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Many who debate the issue if one can lose their salvation, fail to study the mechanics of salvation and the role of each member of the Godhead in that salvation.

Reformed theology well studied the issue and developed the doctrines known as Common Grace and Efficacious Grace.

The anthropology of humans also assists in this doctrine.

God made man in body, soul, and spirit. After the fall, man died spiritually and now requires regeneration of the human spirit for eternal life. Today, no human being is born with a human spirit. It is created by God the Father and implanted by God the Holy Spirit as His gift to us when we have something which justifies us for righteousness.

Without a righteous human spirit, anything we do is qualified as a dead work. It might be good works or evil, but nevertheless fails to qualify as a work living in God’s Plan. Accordingly, they won’t be recorded in the Book of Works as they fail to qualify in Holiness as having Perfect Righteousness and Perfect Justice.

In God’s Plan, every human is afforded an opportunity for eternal life. Since we are all unbelievers before we bcome believers, every unbeliever has 2 decisions to make which are non-meritorious, before a human spirit is regenerated by God for them to receive sonship into His Family.

1) The decision to listen to the Gospel.
2) The decision to accept the call of God by faith alone in Christ alone.

Both of these decisions made independently of God, will fail to exhibit faith in what only God can provide.

As unbelievers, we can’t understand things of God because they are spiritually discerned. Without a human spirit, we not only don’t understand the spiritual thing, but will lapse into soulish interpretation of the spiritual thing, which means we will even think it foolishness (because we lack the spiritual faculty to discern spiritual things).

God’s solution comes in Common Grace and then at the right time, Efficiacious Grace.

In Common Grace, God the Holy Spirit becomes our human spirit imparting a spiritual knowledge of the Gospel in our soul. As unbelievers, we have a decision point to either accept to listen to this spiritual understanding imparted to our souls or we can respond with negative volition and reject the spiritual knowledge given our souls in Common Grace.

After receiving the Gospel message and understanding it, at some point God the Father makes the Divine Call to the unbeliever. This call is per God the Father’s Plan in time and place. It is by His Volition, not ours. He is Spirit, and a Living God. Without a human spirit, we still lack the ability to discern such things, so He Provides God the Holy Spirit again. This Provision is called Efficacious Grace. In Efficacious Grace, the unbeliever who now understands the Gospel, receives the Divine Call and if he accepts the work of God the Son on the Cross as payment for all his personal sins, he exhibits faith alone in Christ alone on the Cross, convicted of our sin, His Righteousness, and the Judgment by the spiritual life of God the Holy Spirit and that simple faith in Him is made Efficacious for eternal life.

God the Father is free in His Perfect Integrity to create us a new man, a human spirit, which is then given to us by God the Holy Spirit. These are the mechanics of salvation.

We are then identified with the Son of God, as all our sins were imputed to Him on the Cross, His Perfect righteousness is now imputed to us, at the point of faith alone in Christ alone. ANYTHING added to that faith voids that faith for its efficacy in our salvation. This is because our faith is His work in us, and His work is received as good.

The more I understand Common Grace and Efficacious Grace, the more obvious that salvation is fully the work and gift of God alone.

When one studies sin and worldliness, is also becomes obvious that we hae become very scarred in our souls to worldly solutions to problems.

One such worldly system appeals to our membership in groups as a panacea for our fellowship with God. He also provides a body of believers, i.e. the Church, but one needs to be careful of substituting a counterfeit for what He provides.

A particular weakness in many arrogant “Christians” are those who are tempted to study the Bible academically, but who fail to exercise faith and simply receive Common and Efficacious Grace, prior to joining a manmade religious club, they identify as the Church.

Accordingly, there might be many who we consider to be believers, who have never tasted the Spirit, but instead interpret Scripture from a soulish perspective independent of the spiritual understanding, and become either legalists or antinomians.

If they then turn obvious unbelievers, they might not ever had received the Divine Call.

Heb 6:1-6 also indicates when an believer receives the Divine Call, accepts it, receives the human spirit, and things of the Holy Spirit, then falls away, it is not proper for another Divine Call to arise as that would re-crucify Christ. This does NOT mean the apostate believer loses their human spirit. It means the believer must return to God with what He has been given already, to return to fellowship by faith alone in Christ alone.