Doctrinal Housekeeping

Alright, at church on Sunday, the pastor was continuing his series on FAQ, and one of the questions asked was "Can you lose your salvation?" (So far, the pastor has answered everything as the typical evangelical would - he answered this question in an evangelical manner, but not the way that I'd expect him to.) He answered "Yes." Now, his explanation was that you can give your faith up in God, there is nothing you can do to lose your salvation, but you can choose to remove your faith from God. This is actually logically consistent. I'll explain -

Most people believe that we have "free will" and what this means is that you choose to put your faith in Christ, however once we put our faith in Christ, God removes our free will and won't let us lose our faith. This pastor said, you can choose to put your faith in God, hence you can choose to remove your faith from God - God doesn't take away your free will once you become a Christian. Now, the response that most people will give to this line of inquiry is that God has bought us with the Holy Spirit (a down payment) Eph. 1:12-15. My response to this is, well so then God takes away your free will once you're saved, right? This is the logical course of discussion, if you have free will to accept Christ, then you have free will to reject Christ once you're saved. Unless one claims that God takes away our free will and the ability to reject God upon our being saved. Then I would ask if God takes away all of our choices or just our choice concerning faith in God. Quite a dilemma huh? THIS IS THE PROBLEM WITH FREE WILL ARGUMENTS!! But, some of you might bite the bullet and say "yes" God takes away our free will with respect to faith upon becoming a Christian.

What's my solution? In the first place sin has so greatly affected our ability to reason that we would never choose to put our faith in God without God giving us the faith to believe in Him (Eph. 2:9-11). So, since God gives us faith, He won't take it away, because He has given it to us, because of His grace. Salvation is nothing that I can do on my own, it is not a choice I make, God gives me the faith, thus I can't choose to not believe in Him. Does God force us to take faith - no. Faith is a higher form of reason, while we are blinded by sin, all of us will reject God. Once God removes the veil from our eyes we would all accept Christ. Does this mean that evangelism is a waste of time - no. We don't know who will listen to the preaching of the gospel, that's why we preach the gospel. In a sense it should be easier to preach the gospel, because one's acceptance of the gospel doesn't rely upon our ability to preach the gospel. We can't convince someone to accept Christ, that's the Holy Spirit's job.

Now, in typical baptist monk fashion, I haven't clearly communicated what I'm trying to say, so when my friend in Poland tells me that she can't understand what I'm saying I'll try to explain it better, but sometimes monks are just supposed to be confusing...