Hebrews 6 and Assurance of Salvation III

Here's part III of my serialized sermon on Hebrews 6 and the assurance of salvation.  As you can see, this is all still introduction to issues raised in Hebrews 6.  I'll preach the rest of the sermon next week so I'll go ahead and keep this little serialization going for a few more days.

This part begins with a little thingy I got from R. C. Sproul on four kinds of people in regards to salvation.

III. Four Kinds of People

1. Those who think they are saved but aren’t 

2. Those who think they are saved and are.

3. Those who don’t think they are saved, but are.  

4. Those who don’t think they are saved and aren’t.

    In this section of the book of Hebrews, the author was sharing his worries that he feared that there were many people there who were in the first category – they thought they were saved, but they weren’t.  

     This is a point that we don’t talk about much in our day, but that the Bible actually talks about a good deal -

IV. The Reality of Counterfeit Believers

     Let me just go through a bunch of Scripture passages that speak of the reality of counterfeit believers.

1. Matthew 7:21-23

²¹ “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. ²² Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ ²³ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

Please notice in this passage that the evildoers that Jesus speaks of are people who confess Jesus as Lord. See how they address Jesus as Lord twice – “Lord, Lord.”

Also, please notice that they prophesy in His name. I am not sure if these prophesies were of the nature of foretelling, as in telling the future, or if they were “forthtelling,” simply telling God’s Word in the here and now. But in either case, they seemed to be proclaiming the Word of God – in other words, these were faithful witnesses of Jesus Christ.

And, they cast out demons and performed miracles in His name. They had the power of the Spirit moving through them.

And what did Jesus say to them – “depart from me you evildoers.” Jesus says “you may know me, but I don’t know you.”

And it is also important to point out that Jesus warns them by saying that there are many who are like this. He says “many will say to me,” not “some,” or “a few,” but many.

2. Matthew 22:11-14:

¹¹ “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. ¹² ‘Friend,’ he asked, ‘how did you get in here without wedding clothes?’ The man was speechless.

¹³ “Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

¹⁴ “For many are invited, but few are chosen.”

     This fellow who came to the banquet looked and acted as if he belonged, but he didn’t because he didn’t have the proper wedding clothes on. You’ll also notice verse 14 – many are invited, but few are chosen. Notice that not only was this guy invited, but he responded positively to the invitation to come to the wedding banquet and thus to come to Christ. Yet, he wasn’t chosen because he wouldn’t wear the proper wedding clothes. 

     Clothing is sometimes used as a metaphor for righteousness in the Bible. What happened here is that this guy came to the wedding feast and he was able to fool the other guests. He looked to them like he belonged, but the king knew different – those clothes he was wearing weren’t the proper wedding clothes. He was standing in his own righteousness, not the righteousness of Christ. 

     This goes to show that there are some who can fool their fellow church members, but they can’t fool God. He sees what is really in their heart. And there are many who really, really want to be in the kingdom, at the wedding and they can walk and talk the talk sufficiently well to fool others – they just can’t fool God.

3. II Corinthians 11:13-15:  

¹³ For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ. ¹⁴ And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. ¹⁵ It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.

In this passage Paul is speaking of people who are public servants of Christ. He compares them to Satan, who masquerades as an angel of light.  There are those out there who are doing the work of Christ in Christ’s name who look like genuine believers in the same way that Satan can transform himself to look like an angel of light.

Another Scripture that is important in this regard is . . .

4. II Peter 1:5-11

⁵ For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; ⁶ and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; ⁷ and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. ⁸ For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁹ But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins.

¹⁰ Therefore, my brothers, be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure. For if you do these things, you will never fall, ¹¹ and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

    How do you know that you are truly called, truly one of God’s elect – in verse 10 – by doing these things. What things? The things in verses 5-9, adding to your faith, goodness, and to goodness knowledge and so on and so forth.

You assure yourself that you belong to Christ not by pointing to something you did in the past, but by continually adding to your faith in the present.

5. II Corinthians 13:5

⁵ Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?

     We are often told that we are not to question whether or not we are saved if we have made some kind of past decision for Christ. But Paul speaks to people who have been professing Christians for years here in II Corinthians 13:5 and says “examine yourselves to see if you are in the faith.”

     We are to examine ourselves to see if we are in the faith.

     I don’t necessarily believe that Christians of the past were always better than we are today or that there is a golden age from the past to which we can never attain. But I do think that some of our forefathers understood some biblical truths that we have let slip and that is this truth of the importance of examining yourself to see if you are in the faith.

     Jonathan Edwards was the great theologian, philosopher and preacher of the First Great Awakening. His ministry ignited an awakening in New England that led to thousands upon thousands of professions of faith in Christ.

     Yet, if you look through his writings you see that one of the great themes of his life’s work is distinguishing between true and false conversions. One of his greatest works is “Religious Affections,” and it is a book length treatment designed to help those who have undergone some kind of religious experience to examine their hearts to see if this experience was real.

     Similarly, an old Puritan named Matthew Mead wrote a book called “The Almost Christian Discovered,” which he devoted to a study of those who had almost become Christians, but hadn’t. He talks about some of the things we saw in Matthew 7 where we think that because someone addresses Jesus as “Lord” and does all of these great things for Him that means that they are a Christian. He says that, in fact, this may mean that the person is almost a Christians, but not quite.

     And so I give you all of this by way of introduction to Hebrews 6. This passage will be very hard to deal with if you come to it with the notion that one should never question his salvation, because that is not the author’s presupposition in writing it.

     This passage will be very hard to understand if you come to it with the idea that a Christian can lose his salvation because then you are going to have to deal with all kinds of conflicts with other passages of Scripture.

     This passage makes sense if you come to it with the biblical framework that there is such a thing as a counterfeit believer, and that it could be you. And that you and I need to be warned so that we examine ourselves to make sure that we are in the faith.  We can be deceived.

     I understand that I have said some things today that are different from what you might expect in your standard evangelical church and that are different from things which you may believe earnestly and I may have even said some things that have upset you or made you mad.

 

    That’s not my intention, but the way I figure it, if you don’t feel like tarring and feathering your preacher from time to time he probably isn’t doing his job. It’s not the preacher’s job to continually repeat to you the things you already believe, but to cause you to continually be examining and re-examining what you believe and do.