Transcription
There is a tragedy unfolding inside Christianity right now that is far more dangerous than the obvious attacks coming from outside the church, far more devastating than the cultural pressures pushing against biblical values, far more threatening than anything that happens in the public square or in the courtrooms or in the universities where Christian faith is openly challenged and openly mocked.
The tragedy happening inside is this. There are millions of people sitting in church pews every single Sunday singing worship songs with genuine emotion, carrying Bibles they genuinely read, quoting scripture they have genuinely memorized, identifying as Christians with complete sincerity and zero hesitation, who are on a direct path to a Christless eternity while being absolutely, thoroughly, and comfortably convinced that they are saved.
And the reason this tragedy continues to unfold without adequate warning is not primarily because these people have rejected the truth. It is because the church that is supposed to carry the truth has largely lost the courage to speak it clearly. We have built a religious culture where making someone feel comfortable in their spiritual condition has become more important than telling them the truth about it, where questioning the validity of someone's salvation is considered more offensive and more unkind than allowing them to live and die in a deception that will cost them everything.
The result is that people who genuinely need to hear the hardest and most important truth available to them are instead being surrounded by a steady supply of the one thing that will guarantee they never seek what they actually need, which is the false assurance that everything is fine. Jesus himself addressed this reality in Matthew 7:21 when he said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven." He was not talking about atheists. He was not talking about people who rejected him or persecuted his followers or openly denied his existence. He was talking about people who called him Lord, which means people who identified themselves as his own, people who prayed in his name, who participated in ministry in his name, who built entire religious lives in his name. And to those people he said with devastating clarity, "Not everyone."
Which means the question of whether your Christianity is genuine, whether your salvation is real, whether the relationship you believe you have with God actually exists from his side, is not a settled question simply because you have been inside the church your entire life and have never had reason to doubt it. It is the most important question you will ever face and the most dangerous thing you can do with it is assume the answer without examining it honestly before God.
The first type of person sitting in church right now who is in genuine spiritual danger despite being completely convinced of their salvation is the cultural Christian. And this is the most widespread category of false assurance in the world because it requires the least amount of personal decision or personal encounter with God. The cultural Christian identifies as Christian because of the family they were born into, the country or community they were raised in, the traditions they grew up participating in, the church their parents and grandparents attended for generations before them. Christianity came to them the way a last name comes, attached at birth, carried forward without any real examination of what it means or what it costs or what it actually requires of a person who genuinely possesses it. They celebrate the Christian holidays. They believe in God in a general and untroubling sense. They consider themselves decent people who are certainly not as bad as the criminals on the news or the atheists who aggressively deny the existence of the God they at least generally acknowledge. And their confidence about eternity is built almost entirely on the combination of those things, on the assumption that cultural proximity to Christianity is the same thing as genuine relationship with Christ.
But Jesus did not establish cultural proximity as the entrance requirement for the kingdom of God. He established something far more specific, far more personal, and far more supernatural when he said to Nicodemus in John 3:3, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Nicodemus was not a cultural Christian in the casual sense. He was a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews, a man who had given his entire life to the study and practice of the scriptures, who came from the right religious family, who held the right religious position, who observed every external religious requirement with genuine diligence. And Jesus looked at him and told him that none of that was sufficient, that what he needed was not better religious performance or deeper theological knowledge, but a supernatural transformation, a genuine new birth initiated by the Holy Spirit in response to genuine repentance and genuine faith.
Second Corinthians 5:17 describes what that transformation produces when it says, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new." New desires, new priorities, new relationship with sin, new hunger for God, new direction of life. Not a slightly improved version of the old person with Christian terminology added on top, but a genuinely new person whose fundamental nature has been changed by an encounter with the living God. If your life, your actual daily life in the private places where no one is watching, looks essentially identical to what it looked like before you claimed Christianity, if your desires have not changed and your relationship with sin has not changed, and your love for God is not a present and active and defining reality in your daily experience, then the question you need to ask God with genuine honesty is not whether you were raised in a Christian home or baptized in a Christian church or born in a nation with Christian heritage. The question is whether you have ever personally and genuinely been born again.
The second type is the intellectual Christian. And this type is particularly dangerous because they can articulate the truth of the gospel with greater accuracy and greater detail than most genuinely saved people can, which makes the deception they are living in almost impossible to detect from the outside and very easy to live in comfortably from the inside. The intellectual Christian has accumulated genuine and substantial biblical and theological knowledge. They can quote scripture. They can explain doctrine. They win debates about theology with people who know far less than they do. They have correct beliefs about who Jesus is, what he did, why he died, and what the Bible teaches about salvation. And they are thoroughly convinced that because they believe the right things about Jesus, they are saved.
When the reality is that belief in correct doctrine and saving faith are not the same thing, and the difference between them is the difference between heaven and hell. James 2:19 exposes this deception with a single sentence that should permanently unsettle every person who has built their spiritual confidence on the accuracy of their theological beliefs when it says, "You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe and tremble." The demons have correct theology. The demons know that Jesus is the son of God, that he died and rose again, that he will return to judge the living and the dead. The demons have correct beliefs about every essential Christian doctrine, and those correct beliefs will not keep a single demon out of hell because saving faith is not intellectual agreement with theological facts. It is personal trust, complete surrender of the will, and genuine living relationship with Jesus Christ that transforms the entire person from the inside out and produces the kind of obedience and the kind of fruit that Matthew 7:21 describes as doing the will of the Father.
