Once saved, always saved? I'm gonna go with the Bible on this one...

I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.  My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.  I and the Father are one. ~ John 10:28-30

I was raised in a church that very fervently believed you could lose your salvation if you "backslid", a term I have come to despise.  Basically, the concept was that, even if you had priorly asked Jesus for forgiveness and dedicated your life to him, if you sinned badly enough or for long enough, you could lose your salvation.  If you died within this time period, you would go to hell.

Now, for this church, "backslid" could mean everything from listening to secular music to hanging out with non-Christian kids.  (You were allowed to witness to them, but not to be friends with them.  Yeah, it doesn't make any more sense to me as an adult than it did to me then.)  Basically, if you weren't, as they often termed it, "100% on-fire sold-out for Jesus", you were worse than a sinner, you were a lukewarm Christian, and Jesus would spit you out of his mouth.

You could even sin through your emotions.  If you didn't wake up every morning filled with energy from the joy of the Holy Spirit, you must be in sin.  The same thing was true if you didn't witness to every single stranger you met in your day-to-day life.  You were expected to be on that "just-got-back-from-a-missions-trip" high, 24-7.  If you didn't feel it, the problem was you.  A popular saying was that, "If you feel far from God, it must be you; He didn't move."

So the pattern was, you go to a youth rally, you get pumped up, you leave, you have that emotional (I now no longer believe it was spiritual) high for a while, you lose it, you feel guilt over having "backslid", you go crying and crawling down to an altar call to rededicate your life, or you go on another (often expensive) trip or rally, get that high again, rinse, repeat.

In an insecure, obsessive-compulsive youth, this sort of thinking led me down paths of paranoia and depression.  I constantly confessed every little sin, every unhappy thought, the second it happened, terrified of falling dead and being condemned to hell.  This grew into a festering hate for myself, and hate for the hypocrites I was surrounded with in my youth group.

As an adult, I can now realize that the doctrine of "conditional salvation" has no biblical basis, and was a tool of manipulation wielded by a controlling church.  However, I still run into a lot of people who very strongly believe that a person can lose their salvation.  Here are some of the arguments I hear most frequently, and why I believe they are not scripturally sound.

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I'm so proud of myself for actually reading Leviticus.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my Core Group (me and two awesome ladies a lot cooler than me) is currenty slogging through Leviticus.

Leviticus is not an easy read. There are rules for building the temple. And rules for sacrifice. And a few thousand (it seems) rules about what's clean and unclean, whether it's clean or unclean to eat, whether it's a clean or unclean affliction, or clean or unclean time to have sex (I don't know how they enforced that one, or rather, I don't want to think about it).

And this is why people sometimes feel like the Old Testament is a buzzkill, because of "Thou shalt not" books like Leviticus. But reading it now, as an adult, I'm starting to see how a lot of those laws made sense.

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Sanitizing the Bible: Explaining ancient Judaic wedding customs to 3-year-olds

Everyone remember the story of Jesus's first miracle? You know...He was at a wedding and the guests were upset because their celebratory beverages were running low, so he turned water into wine. (Or, if you're Southern Baptist, you can pretend it was "grape juice". Just kidding; I love you crazy fundies.)

Anyway, in my preschoolers children's church this past week, we were talking to the kids about helping our friends, like Jesus helped his in the story. Now, every week as we're telling the story, we ask the kids questions to get them to interact, since it would require sorcery or thorazine to get toddlers to sit still quietly for 10 minutes.

Being that I'm one of the teachers, their answers to questions normally border somewhere between "hilarious" and "disastrous". Fortunately, I was not the one telling the story this week, so all I had to do was try to stifle laughter and wrangle younguns (similar to cat-herding) while my friend taught the kids.

Here's what we got:

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Sanitizing the Bible: When Christianity isn't baby-friendly

For those who may not be aware, the Bible is not PG. Not even PG-13. There are more than enough passages to warrant a solid R rating.

I'm not just referring to the obvious stuff either, like Song of Solomon, or the massacre of the innocents. There is some very depraved and raunchy stuff in the Bible. :cough: Lot's daughers :cough:

But you don't normally think about that stuff. Or, at least, I don't. Normally, when I remember things from the Bible, I just think of the books I really enjoy, like Galatians, or Proverbs, or Ecclesiastes. (A really cool and visual verse is Ecclesiastes 10:1, "Dead flies doth cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour, so doth a little folly ruin a reputation for wisdom and honour." The unnecessary "u"s should be indication that I learned it in the Old King James version.)

But a couple of months back, our church charged us with trying to read all the way through the Bible in a year. They even gave us handy little reading charts that break it up so you read about three chapters a day, two from Old Testament and one from New. (The idea is that you have the New Testament there to help you get through some of the really slow parts in the Old Testament. Can you imagine reading nothing but Leviticus for a month? I've tried to do it in the past, and it was mentally painful.)

It's always been a goal of mine to read through the whole Bible, so I joined a small group with two other women in my congregation and we meet once a week to hold each other accountable and discuss what we thought of that week's reading. I even started looking back through the toddler-friendly collection of Bible stories I got my son as an infant, figuring he's about to the age where he can enjoy it, and relate it back to the stories they're learning in class.

It was in comparing my adult, big-girl Bible and my son's "Bible" that I realized just how much they had to leave out. And, even worse, how much more they should have left out.

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