Imagine yourself as a young child waking up on Christmas morning. As you sit up in your bed you’re hit with the smell of cinnamon rolls baking in the oven. Of course, there’s no time to eat right now because there are presents to open, so you run out of your bedroom and into the living room to be greeted by a scene that you had only dreamed about the night before. You see a stocking hanging over the fireplace with your name on it, and you can see that it’s big and full of presents. You look under the tree and see big boxes with your name on them. And then, you see your parents coming into the room with big smiles on their faces. You start to run toward them to give them a big hug, and as you do you notice that they are holding something out toward you. They ask you to take a look at it, and what is it—but a contract! You’re kind of surprised by all of this, but then you start to read it and it says this:
“The holder of this contract (hereafter referred to as “The Child”) may open and enjoy all of his/her presents at once, but will lose the aforementioned presents if any of the following agreements are broken:
1. The Child agrees to never again walk past a pile of his/her toys and say, “I’m bored.”
2. The Child agrees to never again roll his/her eyes when hearing that money doesn’t grow on trees.
3. The Child agrees to do everything in his/her power to become worthy of receiving the aforementioned presents.
Now I don’t know about you, but those presents don’t sound much like gifts to me! They sound more like rewards or bribes. I don’t think we would be too happy if our parents thought that was the way to give gifts, because we know a thing or two about what gifts are like. Gifts are supposed to be free to the one who receives them. They’re not supposed to have all kinds of strings attached to them.
Fortunately, that’s not the way that God offers the gift of salvation. He offers it as a real, true gift—with no cost to us, and with no strings attached. But as we continue our study of the doctrine of eternal security, another implication that we need to understand about the gift of salvation is that the fact that it is a gift means that God will never take it away from us. What we are going to see from Scripture today is that…
Salvation is a gift given by God that He will never take away.
I’d like to unpack that thought today by looking at some observations about God’s gift of salvation that should instruct us, comfort us, and inspire us to live for him and him alone.
1. The gift of salvation is given by God
This observation implies two things:
A. Salvation is free to us
Part of the nature of a gift is that it is free to the one who receives it. If the recipient has to pay something for it or do something to earn it, it is no longer a gift. Now accordingly, the Bible states that the gift of salvation is free to us. Rev 22:17 says, “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.” And in the Old Testament, Isaiah uses water and food to picture the free gift of God’s mercy: “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Is 55:1).
So if the gift of salvation is free to us, this implies that…
B. Salvation was paid for by God
We get a clear statement of this fact in Rom 3:24—“[we are] justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” The word for “redemption” in that verse is used in classical Greek to refer to the ransom payment that is made to free a person from slavery. When Jesus died on the cross, he was making that payment to free us from the debt of our sins, and when he said, “It is finished” we can hear him saying, “Paid in full,” because the complete payment for sin was made.
Salvation was paid for by God, or to be more specific, it was paid for when Jesus died on the cross in our place. When you receive Jesus as your Savior, that payment is applied to you, so that, as Colossians 2:14 says, your debt of sin has been canceled. God declares that the payment Christ made for you was enough, and thus all of His demands against you have been met. But think about this—if you could lose your salvation for committing a sin of any kind, then God would be declaring that Jesus’ payment was not enough to cover that sin. We could look at it in two ways—either God would be demanding double payment for that sin (my own payment on top of Christ’s payment), or He would be saying that Christ’s payment was not enough. Either way, we run into problems—if He demanded double payment for the sin, He would be unfair, and if He declared that Christ’s payment was not enough, He would be declaring that His previous verdict was wrong.
Thus, I think it is very important for us to remember that God has paid the full price of the gift of salvation that He offers to us, and when we receive that gift, God declares that the price for our sins has been paid in full, and we can trust that He won’t change that verdict or demand double payment for any of our sins.
So we know that the Bible describes salvation as a gift, and this gift is of course given by God—He has paid for it, and He gives it to us. But there is another observation to be made about the gift of salvation, and it is really the crux of our discussion today.
2. God will not take his gift of salvation away from those who have received it
This is of course the main point under dispute, but I believe the Bible gives us two reasons for saying this.
