What About Bible Verses That (Seem to) Imply You Can Lose Your Salvation?

There are all kinds of warnings in the Bible about how you must continue on in your faith to be saved. And yet, like we talked about last week, the Bible also clearly teaches that once you’re saved, you’re always saved. So how do these sort of verses square with each other? Do they contradict?

Well, no, they don’t. But they do teach you something important about the nature of saving faith: Saving faith endures to the end.

So why are “eternally secure” believers given warnings about enduring in the faith? I believe it’s because these warnings are not only to awaken those with false assurance about salvation but also to spur true believers onward in their faith.

The Bible clearly teaches that believers cannot lose their salvation. Yet these warnings ought also to be taken at face value: If we fall away, we will not be saved in the end. The only way those two statements can both be true is if a failure to heed them demonstrates that we never possessed that saving faith to begin with.