So You Received Jesus Into Your Heart? So Have Many Apostates (July 16, 2006)

Evil makes cynics of us.

I know it has made one of me in an area that can be nearly fatal to a preacher: conversion. I call people to faith in Christ. It is what I do, and I am convinced that I would be disobedient to do anything else.

So why don't I get all excited about "decisions for Christ"? Because experience keeps teaching me the fragile and untrustworthy nature of such decisions. I trust in Jesus, but I do not necessarily trust in the steadfastness of those who say they have received him.

Here's a short list of those who have eroded my faith in people' ability to persevere: Charles Templeton, evangelist colleague of Billy Graham, became an outspoken atheist. Roy Clements, once one of England's most respected evangelical ministers, is now living with a homosexual lover. The minister who conducted my wedding also left his wife and announced that he is gay. I know two Wycliffe missionaries - one of whom translated the New Testament into a Colombian indigenous language - who left their wives and the Lord. My Arhuaco Scripture co-translator (about whose faith I once wrote glowing tributes), walked away from Christ. My ex wife, who once dedicated her life to missionary service and who encouraged me to enter the pastoral ministry, is now a cold-blooded apostate.

And time would fail me to list all the people I know who once received Jesus but who now live such reprobate lives that no one would ever guess they were once people of faith.

I have been fooled so many times by so many people that I am forced to acknowledge the hard truth that I cannot tell who will persevere in the Lord and who will not. If Charles Templeton can fool Billy Graham, and Wycliffe missionaries can fool their colleagues in Colombia and Brazil, and Roy Clements can fool the faculty of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and my wife can fool me, then who can't be fooled by
whom?

That which I have learned about the heart's inconstancy is what keeps me from saying to any new convert, "You have just been saved eternally - welcome to the family of God!" These words of encouragement are actually a prophecy that is both arrogant and naïve. Only God knows who will persevere and who will not. I don't know anyone else with access to that foreknowledge.

That is why I preach perseverance so much more than I do conversion. I don't care any more how you started - I care how you end up. Just as St. James said, "You believe that there is one God? Great - even the demons believe that," so I might say, "You received Jesus into your heart? Great - so did Larry Flynt." (The publisher of Hustler magazine was briefly "born again" in the '70s.) The mere decision to follow Christ really puts you on no better spiritual footing than that of Judas Iscariot. He decided to follow Christ too - for a while.

Excuse my cynicism. Of course I know there are legitimate conversions, and I know that I must not let grief over false brothers spoil my joy over true ones. But just as we must take our sufferings and let them make us patient, so we must take our disappointments and let them make us wise. Here is wisdom: something is begun, but nothing settled, when a man says, "I have received Christ." From that point forward we must preach perseverance both to him and to ourselves until on our deathbeds we can say, "I have fought the good fight, I have run the race, I have kept the faith." Then into God's hands we may commend our spirits.