I figure that God is a God of love and mercy as He tells us in Scripture, and when you read about how long He pleads with people to return to Him to avoid judgment and how much time He gives them to repent, and the lengths that He went to to save us, it makes no sense that He’d leave us unsure of our future, or that it could be so easily lost or cast away.
He WANTS to save us. The way I see it, is that He’s not looking for a reason, or excuse, to damn us, so that if we slip up just once, we’re hellbound, but He’s looking for a reason to save us, so that He takes our feeblest efforts in His direction and honors them with a response on His part, and saves us.
He knows we’re not perfect and we never will be, but as Psalm 103 says, He does not treat us according to our sins or repay us according to our iniquities and He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust and He shows us GREAT compassion.
When I was a Catholic, I never felt like God really wanted to save me, but it was more like an obligation on His part. If I did X, Y, and Z, then He HAD to save me. Since the God that the RCC presented was one who was so capricious and intolerant and impatient with our short comings, you had to be just about perfect to even think you had a chance of making it.
When my kids were little and disobeyed, it never even crossed my mind to disown them and make them come groveling back to me doing works to *prove* to me how sorry they were. Yes, I was grieved and disappointed by their rebellion, but they were still my children and I loved them anyway. A Father’s heart is not one to throw the child under the bus anytime they slipped up. Or even willfully sinned on occasion.
What a joy and what freedom to come to know the God of the Bible, the one full of compassion and mercy and grace, who understands when we slip, even when we throw our spiritual temper tantrums and deliberately sin, He and forgives us anyway.
THAT is security.
Amen.
Who will save us from this body of death?
Without that security,without that being persuaded that "He is able" the helmet of salvation may as well be made of tinfoil for all the good it will be protecting the mind.
When we consider what's coming upon the world,that peace of mind is going to be sorely tested!
1 Peter 1:13 (Amplified Bible) "So prepare your minds for action, be completely sober [in spirit—steadfast, self-disciplined, spiritually and morally alert], fix your hope completely on the grace [of God] that is coming to you when Jesus Christ is revealed."
Fix your hope COMPLETELY on His un-merited favour!
As time passes by, I become ever more aware of just how far short I fall, and how unworthy I am of any favor of God. Yes, it is true, who will deliver us from this body of death? I don't think Heaven will be filled with good people. I think it will be filled with bad people. People who were so bad, they recognized their lost state, and fled to the savior for protection.