“Once Saved, Always Saved”?

I have made this statement into a question because it’s one that confuses (and concerns) many sincere Christians. As with many of the subjects that I write about here, it’s something that was raised with me just recently in conversation, so I thought it worthy of a blog in response.

The confusion and concern springs from a combination of what appear to be contradictions in what the Bible has to say on that question (though nowhere does the Bible frame it that way, so we’re talking about inferences) and doubts about the absolute sure certainty with which some Christians answer the question in the affirmative (which seems to lack some common-sense credibility).

Another way to pose the same question is, “Can you lose your salvation?” By which, I think in most cases the questioner has in mind something along the lines of, “Can I jeopardise going to heaven when I die?” In other words, can I somehow forfeit the ticket to heaven that I got when I responded to (some version of) the gospel and “prayed the prayer” to become a Christian?

The difficulty in answering the question—posed either way—is that so much depends on what we mean by those phrases and the ways of thinking that underlie them. To start with the most obvious, what does the person think it means “to be saved”? If it’s something that is almost exclusively transactional—I pray a prayer in a certain format which then guarantees I go to heaven and not hell when I die—and, basically, that’s it, then I would sincerely question whether the person has really grasped what being/becoming a  Christian is all about in the first place. In simple terms, being a Christian (being “saved”) is relational not transactional. This way of conceiving what the person is doing here is akin to entering into a “marriage of convenience” with someone you’ve never met and know almost nothing about solely for the purposes of getting a passport to allow you into their country—a transaction (“doing a deal”) where relationship doesn’t come into it. I would question whether whoever presented the gospel to them in those terms as a “sign on the dotted line and you’ll be fine in eternity” kind of way understands what it mean to be a Christian.

Rather than eternal life being about getting a ticket to heaven through saying “amen” to a one-off prayer—with whatever happens thereafter in how a person lives being irrelevant because they are “once saved, always saved”—Jesus said that eternal life was knowing the Father and the Son (John 17:3). Being “saved” is not praying a prayer that one day gets you into heaven when you die, it’s coming into a relationship that starts now. The Bible has nothing to say—there are no verses, no stories, no events—that could be characterised in terms of praying a particular form of prayer to get “once saved always saved.” But the Bible has a lot to say about how Jesus-followers should live. It has a lot to say about Jesus-followers’ relationship with God. Indeed, the better question is not “Am I once saved always saved” but “Am I a Jesus-follower?” and what do I think being a Jesus-follower looks like?

Now, when it comes to who is saved, who gets to go to heaven when they die, or stated more formally, who is a genuine and “proper” Christian, ultimately all that is between each individual and God; not something for us to speculate or pronounce upon. What we can say, however, is that the Bible has a lot to say about what a genuine and sincere relationship with God looks like (in the New Testament especially, particularly for gentiles). We can and should encourage people to pursue that. Not, I hasten to add, in order to “qualify” for certain “benefits” that we might otherwise miss out on, but because that is what someone with a genuine and sincere desire for a living and active relationship with God would want to be doing.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with “salvation by works.” Rather think of it as analogous to a marriage relationship, which is love-based, not what-I-will-be-able-to-get-out-of-it-based. The problem with a flawed understanding of a profound need to avoid any hint of “salvation by works” at all costs is that it misleads people into believing that whatever they do in life (as their “works”) has no consequences. In that sense, salvation being “not by works” is a bad doctrine. It implies that thanks to one quick prayer all past, present, and future sins are all forgiven and forgotten because of Jesus, so what the heck, whatever we do cannot undo that or jeopardise that. But again—think of it like a marriage. How long would a marriage survive if one partner treats the other in those terms? It makes no sense. What God has done for us through Jesus becomes little more than a formula: prayer prayed, all done and dusted.

If what we do doesn’t matter, then why would Jesus have said we would recognise his true disciples by their fruit? Matthew 7:16. Why would James have said, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them?” James 2:14.      

Now—on the other hand—whilst I have been undermining that kind of impersonal, transactional understanding of what it means to be saved (whether that is saved in the first place or always saved), there is another kind of questioner: the sincere Christian with a tender conscience, who is wanting to follow Jesus in her life but realises she does not always do that perfectly (who does?) and is genuinely worried that she may miss out on being saved at the crucial moment. That she may suddenly die—or Jesus may suddenly return—at a moment when she has unconfessed sin in her life (or something along those lines). To her I would say, although you rightly do not understand salvation in terms of a transaction—you understand that it’s a relationship with God—your fear is based on something similar: that God is a transactional God. You’re missing the point that salvation is not birthed (or berthed) in any kind of cosmic formula but in the nature and character of God. He is not a nit-picking, fault-finding, always looking for an excuse to be angered and punish you (or get out of saving you) kind of God. That would be wholly incompatible with a God who desires as many people as possible to be saved (1 Timothy 2:3–4). Salvation is not like walking a tightrope, where you are in danger of falling off at any moment. Remember Paul’s words in Romans 8:38-39: “I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It’s worth reading from v.31 onwards.         

One final point about “Can you lose your salvation?”: I refuse to answer that transactionally (“How much can I get away with—how far can I go—without that happening?”). What I would say is that you cannot lose your salvation unwittingly, through mistakes, through lack of understanding, or unfortunate timing in your personal circumstances when you die or when Jesus returns. If your heart desires to be in right relationship with God—even if you have some wobbles here and there along the way—I have no doubt whatsoever that God will honour that because he shares a desire to be in relationship with you forever (and so, too, with as many people as possible). But equally, I would say that you can choose to “lose” your salvation. That’s what freewill is all about. God will not force anyone to be in relationship with him—now or in eternity—if someone genuinely does not want that. That would seem an odd call to make, to me, but God created us with freewill (which is where all the problems began, of course) and he is not going to withdraw that from us if we wish to exercise it. My personal sense, though, is that God will be going out of his way to try to avoid that happening.