What? The Protestants don't believe in repentance. Once saved, always saved. Jesus died for their sins and they're home free.
“The Protestants don’t believe in repentance.”
Justification is by faith alone, but saving faith is never alone.
Romans 3:28 NKJV
Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law.
James 2:17 NKJV
Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
It is an error to say salvation is by faith alone because, as I said in my previous post, justification is only part of the salvation process.
Faith is always accompanied by works of faith and evidentiary “fruit”.
Further, there are prerequisites to faith, and they are expressed in repentance. A person who does not repent cannot believe.
John 12:39-40 NKJV
Therefore they could not believe, because Isaiah said again: “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, Lest they should see with their eyes, Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, So that I should heal them.”
John 5:44 NKJV
How can you believe, who receive honor from one another, and do not seek the honor that comes from the only God?
“Once saved, always saved.”
This is not a Biblical saying, and it is flawed. As I pointed out, salvation is a process. It is not a state of being.
There is a Biblical doctrine of the security of the believer. But salvation is conditional. The test for saving faith is perseverance. The elect, those who are called by God to belive UNTO salvation, always persevere unto the end.
The idea of the “sinner’s prayer” for salvation and as a milestone for assurance of salvation is not Biblical.
Those who “call on the name of the Lord” do not merely do so one time. We are the ones who enter into a relationship with Christ through the indwelling Holy Spirit and continually call on Jesus as our Lord. It is an ongoing experience characterized by obedience (meaning to act consistent with the reality that Jesus is Lord) that confirms the reality of the salvation experience.
Those who preach a false Gospel that makes “saving faith” into merely a cursory acknowledgment of the historicity of Christ’s death with no repentance and no surrender to Him as Lord, are leading people to Hell. Those who say a “Christian” can murder (e.g. abortion), commit adultery and fornication, can steal and live any way they choose and still enter Heaven are woefully mistaken. Those who are in this state need to not merely revisit their initial “salvation experience” but question altogether their very concept of what Biblical salvation means.
“Jesus died for their sins and they’re home free.”
Jesus died to take away our sins, not merely to take away the penalty of them.
John 1:29 NKJV
The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
1 John 3:5 NKJV
And you know that He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him there is no sin.