Perseverance of the Saints 3 / Peter Naylor

Audio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF1y-WybBY0

The Pastoral Application of the Truth of the Perseverance of the Saints

We started by looking at the biblical foundations how to key text and how to handle them. Then last night we took a look at some of the doctrinal connections and now the pastoral.

We believe what the Psalm has said, for example, the Lord is your keeper, the Lord will preserve you from all evil, and He will preserve your soul, that is Psalm 121, and there are many other Psalms we speak of the same message, “The city of God will not be moved.”

What do we believe then? We believe that God’s elect to whom the redemption accomplished is applied, will engage in a spiritual warfare. We believe that they can stumble into sin but never the less they will persevere through the power of the Holy Spirit and they will be preserved by the power of God so that they will never fall away finally, but will overcome and will be glorified together with Christ at His appearance.

So what is perseverance? It is to continue in the face of opposition, opposing force. It’s not just to stand still but it is to make progress, to increase. It is to increase in faith in a renewal of the inner man in love and in good works. When we stumble, it is to repent and then finally it is to conquer.

 

I want to concentrate for the whole of this address on the benefits and the blessings of this truth. The first obvious benefit is the relationship between the promises of God and the exaltations of God. When the Lord God exalts us to endure, when He presents duty to us, we draw strength from the prior grace that He has shown to us. The promise of God supports His command. In other words, the promise that God will preserve us supports the command so persevere. So then the first pastoral application of the truth of the perseverance of the saints is to encourage the children of God to actively to persevere.

In the copy of the slides which you have, the next, there is the list of some of the benefits of the truth. In the list which we’re looking at now, I’ve given you fourteen points. I don’t think this is a complete list, you may think of other benefits, other applications and you may think that this list could be organized in a better way. So everything that I give you from this point on, I will encourage you to build upon, to use creatively, and to improve.

 

So the first, we’ll come back and look at the details afterwards, but the first item on that list is that the perseverance of the saints promotes obedience because it removes discouragement. It really says to you, go on and put the old man to death because you will triumph in the end.

Okay the second one on the list is it strengthens and its faith in God and love for God.

And thirdly, it strengthens faith in Christ Jesus and love for him, it comforts those who struggles with sin, it’s the ground of assurance of peace and joy. Sometimes as parents we have children perhaps run well at the beginning of their Christian life and then they have fallen away. And when you think about the children who have gone astray, the prodigal son, it helps you to pray for children who have fallen down.  That’s one thing.

 

(Question:  I have a question about this 6th thesis, about the children of the covenant who sin. Yesterday you mentioned sin that is leading to death can you give us particular example which is sin leading to death?

Answer: I would prefer to leave that question for later on if you don’t mind some of them we can take question. It will stop me completely from I want to do now, is that alright? We can deal with that in our small group.

Okay let me just continue to the list, and then we’ll come back to some of these points and look at them in more detailed.)

Another benefit is it particularly helps us dealing with the problem with Alzheimer’s dicease and sin or dementia.  Then looking at point 8 and so on, this doctrine helps ministers to endure in their ministry. It also helps you to handle trials particularly things like this: the abuse of church discipline, when church discipline goes wrong, and when brothers disappoint you and fail you. It’s a help in facing death. It also encourages you to use the means of grace because of perseverance. God enables you to persevere through the use of means. And then just to complete this, it strengthens your hope of glory or interest in the heavenly kingdom, and finally magnifies and glorifies God and it cuts Satan down to size.

Okay I want to look at some of these in detail.

(There’s question on that side.

What is an Alzheimer’s Decease?

Alzheimer’s decease is where the brain decays and the person forgets and loses their personality, it’s usually associated with older people but it can sometimes affect the young people.)

(Let me work through that list again and say more about some of those points.)

First of all I’ve said that the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints promotes obedience. The charge is usually made against reformed teaching that if you teach this doctrine it will encourage people to be lazy and slothful spiritually. You know if I say to you, “God will not let you go”, then you might turn around and say, “Well I don’t have to do anything”. But what should really happen is you should say, “Then I would walk closely with God”. When you strive for obedience and you resist sin and you put a death, the old man, you have a comfort that God will bring you through that and the Holy Spirit will accomplish that in you.

