No, not works. This is about maintaining
faith to remain saved.
Faith can and will dry up if you neglect your relationship with God.
When you maintain faith through fellowship with God the works come along for the ride.....if you don't squelch them.
Turn away from the things of God and your faith will wane and sin will increase. The danger of which is eventually being hardened in unbelief by the deceitfulness of that sin.
With the exception of various groups with their fringe beliefs pretty much the whole church knows this. You can tell by how the church lives these days. If they believe that works literally purchase salvation they don't seem to concerned about that, lol. But it's obvious the evangelical church overall does not believe even a little bit that works buy salvation. The problem in the church is the exact opposite--they think dead faith saves. Christ said he will turn away MANY on that Day because of dead faith.
Yes. I almost said that in that post. Decided not to.
Yep.
The point is that the believer is growing in the fruit of the Spirit and is not characterized by his old life as if nothing happened inside of him.
I agree totally.
Yep.
And they even think they can go so far as to no longer trust in Christ and they will still be saved.
It's pretty obvious to me that many people in the church think they have the license to sin and are driving very fast and hard with it. And they rationalize that by saying once you are saved you are always saved and cannot lose your salvation.
And receive a beating for it.
That is what grace was given us for. This new movement in once saved always saved says grace is given so you can stay in your old life and still be saved. I don't think I ever even heard that argument from anybody in the church 30 years ago. It was not even fathomable that you could be an unbeliever but be saved at the same time. Now it appears to be official doctrine of many churches.
That's what I say. Because that's what the Bible says. The person who is unrighteous is not born again. John told us that in his letter so we could discern who was of the truth and who was not.