him." 1 Thessalonians 5:9 and 10.
And finally from Peter. He says," The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is long-suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." 2 Peter 3:9. But the picture gets even better. As I said earlier, God doesn't just root for us. It's not just a matter that He wants as many as possible to inherit life. He gives us the power we need to complete the race. He assists us all along the journey.
Paul writes," I know how to be abased and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." In Hebrews, we read," Let your conduct be without covetousness. Be content with such things as you have. For he himself has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you." So we may boldly say," The Lord is my helper. I will not fear. What can man do to me?" That's Hebrews 13: 5 and 6.
Now, in both of those verses that I've just read, I hope you paid attention to the context. When they talk about God giving us the needed power, that promise is always connected to our walking obediently with Him. But it doesn't depend mainly on our own power. He gives us the needed strength. But we are the ones who have to make the decision to walk obediently.
Jude 1:24 says," Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy." So God is able to keep us from stumbling. Now, Jude doesn't say that God guarantees He will keep us from stumbling. In fact, the whole letter of Jude shows that many Christians had stumbled. But God is able to keep us from stumbling so long as we earnestly desire to walk faithfully with Him. Earlier on, we read the passage in John 15 about the vine.
I want to read it again, but this time I want to focus on a different part of that passage. It's John 15 verses 4 through 7, where Jesus says," Abide in me and I in you, as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit. For without me, you can do nothing.
If anyone does not abide in me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered, and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned. So, if we walk faithfully with Christ, if we abide in Him, He will then give us the necessary power to bear fruit and to successfully run the race to the end. We are not going to run it successfully on our own power. In summary, those who are abiding with Christ, that is, those who have an ongoing, obedient, love faith relationship with Him.
Such Christians can rightfully have a confident expectation of being with Christ in paradise and in heaven. We don't live the Christian life in constant trepidation and uncertainty. No, we live it with confidence. We're not merely hoping we'll inherit eternal life somehow. We confidently expect that we will. But there's a big difference between confident expectation and presumption. The members of conventional worldly churches are taught to be presumptuous.
They live in conscious, willful disobedience to Christ's commandments. And then they proudly announce to everyone that they know for a 100% certainty that when they die, they're going to heaven. Sadly, most of those people probably won't be in heaven. In reality, the only Christians who are entitled to this confident expectation are those who are walking obediently with Christ.
If we are living disobediently and either ignoring Christ's teachings or else even going so far as to be purposefully disobeying New Testament commandments, then we can have a confident expectation that we will not inherit eternal life.
Hebrews tells us," If we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment and a fiery indignation which will devour the adversaries." So no one should deceive themselves about this. I want to give you an illustration about how this confident expectation works. This is a true life illustration from something that actually happened to me when I was in college.
I was planning to go to law school after college, but there's normally not a designated pre-law curriculum that a college student has to take. I had decided on being a business major, as I felt a good knowledge of business would be helpful in the practice of law. Now, one of the required courses for a business major is insurance. How insurance works, what all the terms in an insurance policy mean and things like that.
We had a very good professor with real-life experience as an insurance broker, and I enjoyed his class a lot. Now, for the entire semester course, there were going to be only four scheduled tests, and our results on those four tests constituted our entire grade for the course. Now, you need good grades to get into law school. So, I was a bit chagrined when I made an 88 on the very first exam in my insurance class, because that was a B. Now the exam had been a multiple choice test with 25 questions.
Each question was worth four points, and I had missed three questions. I was a bit curious about what I had missed as I had felt going into the exam that I knew the material pretty well. And then when I read over my graded test, I realized that I had answered all three of those questions correctly that had been marked wrong. They had been marked wrong in error. So that afternoon, during the professor's office hours, I dropped by his office and told him that somehow my test had been accidentally misgraded.
As a result, three of the questions that I had answered right were incorrectly marked wrong. As a result, I ended up with an 88 when I actually made 100 on the exam. Well, the professor was very gracious, and he apologized for the error. He asked me to show him my exam, and I handed it to him, and then he pulled out his answer key to verify what I had just told him. Well, after looking it over, he told me that according to the answer key, I had put down the wrong answers to those questions.
Well, the exam had come straight from the textbook, and I had my textbook with me. So I showed him from the textbook that the answers I had selected were the correct ones. He nodded his head on each one and told me that was right. He thanked me heartily for bringing the matter to his attention, and he corrected the answer key right there in front of me. So it would be correct for future exams using those same questions. Well, then there was an embarrassing silence after that.
And since he didn't offer to do anything further, I finally said with a smile, I take it, you are going to change my grade. I was assuming that he had just forgotten. Well, to my utter shock, he replied," No, I'm not going to change your test grade. But I appreciate your letting me know so that the answer key will be correct in the future."" Well, why not?" I asked. Because he replied, then I would have to go back and change everyone's grades for the entire class.
Some students' grades would go up and others would go down. That's going to be way too big of a headache, and I'm not going to do it. Well, I thought for a moment, and then I said," Well, you could just change the grades of those students who come by and say something to you about it." And evidently, that's not going to be very many people." No, I'm not going to change your grade or anyone else's." He reiterated firmly. Well, I just stood there for a moment in disbelief. I finally said," I'm a bit stunned.
