There's a name, Charles Templeton, that some of us may be familiar with, but many of us probably not. There's a sad story that accompanies that name, Charles Templeton. He was a man widely known in the nineteen forties and fifties among Christians in America. He was an evangelist who in his day was bigger than Billy Graham, if you can believe that. He spoke to thousands of people, both in The US and internationally.
He was instrumental, many profess, to leading them, thousands, to faith. In 1946, he was listed among the most influential Christian leaders by the National Association of Evangelicals. He was the pastor also of a rapidly growing church in Toronto, Canada, which he had started with his family and a handful of friends. Templeton had become one of the three vice presidents of an organisation called Youth for Christ, which today is one of the biggest university Christian student associations in the world. Within ten years of this incredibly influential ministry, however, Charles Templeton resigned all of his duties as preacher, evangelist, and church leader.
The reason? He had stopped believing in God. Many years later in 1995, nearing the end of his life, he wrote a book entitled A Farewell to God, My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith. In it, he put forth his arguments for why he left Christianity. How could someone so prominent in the mission of the church, seemingly used so powerfully for the upbuilding of the kingdom of God, leave something that had once seemed so precious to him.
It begs the question, how do people abandon the faith? At a deeper theological level, can people lose their salvation? If the Bible teaches us that it is God that draws us to Himself by His irresistible grace, does He allow us to resist that grace later? It's a profound question for many of us. It's a very real question that we ask because who doesn't have a family member who has seemingly walked away from the faith?
Who doesn't have a friend that they once knew attending a church and has never come back again? If they were saved once, have they become unsaved? And perhaps, again, at a more personal level, can I lose my salvation? Well, to deal with these questions, we're gonna look at two passages that, really are used very prominently in the discussion at a theological level about this issue. Turn with me firstly to Hebrews 6:4-6, and we're gonna read from verse 4 to 6.
Hebrews 6:4-6. The writer of Hebrews writes, for it is impossible in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away. It's impossible to restore them again to repentance since they are crucifying once again the son of God to their own harm and holding Him up to contempt. So here we have, in essence, the word saying, it is impossible for them to be restored once they have left the faith. But then I want us to look at John 10:22-30.
John 10:22-30, and we hear this from the words of Jesus. At that time, the feast of dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter. And Jesus was walking in the temple in the colonnade of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around Him and said to Him, how long will You keep us in suspense?
If you are the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, I told you and you do not believe. The works that I do in My Father's name bear witness about Me, but you do not believe because you are not among My sheep. My sheep hear My voice and I know them and they follow Me. I give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of My hand.
My father who has given them to Me is greater than all and no one is able to snatch them out of the father's hand. I and the father are one. Coming back to our question, can a Christian lose their salvation? Well, we read two very different sounding passages, don't we? In Hebrews 6 and in John 10.
But these are key passages in this discussion. It's a discussion that in, I guess, Calvinist circles, is usually answered in a positive way with the affirmation of the perseverance of the saints. That once a Christian is truly born again, they cannot lose that salvation. Well, let's begin with the first issue here. The unforgivable sin, which is the crucifying of Christ through unbelief.
What do we make of people who have been Christians and then walk away from it? What are we to make of the passage in Hebrews 6 that we read this morning that gives us this idea that it is impossible to restore a Christian that has turned away from Christ, who has tasted the grace of God, it says, and turned their backs. It says that they are lost forever. What reason does the writer give, however, for them being eternally lost? Well, if you have a look at that passage again, the last part of verse six gives us the reason.
It says, since they are crucifying once again, the son of God to their own harm and holding Him up to contempt. According to the Bible, there is only one sin that is unforgivable. In all of life, there is only one sin that is unforgivable. Every other sin, and you can think of the worst ones there is, is forgivable by the power of the grace of God. We find Jesus identifying that one sin in Mark 3.
We can quickly flip to that as well. Mark 3:28-29. Mark 3:28, Jesus said, truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven, the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin. For they were saying, He has an unclean spirit.
Now many people have taken this saying by Jesus to mean that if anyone says that the Holy Spirit doesn't exist, or if they somehow denounce the work of the Holy Spirit, they will be doomed to hell. They will be locked away for an eternity in hell. And at face value, if you read that passage, you might just think that that is what Jesus was saying. But think about this, it's a very particular specific sin to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. In other words, you could blaspheme the Son of God, you could blaspheme the Father God, but the Holy Spirit is the one that is an unforgivable sin.
