Perseverance of the Saints is the final petal in the TULIP.  It is the one that brings focus to all the rest and it is the one to which many Arminians or Pelagians want to hold without holding onto the rest.  Some who call themselves Arminians mean by that simply that they believe in free will that is fully free or that they believe that the initiative and impetus for salvation is within us and does not come from without.  In other words, I can choose to be saved by God’s grace whenever I want to make that choice.  It is totally up to me.  But this not classic Arminianism or Pelagianism.  The classic variety holds that entering into a relationship with God and staying in that relationship with God is tied totally to what I do.  I make the choice to enter the relationship and I can make the choice to exit the relationship.  I can be saved, then be lost, and then be saved again. I can come in repentance and faith to Jesus and then by my own choice reject that relationship to which I have entered.  This is classic Arminianism where getting in and staying in is all up to us.

That is why when I hear conversations about Calvinism being such a bug-a-boo and then listen to people who are talking that way, I want to throw up my hands in holy laughter because some whom I have heard being critical of Calvinism are themselves classic Calvinists!  A classic Calvinist is simply someone who believes in the absolute sovereignty of God and the total sinfulness of humans so that God alone can save us and He does it by His grace.  A classic Calvinist is one who believes that it is God who paid the price for our redemption.  We bring nothing all to the table except the filthy rags of our rotten and ruinous righteousness.  We come as penitents pleading for mercy.  We arrive as outcasts wanting to be welcomed.  We come as enemies of Christ desiring to be reconciled, and all of that because of the grace of God that awakens us to our sinfulness in the light of His holiness as He brings us the good gifts of repentance and faith and brings us alive again, we who were dead in our sin.  A true Calvinist believes that when God awakens a sinner and saves that sinner by His grace, God keeps what God does.  God secures what God saves.  But God does more than this.

This holy and righteous God who could have chosen to save no single solitary soul and still be God has chosen to save some.  And those who are saved from His side are known to Him from before the foundation of the world.  From our side we only know this that whoever cries out to God in true repentance and faith is saved by this God.  This God is reaching to save all who cry to Him in repentance.  But how do we know that we are saved?  This God who gives all that is needed to get saved, gives in equal measure all that is needed to give evidence of that great salvation that He has given us.  He imputes to us His righteousness or He declares us to be by position what we are not in person:  fully right and perfectly holy in His presence.  And then He imparts to us His Holy Spirit, His very presence and power to work in us and on us and through us to make us all that He wants us to be.  And He does that because when He saves us and secures us, He begins to shape us for His purposes which is simply that we live in obedience to Him to give praise to His Name because what is at stake ultimately is His credibility and integrity as God.  Thus, He does not trust either our salvation or our sanctification to us.  He gives us what we need so that we can work out our own salvation with fear and trembling because He is the one who is working in us for His pleasure.

One of my real struggles is that I am increasingly running into people who want salvation to be all about them and their choice, but they want their eternal security to be all about God.  They trust themselves to do what is necessary to get saved but they do not trust themselves to do all that is necessary to stay saved.  They want half the truth.  All heresy is half the truth.  Now the truth is that you either do what is necessary to get saved and thus you do all that is necessary to stay saved which means that you and I are responsible for perfecting ourselves in holiness or God does what is necessary to give by grace glorious salvation and then God does all that is necessary to keep all whom He has saved.  Now the real issue here is not which of these options is most attractive.  The real issue is what would cause us to want to mix the two?

Here is my answer.  if we mix the two so that salvation is up to me and staying saved is up to God then I can make getting saved whatever I want to make it.  I can make it my saying a prayer or walking an aisle or being baptized or making a profession of faith.  I can make it easy on myself and then just kick back because I have the other side of the equation that God is going to keep now what I have done.  Does anybody see this kind of thing happening in the church in our day?  Is this a fox in the henhouse or satan among the society of the saints?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful really if I could make getting saved what I want it to be and when I want it to be and then turn it all over to God to keep what I have done.  But it doesn’t work that way. It is either all of God who saves and keeps by grace or it is all of us who choose and lose only to choose again, and perhaps lose again.  The latter is a true Arminian.  The former is a true Calvinist.

Let me just say one other thing here that is so fascinating to me.  The reformed or Augustinian or Pauline or Calvinist view of salvation has been the exclusive view of salvation from the second century through the late nineteenth century.  Every time the “other view” reared its head, it was condemned as heresy by the leaders of the church, until the late nineteenth century and for sure in the twentieth century under the influence of the revivalist and church growth movement, the latter view began to sway the thoughts of many and the former, biblical view; began to recede.  And this is so important:  what began to shape the life of the church in the late nineteenth and twentieth century was not the biblical view of salvation but the practical concerns of getting people in so as to grow a church so as to have the numbers to build buildings and to sustain programs.  You can write this one down:  whenever a church focuses on growth through numbers only, the first doctrine to be depleted is the doctrine of salvation. The church focused on numerical growth only will make it easy for people to get saved and to get into the church. 

I praise God not for the recovery of historic Calvinism but for something far more important.  What Calvin communicated was simply what Paul had preached and what Paul preached was no more and no less that who Jesus and what Jesus did and who Jesus was and what Jesus did was no more and no less than the fulfillment of the Old Testament so that the recovery of historic Calvinism is simply a return to the core issues of the Gospel of Jesus Christ which is the heart and soul of the canon of sacred scripture. 

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