Does dying in sin cause a believer to lose salvation? A listener asked this sobering question, so in this episode of The FLOT Line, Rick Hughes explains the difference between a relationship with God and fellowship with God, between temporal carnality and prolonged carnality, and why divine discipline does not mean loss of salvation. Using Scripture, Rick clarified eternal security, the integrity of God, and the role of rebound in restoring fellowship. This lesson clarifies for believers that salvation is secure while challenging them to avoid prolonged carnality and to live within God’s protocol plan.
Welcome to the Flatline with your host, Rick Hughes. For the next 30 minutes, you’ll be inspired, motivated, educated, but never manipulated. Now, your host, Rick Hughes.
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Good morning, and welcome to the Flatline. I’m your host, Rick Hughes, and for the next few minutes, please stick with me. Stay around. It won’t be long. Just about 30 minutes of motivation, some inspiration, some education. And always no manipulation. We don’t try to con you. We’re not seeking money. We’re not trying to sell you a product. We’re just trying to give you information. Hopefully information will help you verify and identify God’s plan for your life. And if we can do that, you can orient and adjust to the plan if you choose to do so. It’s your choice. You got one shot at it, and it’s a great life to live, so don’t blow it, okay? Listen carefully, and I pray that you will understand God’s plan and how it works effectively for you in your life. And we’ve got a bunch of books out. If you go to our website, rickhughesministries.org, rickhughesministries.org, you’ll find all of the books that we have available free of charge, as always. And many of them you’ll be able to listen to online. Also there you’ll find under the plotline radio show, all our broadcasts are reproduced through our website. So you can actually hear this three ways. You can hear it live on the radio station. As it plays in your area, you can hear it through our website. After it’s played, it’ll be up on our website and you can listen again. Or if you use a podcast, you can listen on Spotify or Apple iPod or something like that. And you can just type in The Flotline and find us. And there you can listen to the radio shows as well where we store those radio shows and podcast them. And our team tells us we passed over 2 million downloads or 2 million plays recently. So I’m very happy to announce that. So thank you for your prayers. Thank you for your encouragement. Thank you for a few minutes of your time. Today I want to talk about a listener who wrote me recently asking me a question. That question was interesting, and I want to try to address that question. This is pretty basic information. You know, sometimes I give you motivation. Sometimes I give you inspiration. And sometimes education. And now we’re going to try to do some education. But this listener wrote and asked this question. Here’s the question they asked me. If I die while I’m in carnality, will I go to heaven? If I die while I’m in carnality, do I go to heaven? Or if any of their friends die while they’re in carnality, do they go to heaven? Or do they lose their salvation if they die while in carnality? To answer that question, we got to first establish a couple of things. What is carnality? What’s that person talking about? What is a carnal Christian? And the second question we must answer is can anybody lose their salvation anytime? So let’s start first of all with the word carnal Christian, C-A-R-N-A-L, carnal Christian. What exactly is a carnal Christian? What was he referring to? A carnal Christian is a person who’s still a Christian. In the Christian experience, there is temporal carnality and there’s prolonged carnality. Two different types, temporal and prolonged. Any Christian who sins moves from spirituality immediately to carnality. So if you’re a Christian and you commit a sin, you are instantly carnal. At any point in your Christian life, you will either be in fellowship with God by means of the filling of the Holy Spirit or you’re out of fellowship with God due to personal sin and back under control of your sin nature. So what is a carnal Christian? Here’s the answer. A carnal Christian is an individual who is indeed a child of God because of their faith alone in Christ alone, but through an act of their own volition, they have chosen to sin and thus break fellowship with God. Thus, they’re a carnal Christian. So you may have about 10,000 opportunities to sin today, and if you sin, you move from carnality, from spirituality to carnality. If you’re spiritual, you’re in fellowship with God, controlled by the Holy Spirit. If you’re carnal, you’re out of fellowship with God, controlled by your sin nature. That’s the difference. And that sin that you have an opportunity to commit could be a mental attitude sin, could even be a sin of the tongue, or perhaps an overt sin, you know, like fornication or drunkenness. And it could occur at 7 a.m. in the morning or 10 p.m. at night. But whenever you decide to commit a sin, you immediately break fellowship with God and you quench the Holy Spirit, thus moving into carnality. You become a carnal Christian when you sin. The question you have to answer is, are you going to be a temporal carnal Christian or a prolonged carnal Christian? That’s the question you must answer is, how long will you remain in that carnality? Because if you have committed sin in your life and haven’t confessed it, I suggest you recover immediately by using 1 John 1.9. This is our