I mean, this seems incredibly unfair." Well, the professor then shook his head and smiled, and I still remember his exact words after all these years. He said," Don't sweat it Bercot. You're going to make an A in the course." Well, that was quite encouraging to hear, so I made sure to end the conversation on a pleasant note, and he thanked me again for helping him get the answer key corrected. And I did end up making an A in the course. I often think that that's how our merciful and gracious Savior looks at things.
I don't mean that He grades us incorrectly and refuses to change it. I don't mean that. But I mean that when it comes to Christians who are truly walking with him, I think he would tell us," Don't sweat it, Pilgrim. You're going to be with me in paradise." Again, I'm not endorsing easy believism here. I'm saying that that is how I believe Christ views those Christians who are abiding in Him, those Christians who have an obedient love faith relationship with Him.
Now, going back to my illustration, why did my professor say those words to me? Don't sweat it, Bercot. You're going to make an A in the course. Well, it was because of my class participation. He had seen over the period of the first quarter of the course that I was easily the most highly motivated student in the class. When he called on me in class, I had always read the lesson for that day, and I probably always had the correct answer.
When he asked questions to the class in general about topics not in the textbook, I often was the only one to volunteer and answer. He could see that I obviously had a good grasp of the subject matter. And then here, of course, I had actually made 100 on the first exam. So, from his experience of years and years of teaching that class, he knew that a student like me was inevitably going to get an A in the course. And he was right. But based on his words, what if I had quit preparing for class anymore?
What if I'd quit studying for the exams? What if I had said," Well, he said I'm going to make an A in the class, so I'm going to blow this class off and just focus on the other ones." Would I still have made an A in the course? No. The professor wasn't giving me an ironclad guarantee. He was just making a near-certain prognosis based on my performance up to that point. But he was assuming that I would continue to be just as diligent throughout the remainder of the semester.
It's the same with all of the confident expressions given in the New Testament. They are mingled with many clear warnings that we can fall out of the race and that we can be cut off of the vine. The Bible writers are simply expressing a confident expectation to those first-century Christians in general that they would finish the race victoriously.
The expressions of confidence in the Bible are based on the assumption that those Christians would continue to run the race diligently and continue to hold fast to an obedient love faith relationship with Christ. It is to those type of Christians that I think Jesus would say. Don't sweat it, pilgrim. You're going to be with me in paradise. But there are no guarantees. We must never be presumptuous. But we can have a confident, joyful expectation.
Before closing, I want to revisit the matter of the assurance of having been saved in the first place. You may be a person who's had concerns about whether you were ever saved. To fully grasp everything I've been saying and to understand how the early Christians looked at this subject, you need to examine the theological framework in which you've been working.
I say that because the early Christians looked at things very differently because they had a considerably different spiritual framework than do modern evangelical Protestants. If you've had worries about whether you've really been saved or not, you're probably working from an evangelical framework. And that whole framework began with Martin Luther. When he was a Roman Catholic, Luther had enormous fears about his salvation. He could find no spiritual peace in the Roman system.
So he ended up creating his own system. He did this by giving Paul's letters new meanings that they had never had before, and by selectively picking certain verses of Scripture and ignoring other verses. In the end, he came up with a system that removed all fears and concerns about salvation. He said," It's all of grace. God does it all. Once we are saved, we are assured of eternal life." But then the question arose, how do we know we have been saved?
Well, Luther said that if we attend a church where the gospel is preached, and by gospel he meant his gospel, and if we believe it, then we can be absolutely certain of our salvation. And that was the beginning of the modern doctrine of assurance of salvation. It was quite easy the way Luther presented it. However, Calvin had a little different approach to the matter than Luther. Calvin also taught that our salvation is totally of God, that we do nothing.
But he emphasized that our salvation is assured only if we are of the elect. I mean, Luther would have said the same thing, but he didn't put as much emphasis on that." If we are not of the elect," Calvin said, then our damnation is assured. Whereas Luther had removed all concerns about assurance, Calvin created new concerns for the churches that followed his doctrine. Calvin taught that each person needed to have a personal assurance that they were of the elect. Well, how was a person to obtain this assurance?
The general view among most Calvinist churches, like the Puritans, was that it was a largely subjective thing, yet it also depended upon the confirmation of the congregation you attended. If you were personally convinced that you were of the elect, then you had to give your testimony before the congregation, and they would weigh the matter. And that's where the custom of giving your personal testimony began. Now, when you look at the Puritan testimonies, they tended to all follow the same pattern.
The person has always gone through a long, arduous personal spiritual struggle, usually lasting several years, as they wrestled with the issue of whether or not they were of the elect. During the years leading up to their testimony, and I mean literally years, they had to have been living a life in accordance with Puritan teachings. At the same time, theologically, they had to completely believe that nothing they did played any role in their salvation. It was all a matter of predestination by God.
