Have you ever had an epiphany? A moment when the lights come on…almost literally? I’ve had only a few, and one such moment surrounded an important verse in 1 John: chapter 2, verse 19.
Before I explore my epiphany, let me provide some background. As most of you know, I grew up attending strict fundamentalist churches. And while they sure inculcated us with an understanding of what good fundamentalists did or did not do, they were not always so clear on doctrine. “Theology” was almost a bad word. “Seminary” was always castigated by being referred to as a “cemetery”. But this is not to say that no important doctrines were stressed.
We learned the basic truths of the Gospel, and the bigger doctrines of the Bible: the nature of God, the Trinity, the Deity and Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Eternal State, along with a heavy dose of pre-trib eschatology and dispensationalism. Yet oft times the messages were fairly shallow.
In such an environment I remember learning two important doctrinal truths. We as Christians are eternally secure and you can’t work your way to salvation. In my soulwinner’s New Testament I compiled lists of verses proving eternal security and also disproving works salvation, and I did my best to use them. I knew my Assemblies of God relatives were very wrong on these issues, for instance.
In some of the circles we were in growing up, there was an overemphasis on salvation being simply a moment in time when one prayed to be saved. As a teenager, when my family travelled around to raise support to go to Africa as missionaries, I remember encountering several different churches where they would push for multiple “salvations” each time people went out soul-winning. Thankfully, such was not the practice of our church. And I am sure my dad never aimed to produce numbers, for numbers’ sake alone.
In my older teen years, I became fairly familiar with David Cloud’s Way of Life Bible Encyclopedia, and I began educating myself more in the way of doctrine. I learned why Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists were wrong, for instance. And I was further bolstered in the doctrine of eternal security and against the doctrine of works based salvation. And at Bible college, thankfully, I was further taught that a “quick prayerism” model of salvation was wrong. We were taught the importance of repentance, and also warned that many fundamentalists were minimizing its importance.
Yet still in this environment, I did not really have an answer to the scenario of someone who made a seemingly genuine profession of faith, and had stuck around for a while, but then drifted away. Some wouldn’t drift but they’d wilt. Yes preachers would often push for people to examine whether they had truly been saved or not, but somehow this always came across as making sure you had “said the right words” or were “sincere enough” when you initially “got saved”. Since my profession of faith happened when I was 4 years old, I was often trying to remember what exactly occurred on that day, to be sure it was a genuine profession.
This issue, of false professions of faith, was not really discussed much, that I remember. As I learned more about repentance, I found myself spending lots of time in my gospel presentations making sure everything was clear and that the person knew about everything I could think of before I led them in the sinner’s prayer. I came to eventually stop using the sinner’s prayer and just ask the person to pray on their own, too.
Something else, however, went with the environment I was in to stilt my thinking. It was assumed that there would be many “nominal” Christians. We were always encouraged to press on and become a “super” Christian, of sorts. No one really connected spiritual growth with genuine salvation. It was more or less connected with will power and character. We were encouraged to “just do it”. To do whatever it takes to get up early and be in the Word. And at times it was easy to get burned out as I strived to make myself do the things I felt I should.
Then we moved to California and were introduced to a ministry which prized expositional preaching. This was a completely new thing to both of us. And as we were fed, something kept coming up in the messages. Scripture assumed that true Christians would behave like true Christians. Scripture assumed that if conversion was genuine, then growth was inevitable. And then one day, the pastor pointed us to 1 John 2:19.
The light came on. I had an epiphany, and I began then to understand some things which eventually moved me to affirm Calvinism’s doctrine of the “perseverance of the saints”.
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Sorry to do this to you, but you’ll have to stay tuned until next time for the rest of the story. Tomorrow, hopefully, we will look at what 1 John 2:19 says and how it reshaped my thinking. I am expecting to finish this tomorrow, but it may take one more installment. We’ll see. Go to Part 2.
