Perseverance

            Perseverance is that gracious work of the triune God in a believer whereby He enables him to fight the good fight of faith from the point of his conversion until he is brought into His presence at death

            Because the believer is saved by God’s supernatural power the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit can never be reversed so that the new life that He creates in the believer’s heart can be destroyed.  Thus, He who begins this good work will perform and perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ. 

            While there are false professors of faith in God, and while true believers can fall into grievous sin, someday they will repent and return to new obedience to God.  Thus, true believers persevere because God always perseveres with them.

            NANC considers the perseverance of God and His saints central to counseling and happily accepts applicants who adhere to this biblical teaching.

Pastoral Implications

            Often this teaching goes by the name “eternal security.” We consider that the wording “perseverance of the saints” better captures what is at stake, though we don’t insist on the wording. Perhaps we might say that from God’s heavenly point of view His beloved people are eternally secure in His redeeming mercies; but from our walking-on-earth point of view, we witness and experience that those who are His true children do in fact persevere, endure, abide. Since ministry walks on the ground, let’s speak in language that connects to what we actually see taking place.

To grasp perseverance of the saints anchors counseling in the reality that the process of growth is sometimes (usually?!) bumpy, and that the genuineness of a person’s conversion “comes out in the wash” in learning to face today’s fresh challenges. As a counselor, you can simply take a counselee’s profession at face value, roll up your sleeves, and get down to work. As your counselees face the current challenges in their fight with sin by finding mercy and grace to change, and as they face their current troubles of life by finding refuge and hope in the Lord’s promises, they manifest that they are in fact the Lord’s true children – “good soil.” But if a counselee is not in fact a new creation and true believer, that, too, will typically come out in the wash. An unwillingness to face sin and to seek the Lord’s aid for both sins and sorrows naturally raises the question of whether a person knows the Lord. It doesn’t decisively answer it (we never see another’s heart or ultimate destiny), but it allows a counselor to raise the stakes in a way appropriate to the facts at hand.

            Failure to grasp perseverance leads to such counseling practices as immediately questioning a struggler, “Are you sure you’re really saved? Are you sure your conversion experience was genuine? Can you identify the date on which you gave your life to Christ? Let’s make sure you’re really a Christian first, and then talk about other problems.” Such a practice turns counseling into a ‘bait-and-switch’. For example, a person may seek help for marital conflict, or depression, or in facing the death of a loved one, but the counselor quickly changes the subject to “Maybe you’re not really saved.” This needlessly alienates counselees. It distracts them from finding God’s help with real problems in the present. It invites endless self-scrutiny about ones own genuineness – a species of self-salvation regarding whether one said “the right words” or “really meant it.” Such self-focused anxiety neutralizes trust in the promises of the faithful God. Counselors waste the God-given opportunity that a counseling conversation presents, the opportunity to dig into current problems, struggles, and troubles, and then to map a way forward beginning here and now. A biblical pattern of life is not obsessed with testing and retesting ones “conversion experience,” but with hammering out what it looks like today to grow in faith, hope, love, and obedience.

            As always, dig behind the stated words to find out what a candidate actually means. It is possible that a person who says that “salvation can be lost” might actually mean, “Apparent salvation can be lost, if a person falls away and lives a godless life.” That observation is consistent with belief in perseverance of the saints. A poorly taught applicant might have been repelled by the doctrine of “eternal security,” because it was presented in a way that sounded like anyone who came forward and professed faith in Jesus was “safe and sound no matter what; no matter how you live, once saved always saved.” Defective teaching naturally spurs opposite, reactive defects. When assurance of salvation is taught in a way that encourages presumption and carelessness, it’s not surprising that a person might react against the teaching. Such an applicant can’t pass NANC certification as is, but you’ve got a teaching moment. You can validate the observation about backsliders. You can agree that a presumptuous view of security and assurance dishonors the holy God. You can then go on to show how “salvation can be lost” also dishonors the powerful and merciful God. To produce insecurity in counselees is just as destructive as producing false security. The doctrine of God’s persevering, saving mercies towards His beloved holy children can then be presented in shining glory.