Bible Text: 1 Corinthians 9:24-10:5 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Lent 2020 | One of the most obviously false, false teachings ever thought up by the heart of man is the once saved-always saved doctrine so popular among the Calvinists and now among our modern American evangelicals. It asserts that once a person has accepted the Lord Jesus into his heart as his personal Savior, that person can’t fall away or lose his salvation ever. Now as with all false teachings, this one has a hint of truth to it. It’s true, after all, that God will never leave us or forsake us. That’s His promise and He doesn’t lie. It’s true that if we are faithless, He is faithful, because He cannot deny himself. We could point to a hundred passages of the Bible that guarantee that God will never let us down. Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. God is our refuge and strength, an ever present help in trouble. No one can snatch them out of my hand. And this is obviously very comforting to us Christians. Our God swears by Himself, by the blood He shed for us, by His pain and suffering on the cross, by the marks on His hands and his side, that He is utterly and completely committed to us and wants us with Him in heaven, cleansed from all sin forever. These are the promises of the Gospel. Faith believes the Gospel, faith receives it all. The Gospel never fails, because it’s God’s promise and God can’t fail. But we can fail. Our faith can fail. And if you lose faith, you lose the Gospel and all its promises. So while it’s certainly and eternally true that God can’t be faithless, it’s also true that we can be faithless. And you know this, we all know this. We know what’s in our own heart. We know our own weakness. We know that left to ourselves, without God’s Spirit, we’d certainly ruin it all. That’s the point of God’s warning to us today, “Let him who thinks he stands, take heed lest he fall.”
Now the problem with once saved-always saved, besides it not being true, is that it can lead a person to think that because once upon a time he confessed the faith, had some genuine spiritual experience with Jesus, that he’s good for the rest of his life. The scholars scoff at this problem as if it couldn’t possibly happen. The pastor and the Christian see it happen all the time. It’s the family member who certainly did believe once but now scoffs at the morality and promises of the Bible. It’s the member who thinks he can go to church once a year or so, or even less, and yet still thinks he’s a Christian because, “I was confirmed in that church.” But of course, the confirmation vows are vows that specifically promise to come to church faithfully, and this isn’t because of some rule, like if I go to church so many times a year I’ve earned some reward from God for being so good, no, God forbid, it’s because without the body and blood of Jesus, without His Word of forgiveness, while we live in this world of sin and struggle with our own flesh, faith can’t live. That should be obvious to all of us. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. The thought of losing Jesus is so horrendous precisely because we hear Him Sunday after Sunday and we think of Him day after day, He is our Lord, we know Him, we hear His voice and we follow Him, we need and we want what He gives. Faith echoes what the Psalmist says about God, “My mother and my father may forsake me, but God will never forsake me.” And we say in return, Amen, let me never Lord forsake you.
This is what God warns about. Run the race with endurance. Run, live life, in such a way that you obtain the prize of heaven. That’s what St. Paul says. And he makes it very clear that if we don’t discipline our bodies and keep them under control, we run the risk of being disqualified and never getting to heaven. Now, by disciplining the body he means fighting against laziness and gluttony and sexual urges and pride and anger and hate, not that we can’t enjoy rest and enjoy food and enjoy marital union – of course we can and we should, God’s no prude, no despiser of pleasure, but we don’t obsess over our body’s desires and let them dominate our lives. Man shall not live by bread alone, Jesus says, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
This is what happens. I’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. A faithful Lutheran girl meets a guy, falls in love, and decides that it’s not worth losing him by keeping herself a virgin before marriage, and so she gives herself to him, chooses that pleasure above her Lord Jesus, does it over and over again, and falls away, stops coming to church altogether, and eventually never even thinks about her God. She doesn’t discipline her body and she ends up losing Jesus. Or a kid goes to college and just gets lazy, would rather sleep or play video games or make money or do whatever else makes his body feel good than come to church. He indulges his body and he ends up falling away. What happens is not simply that church and Jesus fall out of someone’s life, as if that just happens for no apparent reason. No, what happens is always that Jesus is replaced with something that our flesh likes better. Sometimes that’s base pleasure like sex or drugs or alcohol or shear laziness, sometimes it’s some worldly philosophy or politic that nurses the pride, but regardless, faith doesn’t just fail, it’s replaced with something else. That’s why Paul says to discipline the body, keep it under control. Not because you’re saved by fasting or bodily preparation but because you’re saved by faith, and faith can be forced out and replaced with something entirely useless if we live our lives in service to our own bodies.