 

Okay so the first thing I want to say is that this doctrine, if you are a true son of God, this doctrine will encourage you to run the race. And secondly, this doctrine strengthens your love for God. If this doctrine teaches you anything, it’s that God’s love is everlasting. That strengthens us because we can never doubt the certainty of the love of God and when we think of the love of God that will provokes us to return love to Him, we love Him because He first loved us. I think that our mind and heart should be like King David’s. Listen to what he says, “I will love you oh Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer and so on…” So not only does it strengthen our love for God but it particularly strengthens our love for Christ Jesus. We are told of Him that He is the one who has obtained eternal redemption for us. Not only do we think about what He has done, but we think about what He is doing now. Christ Jesus our high priest is interceding for us now moment by moment. The writer of the Hebrews says that He ever lives to make intercession for us and I think what that means is that the intercession of Christ will never end and it will not be broken up. There will not be a day when Christ forgets you.

We do know a little bit about the intercession of Christ. We know that he asks the Father that we may have the spirit. And in this connection, particularly, we know that He is interceding that our faith will not fail. You can see that for example in the case of Simon Peter when he was about to deny Christ three times. Jesus says to him “I have prayed for you that your faith will not fail and after you have recovered strength in your brethren.

Let’s go on. Fourthly then, the perseverance of the saints strengthens us when we are dealing with sin. We’ve already seen that the believer has a lifelong struggle within dwelling sin and in that battle, there are times when the believer falls down and when he falls down and maybe he feels deserted by God, the Bible reminds him that the fallen believer will rise again. God has not deserted him, not absolutely. And we have examples to encourage us, the example of King David and the example of Peter.

I want to think about the perseverance of the saints and its effect upon us in terms of our appearance, our peace, and our joy. I’ve already mention that Martin Luther at least at certain time of his life taught that believers could be lost but they could have the elect, could have a certainty, an assurance, an absolute assurance of their own salvation. I think that Martin Luther said something very important for men who preach. He did say that our preaching should strengthen the assurance and the confidence of our people and if it doesn’t do that, it’s no good. Obviously what Luther meant was that it should strengthen our confidence in God and his faithfulness not a false confidence in self. In that connection, of course there’s another side to good preaching as well.

I remember one minister saying when he went to a new church that his big job was to persuade people who thought they were saved but they weren’t. So when we preach, we bring people to Jesus Christ so that they’re in a position where they can have justified confidence. Okay so reformed preaches will teach that the elect cannot be lost and that teaching is a ground for confidence for assurance although not all of our heroes do we find our assurance, it’s not always possessed.

Question: what can you say about Lutheran? Isn’t Lutheran’s view doesn’t give us full assurance?

Answer: No it’s contradictory. It is a problem but I think I am allowed to defend Luther. He didn’t get anything right and church leader and preachers have wrestled against these things for centuries. It’s quite interesting, if you look for the perseverance of the saint in Calvin’s Institute, you won’t find much. The reason is that the Armenian controversy comes afterwards and wearing the happy position of living after the council of Dort. Praise the Lord!

Question: But in the first scripture we have a lot of paradox for example God has 100% sovereign and human being 100% responsible before God. So as for me I don’t see any problem in Lutheran’s view.

(Can I press on to number 7, Alzheimer’s decease?)

The seventh thing I want to look at is that the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints helps us when we’re facing the problem of Alzheimer’s decease. There’s a hymn in the English language, I don’t know if you know it but the hymn is written for the Lord’s Supper, when we are called to remember Christ. But the last verse of that hymn written by a man called James Montgomery is this, “And when these failing lips grow dumb, when I can’t speak and mind and memory flee when thou shalt in thy kingdom come, Jesus remember me.” The hymn writer is anticipating old age, when our memory is going and death when we completely lose control of our self and he’s saying the Lord will completely remember me when I can’t remember him. Alzheimer’s decease involves the deterioration through stages of the mind. In that decline, there comes a time when for example a believer no longer knows his wife, he doesn’t recognize his wife.

When I have had to minister to people like that and you may have had the same experience, I have found it even when they don’t know their wife, they can still remember scripture that they learned from childhood, and they can still sing hymn with you, word per word. And actually, just as in the side, that’s a great encouragement. When we’re pastors and we have young children in the congregation, we ought to teach them to memorize scripture. But, I think that the main point of this is ; ‘When an Alzheimer sufferer reaches the point where he can’t remember God, He does not forget them’. This might be important to some of us here. It maybe one day that you will be diagnosed having an Alzheimer’s decease and if you are, you will know what lies ahead of you.

