Churches of Christ -- Sermons; Sermons, American -- 20th century
If any further evidence could be desired, you can find much more in the
Bible to the same point. For instance, James, chapter 5, and the last
two verses thereof, “Brethren, if any one of you do err from the truth,
and one convert him; let him know, that he which converteth the sinner
from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a
multitude of sins.”
Save a soul from what death? Not from physical death. “It is appointed
unto men once to die,” physically. In that sense everybody has to die,
the good and the bad alike. The only death from which you can be saved
is the second death, which means to be cast into the lake of fire and
brimstone (Rev. 20:14, 15; 21:8). This verse says that if you save a
sinner from the error of his way, you have saved him from the second
death. But who are the sinners here addressed? They are members of the
church. Verse 19 says, “brethren,” you people who have already been
saved, “if any one of you”—one of you saved people—“do err from the
truth, and someone convert him,” then he has saved his soul from eternal
torment. Surely this teaches that a brother in the church, who has been
saved, may so sin as to go to hell, and will go to hell if somebody
doesn’t convert him.
No wonder, then, the Apostle Paul said, “Let him that thinketh he
standeth take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12). Let him who thinketh he
standeth—let the man who thinks that apostasy is impossible—take heed,
lest he experience that which he denies. These Scriptures then are
sufficient to show that there is a danger of one’s falling from grace.
II
The Power to Stand
Please do not get the impression, however, that you have to fall from
grace. You don’t have to do it! You can stand if you will. If you will
stand, God will give you the power to stand. If you submit your life
unto Him for safekeeping and maintain the right attitude toward Him, and
the right sort of service for Him, then He will keep that which has been
committed unto Him. You don’t have to fall from grace. Anybody can be
saved who wants to. If you don’t go to heaven, it will be because you
didn’t want to badly enough to put forth the proper effort.
I’d like to emphasize the fact that anybody can go to heaven who wants
to. It is like Brother Freed used to tell us at school: “You can do
anything you want to, if you want to badly enough.” A story which
illustrates the point comes from England, where they are said to dig
graves deeper than we do in America—in fact, ten feet deep. Instead of
having the cemeteries hard by the church building as we often do, the
story says that they have them adjacent to the school buildings,
sometimes on the school campus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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