Is that really what Jesus had in mind? I don't think so. If we look at that context, we get a far better understanding of what was happening. The Pharisees were accusing Jesus of having an evil spirit, performing His miracles by a demon's power. Instead, Jesus is healing people by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The reality is, the truth to which this was pointing to, is that only someone sent by God Himself could be healing in such a powerful way. At an even more deeper level, only someone who was truly the Messiah could have the spirit of God to such a great degree that the miracles Jesus was performing pointed to the fact that He was the Christ. By saying that Jesus was performing miracles through the power of a demon or an unclean spirit was essentially to deny that Jesus was the Christ, that Jesus was the Messiah. And therefore, the eternal sin that Jesus was warning them about is not denying the existence of the Holy Spirit, but refusing to see what the Holy Spirit was pointing to by His empowering of Christ. The Holy Spirit is pointing to the fact that Jesus is the Messiah sent by God to save the world.
The unforgivable sin therefore is not believing in Christ as saviour. In other words, the one and only sin that sends people to hell is not believing in Jesus Christ. Every other sin will be forgiven by His grace, but the sin of unforgiveness, of unbelief in His forgiveness. Coming back to Hebrews 6, we find the author saying essentially the same thing. Individuals in this context were crucifying the Son of God all over again, he says.
How? By walking away from the faith. Why does he put it this way? Because only people who reject Jesus crucify Him. Remember how Jesus went to the cross?
I mean, we could say why? Well, why He had to die for our sins, but remember who placed Him on the cross? It was the Jewish religious leaders. These ones were exactly asking Jesus in John 10 these tough questions. It was an unbelieving, sort of nonchalant Pilate who signed His death warrant.
It is unbelief that sent Jesus to the cross. It was rejection of Him that led Him to be crucified. Now these unbelievers who were once a part of the church in Hebrews 6, were, it says, once again, crucifying Christ through their unbelief. They were killing Him in their hearts. And for that reason, Hebrews 6 tells us, they have no idea who Jesus Christ is.
They don't know Him as saviour. They don't know Him as messiah, as Christ. The one and only sin that guarantees that you will not receive salvation is not believing that Jesus Christ has come to save you. On the other hand, Jesus Himself speaks with an incredible certainty of a person's salvation. And that leads us to the next point.
You will not be lost. The universe's strongest hands hold you. Again, we go to John 10 in our passage, and we hear Jesus say to those who truly place their trust in Him, verse 28. Says, they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of My hand. Verse 29, My father who has given them to Me is greater than all and no one is able to snatch them, these believers out of the father's hand.
Friend, if you ever catch yourself doubting your salvation, come back to this verse. I hope you realise even today that no one can snatch you from the father's hand. And guess what? If no one can snatch you from the father's hand, that includes yourself. Nothing and no one can pluck those whom God has chosen out of the strongest hands in the universe.
It's why Paul writes in Romans 8:38-39, that great chapter in Romans. Romans 8:38, for I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, things to come, nor powers, nor height, depth, nor anything else in, what? All creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. No created thing, no power in the spiritual realm, no demon, no angel can separate us from the love of God which we have received in Jesus Christ. For all the attempts of Arminian theology to try and elevate the autonomy and the power of mankind, to direct our own futures.
I must say the argument that salvation can be lost by our own will is for me one of the greatest causes for a Christian to despair. If I cannot trust that when life throws its worst at me, that I won't break. That truly is a deep and lasting despair. And yet the Bible has supreme confidence in the perseverance of God's saints. And we find that here in this passage, Romans 8.
That the person when he is born again, when he is called by God, when he is regenerated, then justified through faith in the work of Jesus Christ, they will also see that be guaranteed to receive the end result of that justification, which is what in Romans 8? Glorification. Glorification is the salvation that we're looking for. Glorification is the end goal of Jesus' work. Glorification means the resurrected bodies, the entrance into the glorious kingdom of God, and see how all of them are linked.
It's not a conditional statement. Those that God has predestined, He has called. Those He has called, He has justified. Those He has justified, He has glorified. There is no doubt.
If a Christian can lose their salvation, then this very important order of salvation written for us in Romans 8:30 could not have been written with any certainty because God would not be able to guarantee glorification for those He's called. If a Christian can fall away after being justified, then their salvation, their glorification cannot be guaranteed. But here in God's word, we find this incredible assurance that those whom God has justified through faith, He will guarantee their place in Christ's kingdom as well. And it's not just here, it is everywhere in scripture. Go to some of the greatest passages talking about salvation and you will find it.
