So great is the privilege of those who seek to be used by God: they become the instruments of God to their fellow Christians to keep them in the right path as well as bringing them to Christ in the first place.
Doesn’t Scripture teach that a Christian can never lose his salvation? How then can Paul speak as if the Galatians could lose a salvation that they once possessed and fall from grace? First, it must be said that Paul himself teaches elsewhere that salvation is secure and that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ; we are in the hands of the God who will complete the good work that he has begun in us; he is able to keep that which we have committed to him against the last day; all things are ours whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future. Nevertheless Scripture treats the danger of falling away as very real and in doing so issues faithful warnings to professing Christians. These warnings must not be dismissed as merely hypothetical so that we say, That can never happen to me; I do not have to take it seriously. In the understanding of the Bible, although the saints will persevere and no true believer has ever lost their salvation, the danger of falling away is one which every saint must take to heart. By doing so, they avoid sin which would otherwise destroy them. God’s faithful warnings are the very means that are used to turn us back from what would otherwise be a fatal path.
Can the believer not then comfort himself with the doctrine of eternal security? Yes he can, but he may draw that comfort only when he trusts in the Lord and relies on his strength and does all in his power to avoid sin. But to reason that we are eternally secure whether or not we return to our old ways and depart from the truth of the gospel is to make shipwreck of our faith. The doctrine of final perseverance is a comfort to every Christian who fears his own weakness and unbelief, and sees his tendency to fall, and who longs for power from God to keep him to the end, but it is never an encouragement to complacency or presumption of sin, or to take our ease and let God do it all. God will remove assurance from presumptuous people, and such is man’s exposure to spiritual deceit that none can assure themselves of having life except those who see the scriptural signs of life within them. Another reason why we are warned in this way is that there are among the professing people of God those who are not truly born again and who do not realise their true state. These too need to be warned, for the commandment of God to live a holy life must be honoured. Those who take no notice of it will pay the price for their complacency.