Now, if their testimony before the congregation bore out all of those things, and if their struggle had been long enough, the congregation would likely affirm that they were indeed of the elect, and their ultimate salvation was now an absolute certainty. So in Calvinist congregations, the issue of assurance of salvation was initially a matter of assurance that you were of the elect. However, their approach was not entirely satisfactory, which is why Puritanism eventually died out.
As I said, it was usually a matter of wrestling with all of these things for years, and developing a testimony that met all of the needed criteria was not easy. And in the end, it depended upon the confirmation of the congregation. So in the early 1700s, George Whitefield, who was a Calvinist himself, came up with an entirely new approach. He called it instant salvation. He would preach sermons, both to congregations and out in the open air, sermons that were highly charged emotionally.
And any of his listeners who felt a quickening in their heart or who underwent any type of subjective spiritual experience, well, they were deemed to have been saved right then and there. They could be assured that they were of the elect, that their salvation was complete. They didn't have to wrestle for years and wait for the confirmation of their congregations. The more intense the experience was, the greater evidence it was that you were of the elect and could now be assured that you were saved.
So you had people weeping and wailing, rolling in the aisles, barking like dogs, and going through all sorts of other experiences. Now, this approach was enormously successful, and it brought about in the United States what is called the Great Awakening. And although George Whitefield was the leading preacher of this movement, there were hundreds of others like John Wesley and people who aren't as well known. And this new approach spread from the Calvinists to groups like the Methodists who were Arminian.
But initially, all the church groups who adopted this approach were churches who practiced infant baptism. So they viewed the people who were listening to the preaching as having been already baptized. So the meetings didn't end in people coming forward and getting baptized like we see in the Book of Acts. Rather, the key was that you had to have a born-again experience. This is what proved you were saved. Baptism now became a rather insignificant thing.
If you had the right experience, you could then have assurance of your own salvation. As a result of this, the door to the initial stage of salvation changed from being an objective reality that we see in the Book of Acts to a subjective experience. Not only was this unscriptural, but it created a new unforeseen problem. And that is, people later began having doubts about their subjective experience.
For example, if they were not progressing spiritually in the same manner as many of the others were, or if they weren't having victory over certain sins in their life, they began wondering, well, maybe I haven't been saved after all. Maybe I only thought I was saved. So it became common for people to attend successive revival meetings and to get saved a second or third time or even more.
So as I said, if you personally struggle with the issue of whether you've really been saved, I can almost guarantee that this is the theological framework you're working under. And it's a very new framework, only going back about 300 years. It is not part of the historical faith. God didn't create a system that leaves people in doubt about whether or not they've been saved, whether or not they've become a branch on the vine. No, he created a procedure that provided an objective reality centering on baptism.
Jesus said," He who believes and is baptized shall be saved." Mark 16:16. In saying this, Jesus was not discounting conversion and repentance because real belief incorporates those things. But neither was he changing an objective reality into a subjective experience. People could be assured that they had entered into salvation. As we've discussed, the only rebaptism we see in the entire New Testament is when people received John's baptism, a Jewish baptism, instead of a Christian baptism.
So in short, what I'm saying is this: If you believed in Christ as your Lord and Savior when you were baptized, if you intended to become His follower, and you were sorry for your sins, and if you were baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, then I don't think you need to worry about whether or not you were saved. Worrying about whether or not you were actually saved is Protestant thinking. It's not New Testament thinking. It's not the historic faith. But please don't misunderstand me.
When I'm personally conducting a baptism, I want to make certain that the people being baptized fully understand the commitment required of them. I want to be sure that they are fully surrendering their lives to Christ. I want to know that they have truly repented of their sins. In other words, I set the standard high when I'm performing a baptism personally. But that's not the same thing as invalidating everyone else's baptism whose standard was perhaps not at that level when they got baptized.
So I'm not a big fan of people getting rebaptized. As I said, you just don't see rebaptism in the New Testament or in the early Church, unless it was a Jewish baptism or a baptism done by heretics who were outside the church. In conclusion, let's summarize what we've talked about. There are two stages of salvation. The past stage, when we first become saved and are added to Christ's Church. This is an objective reality, not a subjective experience. We simply have to believe in Christ, repent, and be baptized.
We see that time and time again in the book of Acts. If we have done this, then we have passed from death to life and have become a branch on Christ's vine. We can have complete assurance that we have been saved. Unless we didn't receive a Christian baptism as a believer, then there is no reason to doubt our past salvation. This business of doubting that we've been saved is a result of the revival movements that began in the early 1700s and that have colored the scriptural procedure of salvation.
Now, the second stage of salvation is inheriting eternal life at the end of our earthly life. And this is dependent on our faithfully running the race to the end. So there is no guarantee now that we will continue to abide in Christ throughout our entire life. However, God is on our side. He wants us to complete the race victoriously, and He will give us the power to do so so long as we continue to faithfully walk with Him.
If we abide in Christ, if we maintain an obedient love faith relationship with Christ, then we can have a joyful, confident expectation of inheriting eternal life. We should never be presumptuous or relax our guard. But if we are faithfully abiding in Christ, I truly think Jesus is smiling at us in love and saying," Don't sweat it, pilgrim. You'll be with me in paradise."