We'll jump through them quickly. Ephesians 2, remember that famous, you've been saved by grace through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, why? So that no man may boast. What is salvation? It is a gift.
In other words, God is the one who gives salvation. No one takes salvation for themselves. Coupled that with Romans 11:29 which says that all of God's gifts are irrevocable, which means God doesn't call them back. God doesn't turn around and say, wait, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have given you that gift. He gives and that's it.
What does that mean? It means that a Christian having received their salvation as a gift cannot have that gift taken back. They cannot even give it back if they wanted to. It is theirs. Likewise, 2 Corinthians 5, which famously talks about a person becoming what?
New creations. The old has gone, the new has come. How can someone become uncreated once they've been created? The Bible speaks with such finality about salvation. Those who have been purchased by the blood of the lamb, how can they be unpurchased?
Those who have received eternal life from the eternal Son, how can they have eternal life for a few months or years? A temporary eternal life is a contradiction. It does not exist. So what do we make of people who do seemingly walk away from the faith? Even highly influential people like Charles Templeton.
If a true believer in Christ cannot lose their salvation, What happened to those who once belonged to the church and left? Well, that brings us to our third and our final point. The fool's gold of a Christian veneer. You may know this, but a long time ago, gold coins were used in, like, currency. People have gold coins.
In fact, I know someone in our church has bought a gold coin to be in a collection, and yet often, and I hope they checked this before they bought that gold coin, there was a scam where people took lead and covered it with a thin foil of gold. Obviously, to make it look like an expensive gold coin when it was worth hardly anything. Now you may have seen this on cartoons or on a TV show. People used to bite down on coins. And I thought that was actually, once you saw the tooth marks, it was like real gold.
But it's the opposite. Lead is soft. So if you could bite down on a coin and you could see your teeth marks in the coin, it was a fake coin. Genuine coins, gold coins were much harder. Well, the Bible says that there will be people living with a fool's gold veneer of Christianity.
They are pretenders. Now that is a very harsh word. Perhaps we feel uncomfortable calling them that because they may genuinely not be trying to trick anyone. They may just genuinely be trying to fit in. But it is also true that they professed to be Christians when they were not.
Again, whether they know that they are not Christians, is a different story. But we find a clear explanation of this phenomenon also in scripture in the final passage we'll look at, which is in 1 John 2. 1 John 2:19. The apostle John writes, they (this is church members) went out from us, but they were not of us.
For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us. In the Apostle John's characteristic, poetic and slightly cryptic sort of way of writing, he's explaining the situations of individuals who once belonged to the church. By him saying, they went out from us, means they left. They stopped attending church, they stopped being part of their Christian community.
But what's important to notice is the order in which John explains what is happening spiritually, so that we might understand what's going on. John says that their walking away proved that they were definitely not Christians. He says they never belonged to us. It's not, he says, that they once belonged to us and then decided not to, even when they belonged to us, they did not belong to us. And in their walking away, they proved it.
They weren't children of God in the first place. They may have acted like it. They may have prayed like it, but they were not of us. What this means for those who have walked away is that they were possibly never convinced of the truth of Jesus Christ. They were never convinced of their need for the Lord Jesus.
They were never born again. They never had that moment of realising what the demands of God is on their life. Their great need of Christ. And in their walking away from the church, from the faith, that dividing line became very clear. But notice that I used the word possibly.
One thing we must never do is assume to know the heart of a person. As finite human beings with our very, very small understandings and all the prejudices that we have, we will never know a 100% who is saved or not. We have not been made judges. There is only one judge and thank the Lord for that. But John gives us a theological perspective that for some who leave, it is a clear explanation that they have never understood the gospel.
They have simply been removed from the church by God's providence. Yet practically, it is entirely possible that people who have left the church, people who do leave the church are still part of God's chosen people. They have perhaps fallen greatly. They may be sinning in that rejection of the church in their walking away from Him, But like the prodigal son, remember the parable of the prodigal son? It is entirely plausible that they, having attempted to live far away from their heavenly father, may return to the father's home.
If that is true, the question is, does walking away mean they stop being a son or a daughter of their father? No. That's the powerful message of the parable of the prodigal son. Even when the son is in a far off country, he is still the son of the father. Even when the son says, I want my inheritance, therefore, I'm saying I wish you were dead, dad, he returns home and has received home like a son.