A. God’s gift of salvation involves a promise
We can learn a lot by comparing God’s gift of salvation to gifts that we might give to each other, but here the comparison kind of breaks down. When we give gifts to one another, we don’t normally make promises to each other, or make any guarantees about future for our relationship. We may give a gift to a co-worker, and then if we change jobs later, we may never talk to them again. We may have family visit us around Christmas, and we’re happy to give them a gift on Christmas day, but when they’ve overstayed their welcome on Jan 5th, we’re ready to send them home and say, “See you next year.” Or worse yet, we might give a gift to a friend, and then a week later they’ll stab us in the back and we’ll never speak to them again. But God’s gift of salvation involves a promise on his part—basically it is a promise to finish what he has started.
Look with me at Eph 1:13–14 [READ Eph 1:13-14]. I like the way the New English Translation puts verse 14. It says that the Holy Spirit is “the down payment of our inheritance,” and that’s the word picture that Paul is using here. Many of you live in your own home right now, and most of you have a mortgage on that home. Hardly anyone is rich enough to pay for a house outright, so we take out a home loan and a sign a contract to purchase a home. Now one of the things that’s required of us when we enter that agreement is to make a down payment, which is a sum of money that you pay toward the total price of the home. That down payment shows your intention to complete the purchase that you just made.
When God gives us his Holy Spirit at the moment of salvation, the Holy Spirit is God’s down payment to guarantee to us that he will complete the purchase that he has made. He is the promise from God that we have been forgiven and that one day he is going to free us completely from the sin that is in our lives. Now I know our housing market is a little shaky right now, but when God makes a down payment, He won’t need a bail out and He won’t be foreclosed on! He will finish what he has started because…
B. God’s promises are guaranteed by His character
Why don’t you turn with me to Malachi 3? Some of you might be familiar with what God has to say in the first part of Malachi 3:6, but almost no one is familiar with the context of that verse. In the first part of that verse the Lord says, “For I the Lord, do not change,” and we usually stop there and say, “Wow isn’t that great!” And we might expect the last part of the verse to say, “therefore you can always count on me” or “therefore I’ve always got your back.”
But instead the Lord says, “therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.” Whoa! What a minute! What is God talking about? Well, back in v. 5 he was describing all of the sins that they had committed against him. They had engaged in sorcery and adultery and perjury and had oppressed needy people, so why didn’t God consume them? Why didn’t he just wipe them out? Because he had promised to their ancestors that he would never wipe them out, but that he would make them a great nation and would draw them back to himself. Notice just a few of the promises that God had made to the people of Israel:
• Isaiah 54:10—“‘For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed,’ says the Lord, who has compassion on you.”
• Jeremiah 31:37—“Thus says the Lord: ‘If the heavens above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth below can be explored, then I will cast off all the offspring of Israel for all that they have done,’ declares the Lord.”
• Jeremiah 33:20–21—“Thus says the Lord: ‘If you can break my covenant with the day and my covenant with the night, so that day and night will not come at their appointed time, then also my covenant with David my servant may be broken, so that he shall not have a son to reign on his throne, and my covenant with the Levitical priests my ministers.’”
God has kept and will keep these promises to Israel because they are guaranteed by His character, which, as he himself says here, never changes. God keeps His promises, so we can rest assured in the promise that He has made to us that we have an inheritance in heaven. God has given us that promise, and He has given us His Holy Spirit as a guarantee of His promise.
Salvation is a gift given by God that he will never take away. God is the one who has paid for it, and he graciously gives it to those who place their faith in Jesus Christ. God’s gift also involves certain promises on his part that he guarantees with his own character.
So with these observations in mind, we can be confident that God will never take his gift of salvation away from us! Certainly he will deal with our sin, as any loving Father would, but what we can know for sure is that He will never cast us out of his family.
Just think about the freedom and the peace that this assurance gives us. Some of us probably grew up in situations where our dad wasn’t around, or if he did come around, it was only a matter of time before he walked out on us again. Or some of us may have grown up in situations where we felt like we had to prove that we were worthy of our father’s love, and we felt like nothing we did was ever good enough.
But if you have received God’s free gift of salvation, you are forgiven of your sins and you are accepted. You don’t have to prove that you’re worthy of his gift in order to keep God in your life. You don’t have to feel like you’re one mistake away from God walking out on you. You are secure, and you are free to serve God in love to show him your gratitude for his gift of salvation.
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