The intellectual Christian has studied about God extensively but has never genuinely surrendered to God. They have learned about Jesus with great thoroughness but have never actually loved Jesus in the way that 1 John 2:3 says is the evidence of genuine salvation, which is keeping his commandments. They have accumulated biblical knowledge with real diligence but have never allowed that knowledge to reach the place where it breaks their pride, confronts their sin, and actually changes how they live when nobody who knows them is watching. On judgment day, theological precision will not be the question Jesus asks. He will ask one thing, and 1 John describes it repeatedly throughout that letter. Do you know him? And does your life show it?
The third type is the moral Christian. And this is perhaps the most resistant to genuine conviction because the very thing that is contributing to their spiritual danger, their genuine goodness and decency as a person, is also the thing that makes the danger invisible to them and to everyone around them. The moral Christian lives a genuinely clean life by any reasonable human standard of measurement. They treat people well. They are honest in their dealings. They are faithful in their relationships. They give to charitable causes. They avoid the kinds of obvious destructive behavior that most people would identify as clear evidence of a problem. And their confidence about eternity is built on the reasonable seeming logic that if God is fair and they have genuinely tried their best and genuinely lived better than most people they know, then surely their goodness will be sufficient.
The problem with that logic is not that it is unreasonable by human standards. The problem is that it measures itself by the wrong standard entirely. Romans 3:23 establishes the actual standard when it says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Not fall short of the average behavior of the people around you. Fall short of the glory of God himself, his perfect, infinite, absolute holiness. The standard that has no gradations and accepts no partial credit and cannot be satisfied by being relatively better than other sinful human beings. And Isaiah 64:6 takes that standard to its most confronting conclusion when it says that all our righteous deeds, not our sins, but our best and most genuinely motivated acts of goodness, are like filthy rags before a holy God. If our righteousness is filthy rags, then our morality cannot be the foundation of our standing before him.
Ephesians 2:8 and 9 removes every possible ambiguity about this when it says, "By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. Not a result of works, so that no one may boast." The moral Christian who stands before God on judgment day depending on their good behavior is essentially communicating that the death of Jesus was unnecessary because they were capable of saving themselves through sufficient personal virtue. And that is not humility before God. That is the deepest possible form of pride dressed in the respectable clothing of genuine decency pointing away from the only righteousness that actually satisfies a holy God and toward a self-constructed righteousness that Isaiah says looks like filthy rags from where God sits.
The fourth type is the emotional Christian. And what makes this type so difficult to reach is that they have a genuine experience in their past that they genuinely believe constitutes their salvation. An experience that was real in the sense that they actually felt something that moved them genuinely. That produced a real emotional response in a real moment that they can point to with real specificity. They walked an aisle at a revival. They prayed a prayer at a youth camp. They had a powerful emotional moment during a worship service that felt unlike anything they had experienced before. They raised their hand at an altar call and someone told them they were now saved and they believed it and have been believing it ever since.
And the problem is not that the moment was fake or that the emotion was manufactured or that the person telling them they were saved was dishonest. The problem is that a genuine emotional experience and genuine salvation are not the same thing. And 2 Corinthians 13:5 gives the instruction that the emotional Christian has almost never followed when it commands, "Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves." The emotional Christian does not examine anything. They point to a moment. But 1 John 2:3 provides the actual test when it says, "By this we know that we know him if we keep his commandments." And verse 4 says, "He who says, 'I know him' and does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him."
The evidence of genuine salvation is not the intensity of the emotional experience that preceded it. It is the reality of the transformation that followed it. Jesus describes this in Mark 4 when he talks about people who receive the word with joy and gladness, but have no root in themselves and endure only for a time. And when tribulation comes, they fall away. They had a moment, but they never had a transformation. They felt something temporarily, but never became something permanently. And the person who has been coasting on a childhood emotional experience for decades while their daily life shows no love for God's word, no genuine prayer, no hatred of sin, no fruit of the spirit, no progressive movement toward holiness, and no meaningful difference between themselves and their unsaved friends, needs to understand that an emotional experience one time is not the evidence that scripture points to when it describes what genuine salvation looks like in a person's life.
The fifth type is in some ways the most heartbreaking because this person has given more to religion than almost anyone else in the building. This is the religious Christian, the person who is deeply and genuinely involved in church ministry, who serves consistently, who gives financially, who attends faithfully, who has built their entire identity and their entire social world around their religious involvement, and who has mistaken that involvement for the relationship that genuine salvation requires.
Matthew 7:22 and 23 describes this person with a specificity that should make every ministry active Christian stop and genuinely examine themselves. When Jesus says, "Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and done many wonders in your name?'" And then he will say to them, "I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness." These were not casual observers of Christianity. These were people with spiritual gifts, people with ministry platforms, people who had seen supernatural results in their ministry activities. And Jesus does not say to them, "I used to know you, but you fell away." Or, "I knew you, but you disappointed me." He says, "I never knew you." Which means despite all the religious activity, despite all the ministry involvement, despite all the visible spiritual fruit, there was never any genuine relationship.