Paul gives an example from the Old Testament. The people of Israel were saved. Literally, saved from slavery in Egypt, and brought to the very border of the promised land. God baptized them in the Red Sea. He fed them with waters of life from a Rock to teach them about Christ, who would give them true life from heaven. These were their sacraments. They were Christians. They had Christian faith. And they fell. They lost the promised land. Lost salvation. Once they were saved, but they weren’t always saved.
And why not? Because they didn’t believe. And what replaced their belief? Care for their own bodies, fear that they couldn’t conquer the Canaanites, doubt that God would actually give them what he promised. And so, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness.
So let’s look at the ancient Israelites and learn from them. A negative example is sometimes a better teacher than a positive example. When a man overdoses on drugs, it’s a potent and obvious warning never to touch drugs, ever. When you see a man ruin his life and his marriage by being unfaithful to his wife, you have a clear and unmistakable warning to keep from sexual sin. And so St. Paul gives us this negative example. They forgot the wonders of their God. That’s what they did. They saw Him open the sea by the hand of Moses. They saw Him give them water from a rock by Moses’ staff. God saved them by these Sacraments. They had God’s guarantee that He would take care of them and lead them to the promised land. But they turned their faith away from what God had done for them, away from God’s promises to them, away from the sure fact that God is powerful to fulfill His promise, and they fell.
Now this is the warning from St. Paul. And he doesn’t say anything that will cancel out the fact of this warning, that you can lose your faith if you pursue sin. Because you can, if you embrace your sin, live in it, persist in it, refuse to repent of it, you can lose the faith. God doesn’t say this simply to scare you. He says it because He loves you. He wants you with Him forever. And there should always be a healthy fear in you of doing anything that would jeopardize that: Gnothi sauton, the ancient philosophers said – Know thyself; know where your flesh would take you if you let it. Learn to hate sin, to run from it, to always want to do better, to strive to keep your God’s commandments, because chasing after sin is running away from God and heaven.
But this St. Paul does say, because it’s God’s honest truth and the message of our Gospel for today. Paul is confident, sure, that he will complete the race. He runs with confidence. You are not saved by your works, either by what you do or you don’t do, you are saved only by God’s free grace in Christ Jesus. And your faith will not die, it cannot die, so long as you have God’s Word. God’s Word will do as God promises. All the promises I quoted at the beginning of this sermon, that your Lord is with you always to the end of the age, that nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus, so long as you are hearing them, know for certain that God Himself is speaking them to you because He loves you and He wants you to be with Him forever, that He is stronger than all your sin and all your doubts and every temptation you will ever face, and His strength, his power to save, is in His Word, bought and sealed by His own blood. Confess with St. Paul, I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. Believing comes from hearing. And you are hearing the words of everlasting life. Your trust is not in yourself, in some quality in you, in the purity of your commitment, but in God’s promise, in the quality of His incarnation, death, and resurrection, in the purity of His commitment to you in your Baptism, in the body and blood given to you for the forgiveness of your sins.
You don’t have to complete the race to know you will obtain the prize. The prize is Christ. And He is yours. He has borne your sin in His own Body. He has conquered your sin and your temptations and your death. He has run the race and obtained the prize of salvation for you. Claim your Baptism, eat and drink the spiritual food of Christ’s body and blood, the very body and blood that has won for you the imperishable crown of life, and you are running a victorious race. No sin, no temptation, no devil can overcome the Rock of our salvation. He’s already defeated them all. He’s already passed through our wilderness and finished the race to the promised land. And where He is there we will be also, because our life is hidden with Christ in God. The answer to all our failures in our race toward the goal of eternal life is always, always, the Word of Christ’s cross, the sure promise of forgiveness and adoption as sons given us in our Baptism, the body and blood given for us and to us. Here is our sure victory. It is ours now, and it is the imperishable crown to which we run every day of our lives. God keep us faithful now and always. Amen.