Religious Arguements

It’s amazing to me how good God is.  I’m a guy who just wants to understand everything about Him and the world we live in, I don’t think that’s to much to ask.  I recently started praying for understanding again, but I realized that before when I would pray for it I would be expecting Him to agree with me, but now I just want to get it, whatever it is.

I have had salvation and spiritual gifts on my mind lately.  I want desperately to find the answer to the eternal security question.  How do we have an assurance of salvation.  There are typically two prevailing thoughts on the subject.  The first is one I grew up believing, that you were once saved always saved.  The other is that you could lose your salvation.  Now I don’t support the idea that God is an evil dictator just waiting for you to mess up then boom your salvation is gone.  I actually believe that if you can lose your salvation you would have to make a conscience decision to release yourself from God.

I think the more likely explanation is that you are once saved always saved.

I have agonized over this because there is so much scripture to support both sides of the argument.  I think first you have to define salvation.  I am not sure I can lay out an infallible explanation, but salvation is faith.  In the Bible there is only one thing that is require to be saved and that’s faith.  Faith is believing that Jesus came to earth and was born of a virgin and he died on the cross and was resurrected on the third day.  Thus saving us from our sin.  If you believed that your saved.  Where I think this gets sticky is when we talk about the maturing of our faith and salvation.  There’s a process that includes: repentance, sanctification, and several other steps.  A lot of the verses that deal with losing something are usually talking about losing sanctification or other steps in that growing process.  But if one loses faith he never really had true faith.  That’s the best I can do to explain this concept.  See faith although it is belief it transcends belief.

I also questioned the spiritual gifts commonly referred to as the sign gifts: healing, prophecy, tongues, etc.  I do believe they are for today as they have been for all ages.  There are two questions I ask you to contemplate when dealing with these gifts.  Why does God exercise these gifts and is there a difference between a healer and healing, or plug in your favorite gift.

The first question of why God exercises these gifts, I think the answer is to show us His glory.  There may be other reasons but I think it really boils down to God wants us to see His glory.  I think this might be why we don’t see the gifts as much in the US.  We live in a culture of ego.  All to often people are looked the person doing, instead of God.  In other cultures, especially 3rd world countries, they are more in tune with the spiritual realm.  So they are more accepting of the spiritual gifts.

The other question stems from defining the gifts.  When we look at the apostles they healed without question that the healing would happen and I don’t remember them ever not healing someone after praying for them.  Yet today people pray for folks and they get healed and don’t get healed.  So I think a healer is someone with the gift of healing that heals every time.  The rest of us don’t necessarily have the gift of healing but we pray for people and sometimes God heals them.  I use the example of healing because it’s the easiest illustration to understand.  This could pertain to many of the sign gifts.

I think that if we listen to God that we will reach a common understanding in today’s culture.  We must all continue to hear God and trust what the Bible says and abandon our preconceived notions.