I want to move on to point 9 and particularly the problem when church discipline goes wrong and it’s wrongly administered. To put it bluntly, if the church puts you out and justly you know that Christ puts you in. We saw this in the case of the man born blind in John chapters 9 and 10. You shouldn’t really preach about John chapter 10 and the good shepherd without remembering the context other which it comes. You know if bad shepherds put you out, it’s good that Christ will come to you and say, “I am the good shepherd, and if you enter by me you will go in and out and be saved and find pasture”. That’s the medicine for corruption in the church and you have the same thing really in Hebrews where the confession of Christ meant that they lost the right to the temple of the synagogue, it’s against that background. You have a text like this in Hebrews 13:6. So we may boldly say,” The Lord is my helper, I will not fear. What can man do to me” and then the doctrine of God’s keeping in our perseverance is a great help when brothers disappoint you.

 

You know King David have been a fugitive from Saul for perhaps 13 years. He had about 600 men with him and things got so bad that those 600 thought about killing him. And we need to notice what David did. It says, “Now David was greatly distressed for the people spoke of stoning him because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and his daughters, but David strengthen himself in the Lord his God”. You have exactly the same behavior in the apostle Paul late in his ministry when he is on trial. He says to Timothy, “At my first defense, my first trial, no one stood with me. They all left me” but he says “But the Lord stood with me and strengthens me”. And then after that, he says in verse 18, “And the Lord will deliver me from every evil work and preserve me for his heavenly kingdom”.

So the perseverance, the truth of God’s keeping preserving upheld Paul in some of the worst trials of his ministry. Every one of us has to die and the bible tells us that men and women pass their life in fear of death. And I think that when we face death ourselves that it’s the time, above all, that we need to know that God will not let us go.

 

I put a quotation on a slide of John Bunyan’s account of pilgrim or Christian coming to the river Jordan and how he battles to get through it and he get sinks and rises. It is a long quote.

 

Okay we’ve nearly come to the end but just a few more points. 11, the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints encourages us to use the means of grace. We must not think that we can persevere in a vacuum. Persevering says to you “Well, go back to the word of God, keep going back to the scriptures”,” Gain the benefits from regular frequent use of the Lord’s supper”. Even wise loving godly church discipline is designed to help us persevere.

 

Psalm 92 which I think is known as a Psalm for the Sabbath day says that those who are planted in the house of the Lord will still bear fruit in old age. In other words, if you are grounded in the provisions that God has made in his word, sacraments, if you’re grounded that when your physical strength fails. God will still enable you to bring fruit to the glory of His name.

 

Okay twelve, the perseverance of the saints strengthens our hope. You see, if I talk to you about the wonders of the New Jerusalem to come and then I said to you, “But well we can’t be sure whether we’re going to see it”, well that could be very discouraging. You see, I know it’s a great place but well I’m in doubt whether I’ll ever be there. But when you are assure that God will keep you, you can delight in what we hope for.

 

Thirteen: The perseverance of the saints. When we persevere, that magnifies and glorifies God. We can learn a lot from the book of Job. Satan was attacking Job and really Satan was challenging God and saying, “You know this child of yours that you delight in is a fake”. You see, Satan was trying to rob God of glory by saying, “Put him under pressure and he’ll fall away”. And the same thing applies to the Christian church today that our perseverance is on display to the Spirits, if you like, of the Angel host, and even of the devil and his angels. God doesn’t need us to get glory but He has in His sovereign free will, He has tied Himself in with his people and because of that, when we prevail in our race, in our warfare. That does bring glory to God.

 

Fourteen, the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints put Satan in his place. He has no claim on us. He cannot destroy the elect. Yes, the elect are too weak to overcome Satan but God is too strong for him. Furthermore, every attack of Satan God uses to strengthen the saints.

 

I want to finish by saying that I have noticed how many hymns in English have been written out of the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. You have translations of the hymns that are chosen.

The first of those hymns, if you look at verse 2, has a point like this, “Those who understand that they are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation, ready to be revealed, those people are stirred up to praise and worship God”. Thank you.