A Salvation Adrift

"But you must continue to believe this truth and stand firmly in it. Don’t drift away from the assurance you received when you heard the Good News." Colossians 1:23

Shortly after becoming a Christian, I found that the Lord was working on me in ways I never would have imagined. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is talking to His disciples about the promised Holy Spirit that He was going to send after He died on the cross and rose from the grave. He tells the disciples, "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own but will tell you what he has heard. He will tell you about the future (John 16:3)." I was beginning to feel that the Holy Spirit was leading me into all truth; not only from the standpoint of revealing the meaning of scripture to me but that He was leading me into the truth regarding the society I lived in. A case in point is a 1995 documentary called, "A Nation Adrift." It bills itself as "the true story of how God's sovereign hand guided the founders of America. It takes you on a journey...from Christopher Columbus to Jamestown...from Valley Forge to the Constitutional Convention...from the Civil War to the Stock Market Crash...from FDR to the present. The result of the journey will give us a better understanding of where America is today, how she arrived here, and where she must turn at this critical hour. For as Thomas Jefferson once asked, "Can the liberties of a nation be secure, when we have removed the conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?"" To be adrift is defined as "(of a boat or its passengers) floating without being either moored or steered." In other words, the United States was said to be adrift in the sense that it was no longer being steered by the biblical principles and precepts that influenced the Founding Fathers. Watching the documentary made me realize that the country, just like a boat adrift at sea, was drifting out of control and becoming increasingly lost. What it taught me was that the further you get away from your foundation, the more the truth of your foundation becomes foreign to you. For example, biblical morality that once was once believed to be second nature to most is now treated as if it never existed. Therefore, in order to reign in the increase in the immorality that has occurred, we have to resort to more and more laws in an effort to change the behavior of the people. Unfortunately, Christianity has much of the same problem affecting it as well.

When it comes to the issue of salvation, many Christians believe that you can lose your salvation. You will hear those that believe this say things like, "Those who do not obey Him . . . have ceased to be His son." Others have said, "you CAN know you are saved today but you can't know that 10 years from today you will still be saved. The Holy Spirit gives us the assurance of salvation - for today, if we ask Him." Just for clarification, salvation is the restoration of the life of God. When a person is born again through faith in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit comes to live inside that person. And because of the forgiveness given to us when Jesus died on the cross, the life of God will never leave us. It is the Holy Spirit that "steers" a believer from within as that person responds to the truth God is revealing to them. There is no need for that person to be led by laws designed to modify their behavior because the God who authored those laws is guiding them. However, those that say you can lose your salvation, are basically saying that the Holy Spirit can leave a person and that there is no one left to steer a person through life. Therefore, these people are only left with having to subject themselves and others to laws to try and produce the behavior that would come naturally as a byproduct of allowing the Holy Spirit to lead them. In essence, as Colossians 1:23 warns against, they have drifted away from the assurance they received when they heard the Good News. It is not good news to not have the assurance of your salvation because now you are responsible for it. At this point you must ask yourself, do you trust yourself to obtain your salvation or will you trust Jesus and His finished work on your behalf? Because just like the increased laws in our society have not slowed down the immorality in it, subjecting ourselves to God's laws will only lead us further away from the salvation we believe they are leading us toward. It is past time for us to allow the Holy Spirit to do its job and let Him lead us into all truth about who is steering our boat and who are His passengers.