I know Catholics believe differently regarding God’s grace. My husband was Catholic and when he became born again, he was relieved to learn that God’s grace would never leave him. It wasn’t going to bop in and out of his life because he sinned. ALL have sinned and come short of the glory of God. When you sin, you repent and confess your sin and God is quick to forgive it. He doesn’t remove His grace because you sinned and repented. Now if one continues in sin and refuses God’s grace, that’s another thing.
You wrote:
“I know Catholics believe differently regarding God’s grace. My husband was Catholic and when he became born again, he was relieved to learn that God’s grace would never leave him.”
Really? So if your husband became a Hindu, would God’s grace leave him?
“It wasn’t going to bop in and out of his life because he sinned.”
And this would include apostasy too?
“ALL have sinned and come short of the glory of God. When you sin, you repent and confess your sin and God is quick to forgive it.”
And if you don’t repent? Do you hold on to God’s grace - all of it - even then?
“He doesn’t remove His grace because you sinned and repented.”
Who said He did? Aren’t you overlooking the possibility that we severe our relationship to God’s grace - even only partially - by our own actions? God does not force grace on a man.
“Now if one continues in sin and refuses God’s grace, that’s another thing.”
Oh, so it’s “another thing”? So, you can’t lose grace, except when you lose grace? And you can only lose that grace when you refuse it or “continue” in sin, but not when you sin?
God says differently. In His word - 1 John 5:16-17 - we are told that some sins - but not all - are deadly. Deadly to what? Deadly how? They are deadly because they severe that grace relationship between the sinner and God.
This is exactly what the author of Hebrews was talking about in Hebrews 10:26-36, “For if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains asacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment. . . . How much worse punishment do you thinkwill be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God and profaned the blood of the cov-enant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace? . . . For you have need ofendurance, so that you may do the will of God, and receive what is promised”
As Peter pointed out in his second letter (2:21): “For it would have been better for them [those who should know better] never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.”
If “once saved, always saved” - a doctrine no one believed in before the 16th century is true - then why are we told to we must persevere “to the end”? (Mt. 10:22; 24:13)
Why must we stay “in the kindness of God” (Rom. 11:22) in order to reign with Christ (2 Tim. 2:12)?
Why are we told in scripture of several cases of Christians who have fallen away through sin (e.g., 1 Tim. 5:8; Heb. 6:4-6; Jas. 5:19-20; 2 Pet. 2:20-21)?
Why does St. Paul, who had a dramatic conversion himself, write, “I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:27)? Why would he need to do that if OSAS is true?
St. Paul also advises us to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). Why? Why would there be fear and trembling if OSAS is true?
OSAS is a 16th century belief, but not an orthodox Christian belief at all.