number one problem-solving device on the flatline of your soul, and it’s called rebound. And the verse simply says if we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us of our sin and to purify us from all of our wrongdoing. That means even the ones you might not remember, he cleanses you from them. When you cite, name, or agree with God concerning the sins you did commit. But prolonged carnality can lead to reversionism, a term we introduced a couple of radio shows ago, which is you going backwards, not going forwards. Reversionism is you going back to your old lifestyle before you became a Christian. So you move from carnality into reversionism, and you’re still carnal, but you’re a carnal reversionistic Christian at that time, a Christian going backwards. So let’s get some principles down so you’ll kind of understand it. One, any believer can be spiritual or carnal. Any believer can be spiritual or carnal. So right now, as you’re listening to my radio show, and as I’m speaking to you, I’m either spiritual, filled with the Holy Spirit, or I’m carnal, acting under the power of my sin nature. But I could still be teaching you I could still be preaching the Bible with sin in my life and you wouldn’t even know it, but God would know it. And it would be called human good on my part. So any believer can be spiritual or carnal. So that term reversionism or reversionistic believer, who is that person? Well, he’s a person that does not confess his sin. He doesn’t rebound. He doesn’t admit his sin. He stays in prolonged carnality. So instead of confessing his sin to God, he justifies his sin through his own personal arrogance. Self-justification, self-deception, self-absorption. Three steps there, self-justification, self-deception, self-absorption. That’s what arrogance looks like. So the second principle, Perpetuation of carnality results in divine discipline. Always, 100%, God will lower the hammer on you and get your attention if you are left unchecked. And if you don’t confess your sin and get right with the Lord, some people say, I want to rededicate my life to the Lord. Well, every time you rebound, you’re rededicating your life to the Lord. But if you don’t check your sin, it eventually will lead you into reversionism or going backwards. Three, failure to rebound, 1 John 1, 9, results in judgment and discipline from God. And that judgment and discipline from God will keep you off balance for your entire life. Nothing will work right. Everything will go wrong. Because God loves you, he’s trying to get your attention. He’s not mad at you. He’s not trying to punish you because he’s angry with you. He’s trying to save you from self-destruction. Point four, whether we are carnal or whether we are spiritual, that means whether we’re filled with the Holy Spirit or whether we’ve quenched the Holy Spirit, God’s personal love for us never changes. His unfailing love never changes. And five, in perpetual carnality or prolonged carnality, we are blinded to the evil that we’re causing because we justify ourselves when we’re in a state of sin and a state of wrongdoing. That’s what we do. We justify it. We try to make it like it’s okay. I deserve this, and you don’t. Sixth, if you reject rebound, 1 John 1.9, your self-absorption or arrogance will intensify into self-deception, which follows saying I have the right to sin and I’m justified in the sin that I’m doing. And that happens every day where people steal or do things they shouldn’t do and they justify it, thinking they have a right to do it. Maybe you think the world gave you a bad raw deal so you have the right to do what you’re doing and you don’t. If you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you never have to justify your sin. It’s always justified. terrible, and it breaks fellowship with God, quenches the Holy Spirit, and gets you under divine discipline, whether it’s mental attitude sin, such as hatred, such as jealousy, or it could be a sin of the tongue, such as criticism, maligning, lying, or it could be an overt sin, such as we mentioned, alcoholism, drunkenism, fornicating, whatever. So you can’t justify sinning. So can I now ask you a question? We’ve given you six principles about this, carnal Christian. So I want to ask you a question. What is your current status with God? What is your current status with God in California, in Maine, in Pennsylvania, in Texas, in Alabama, in Mississippi, where this radio show is being played across the country, Colorado, Arizona? What is your current status with God? Are you in fellowship with him by means of the filling of the Holy Spirit? Or are you carnal because you have unconfessed sin in your life? If you are carnal, if you’re out of fellowship, are you the least bit even concerned about it? Are you rocking along like nothing even bothers you, nothing ever happens, nothing changes, and I just keep doing my sin? You can’t do that. It’ll catch up with you, I promise you. The better question I want to ask you is this. Are you willing to regain fellowship with God by confessing your sin or are you satisfied letting your sin nature enslave you to your lust pattern because that’s what you’re doing? My suggestion is you quit playing games with God because you may be fooling your church, you may be fooling your friends, but you are not fooling God Now, what about losing your salvation? That was the second part of that question. If they die while they’re in carnality, do my friends lose their salvation? Well, let’s get some principles on that. Number one, eternal life. That’s called salvation. It’s eternal life. It’s imputed to us at salvation. Eternal life