And so we find these two dynamics at work when we think about the question, can a Christian lose their salvation? On the one hand, we think biblically, we think theologically, and understand that no one whom the Lord has set His heart upon can be lost to Him. On the other side, practically, on an earthly level, people come and go into open house, into our lives as Christians, and we will never be sure entirely of their salvation or not. But fourthly and finally, there is one thing that we can know, and that is whether I am saved or not. We will never know on this side of eternity whether Charles Templeton's final fate was with Christ or without?
One day at the judgement seat of Christ, we will certainly know, but for now we don't. I remember reading that story of Templeton in a book by Lee Strobel called A Case for Faith, where he actually interviewed Templeton just a few years before his death. Lee Strobel was a Christian and he interviewed Templeton about how he got to where he was. And it says that in this interview, at the end of it, Strobel asked him, well, tell me what you believe about Jesus. Okay.
This is all your theories about God and for Templeton, it was about the suffering of the world that drove him away from God. Tell me about Jesus. And he replied, Jesus is very special to me. I still miss Him. And then he broke down in tears.
Somehow, after the entire second part of his life had been spent trying to convince himself and the rest of the world that God doesn't exist, that Christ couldn't have been a saviour, in some way, Jesus still had a hold on his life. But what those tears meant, we may never know. I remember praying for him at the end of that story, that maybe in the final hours of his life, he may have repented of the savage undermining that he attempted of the gospel in his life. And I felt confident I could pray for him for this one thing because I know for sure. I know for sure that God's grace is very deep and His love is very wide.
This morning, we may not know Templeton's fate, we may not know our family member's fate. The only thing we may know for certain this morning is whether you are a genuine believer. And I wanna tell you that you can know this morning whether you are. Jesus said, I am the good shepherd. My sheep know My voice when I call to them.
He said, the good shepherd lays His life down for His sheep and I have come for those sheep that they may have life. This morning, friend, do you know the voice of your shepherd? Have you heard Him calling? Place your trust today in Him again to guard your soul with His life, to save you from eternal death, to grant you life. And for those who are wandering sheep, those sheep that have gone to a different hillside, Turn away from your life of unbelief and believe in Him.
Let Him be your shepherd. Let Him be your guide. Let Him be the redeeming saviour that lays His life down for His sheep. And then for those family members who seemingly have turned away from the shepherd, what does that mean for us? It means we pray for them.
We pray for them that they may not be people with a fool's gold veneer pretending to be something that they're not. Pray that their lives of unbelief and sin are not genuine indicators of unregenerate, dead in sin hearts, but simply hearts that are burning with guilt, longing for their heavenly father even as they sit in the mud with the pigs. Even as they sit and long to feed on the pods and the waste and the garbage that these pigs are eating. Like the prodigal son burning to go home, burning to be reconciled with their father. Pray for them.
And finally, we have to praise our Lord Jesus for the assurance that we have that He holds us in arms of unshakable love. Thank your heavenly father that He has hands of immovable strength that nothing and no one can snatch you out of, including yourself. Almighty God, with His perfect love, in His unwavering determination, will not let go of you. He cannot lose you because He has set His heart on you. Let's pray.
Heavenly father, we thank You for this incredible, incredible news. Thank You for the great assurance this morning, even as we come this morning with wavering faith. Lord, having again just looked so much like our former selves, sounding and acting like people who haven't tasted the grace of God. Living and behaving and thinking as people that have not tasted the fruit of heaven in the Holy Spirit. Father, perhaps doubting that we could have ever have been recipients of Your love.
Thank You this morning that we are assured of that again. We pray, Lord, for our family members and friends that are perhaps wandering sheep, who need the shepherd to come and call them, to bring them back. We pray, Lord, that You will act swiftly, that You will act very soon because they are making a huge mess. Father, will You have mercy upon them? And we can only ask that because You've had mercy on us.
Father, let us be people who are radically moved by the great confidence that we have in You, people of incredible hope, where life at its worst cannot shake anything of what we have received in Christ. That we can be bold, that we can be confident, that we can be hope filled in every situation because we know Christ has called us. Christ has redeemed us. Christ has justified us. And just as those things are true, Christ will glorify us.
Thank You for that truth. We praise You with unending praise. In Christ's name. Amen.