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.
Because it's been like, at least a good whole week since I've offended anyone (via blog, at least), I thought today would be a good time to write about something I've been pondering for a long time now . . . Why are Christians so hung up on homosexuality?