is imputed to us at salvation because God the Holy Spirit regenerates us by creating in us a human spirit for the imputation of eternal life. I’ll try to repeat that for you. Eternal life is given to you at the point of your salvation by God the Holy Spirit. When you’re born again, what does that mean technically? It means you’re dead spiritually before you get saved, and then you’re born again, or born again spiritually, or your dead human spirit is made alive as it’s indwelled by the Holy Spirit. And now you have spiritual life because nobody can have fellowship with God that doesn’t worship him in spirit and in truth. And if you’re spiritually dead, there’s no way you can worship God. So when you’re made spiritually alive, that means that God the Holy Spirit enters your dead human spirit. You’re made spiritually alive, and eternal life is one of the things imputed to you. And we’re going to get to what all is imputed to you shortly because there’s about 40 different things. But number two, God cannot cancel eternal life. When God gives eternal life, he does not take it back. He’s given us his righteousness and his life so that we will be qualified to live with him forever. That’s what the Bible teaches. God gave us his righteousness through Christ. He who knew no sin was made sin for us so that we could be made the righteousness of God through him. So point three, eternal life is a gift from God. It is not something we earn, nor is it something we deserve. Listen to the word gift, Romans 6.23. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God, see the word gift? The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. That means you didn’t earn it, you didn’t deserve it, you just got a gift. In Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, we read, For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. The implication is you can’t earn it. It’s a free gift from God because of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, because of his burial and his resurrection, and guarantee assurance that you will live forever. So, point four. You cannot lose your salvation because it is strictly the work of God. God did it, not you. You did nothing to gain it. You do nothing to maintain it. Your salvation or your eternal life is the work of God. And God is not going to let you go because you’re failing or because you’re a failure. Point five. Eternal security is defined as an unbreakable relationship with the integrity of God. Eternal security is defined as an unbreakable relationship. You hear that word? Unbreakable relationship with the integrity of God. It depends on the integrity of God. Your eternal security does. It doesn’t depend on your integrity. It depends on Him. It is an unbreakable relationship because God will not break the relationship regardless of what we do or don’t do, regardless if we fail or we don’t fail. God is not going to take it back. Six, knowing that you have eternal security does not give you the right to completely go off the rails and do whatever you want to do. Living like that as a Christian is a very good way to get under maximum divine discipline. And point seven, man’s failure does not abrogate the integrity of God. Abrogate means do away with. Man’s failure does not do away with the integrity of God. Man’s weakness does not cancel God’s strength. Lack of integrity in the believer, you and I, cannot cancel the integrity of God. If we fail to execute the protocol plan of God, it does not cancel our eternal salvation. God does have a plan, and we call it the protocol plan of God. It means a plan for your life must be done in the right way, the right time, and the right way. And if you fail to execute that plan, if you fail to learn that plan, it’s not going to cancel your salvation. Yet we are more impressed, it seems like sometimes, we are more impressed with our failures than with the integrity of God, and that’s our problem. If you’re more impressed with your failures than God’s integrity, that’s your problem. Because we need to be more impressed with His integrity and less impressed with our own failures. That’s why many Christians don’t believe in eternal security, because they’re impressed with what they did. They say, oh, I did something so bad, I did something so evil that God cannot save me. And you’re saying to yourself, my deed or my action was beyond the integrity of God, and that’s dumb. That’s not true. God’s integrity is not compromised because you failed. Listen to this 2 Timothy 2.13 verse. This may shock you, but listen carefully. If we believe not, yet he abides faithful, he cannot deny himself. If we believe not, he abides faithful, he cannot deny himself. This verse I just read to you assumes that a Christian can turn away from his original faith in Jesus Christ and no longer believe in God’s plan. Some young Christians are recruited by the zeitgeist. Z-E-I-T-G-E-I-S-T. The zeitgeist. You say, what is that? It’s the spirit of the times. And some young believers are recruited by the spirit of the times. after they initially get saved. You can imagine these giant crusades that used to take place. Dr. Billy Graham used to have these giant crusades and hundreds of people would come forward to get saved. Did they all grow to spiritual maturity? No. Did they all begin to replicate the life of Christ? No. Did they all learn the protocol plan of God? No. And it can happen through the educational department at any university. That young Christian can be persuaded by an educated friend who they respect and admire. But however it happens, the fact is they become, even agnostics, or worse yet, atheists. Does that now mean they’re no longer saved? And they got saved maybe when they were 18 or 16 or 15 or 22. But now they’ve turned away from that after they got to a little education. Now they no longer believe in God. Now they’re agnostic. Agnostic means no knowledge. They’re no knowledge or worse yet, an atheist. If a young believer or any believer denies the Lord, he most certainly will forfeit some of his rewards in the kingdom of Christ. That’s the millennial kingdom for sure. But it does not negate the promise of eternal salvation. When we receive the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior, there are many things that occur. Years ago, my very own pastor taught a series on the 40 things that happen to us the very moment we believe in Christ. Included in this particular study is a list of things the Holy Spirit does. For example, we are dwelled by the Holy Spirit, sealed by the Holy Spirit, given spiritual gifts by the Holy Spirit, filled with the Holy Spirit, at least until we commit our first sin after having been saved, and that will come along a couple days later. But for a complete list of those 40 different things that happen the moment you get saved, if you’ll contact us, we’ll put you in touch with where you can get that information and how you can request the book called The Plan of God. It has a list of all of them. So the point that I’m making is this, that God would have to cancel all of those things if you could lose your salvation. All 40 of them, he’d have to say null and void, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel. It’s not gonna happen. If you understand God is immutable, you understand the word immutable, he doesn’t change, You understand God does not change, thus it would be against his nature to cancel your salvation once you’ve been admitted into the royal family of God. He doesn’t do that. We’re guaranteed that because of his immutability. He does not change. This happens when the transfer of the righteousness of Christ is accredited to your account. God’s not going to take it back. Ephesians 1.13, listen carefully. In whom you also trusted. After that you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. In whom also after you believed, you were then sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. You were put into the royal family of God. Your eternal destiny was sealed. You’re sealed with the Holy Spirit. You can still quench the Spirit. This is a difference. The filling of the Spirit and the sealing of the Spirit are two different things. Sealed by the Holy Spirit has to do with your relationship. The filling of the Holy Spirit has to do with your fellowship. So if you could in fact lose your salvation, then it would mean that you’ve got to do something to win it back. Since apparently you did something to forfeit it to begin with. That fact alone should alert you to something, that it’s a lie. The fact alone should alert you to the lie that you could lose the free gift God gave you. You’re not going to lose it. He’s not going to take it back. He’s not going to say, okay, hand it over. Let’s go give it back. I want it back now. I’m going to take back my righteousness. I’m going to take back your eternal life. I’m going to take back everything I did for you. It’s not going to happen because he’s immutable. You’re going to lose out in life. You’re going to live a miserable life under discipline. You’re never going to complete the protocol plan of God for your life. And you’re going to wind up in heaven looking back and saying, what a dummy I was. You’re never going to hear, well done, my good and faithful servant. But God will not take back the gift of eternal life that he gave you. So here’s some more principles that I’d like for you to remember. One, God cannot cancel eternal life. When God gives, he does not take it back. He has given us his righteousness and his life so that we are now qualified to live with him forever. Now you might not be sitting on the front row. You might not be getting a high five from the Lord Jesus Christ for the way you lived your life, but you’ll be there. But you may be like at a football game in the upper stadium and way up in the top row of the bleachers trying to look down and see what all’s going on, but you will be there. I don’t know about you, but I don’t wanna sit up in the top row of the bleachers. I wanna be on the sideline. I wanna be where the action is. Two, the imputation of divine righteousness is the only means of justification. The imputation of the righteousness of Jesus Christ given to you is the only means of justification. Justification means that we have an eternal relationship with God based on His integrity, not ours. It’s based upon our possessing the righteousness of Christ. Romans 5, verses 1 and 2 say this, Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom also we have access by faith unto this grace wherein we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Three, we have peace with God because he gave us his righteousness. We do not have peace with God because of our own self-righteousness. Four, we stand in grace, not in merit. It is God that provides the grace and our standing ability. We don’t stand on our own strength. If we had tried to do that, we would collapse. We stand in the grace of God. based on the filling of the Holy Spirit and the dynamics of the Word of God. You can look at those as two crutches holding you up. So eternal security, point five, is defined as an unbreakable relationship with the integrity of God, depending on the integrity of God, not you. It’s an unbreakable relationship because God will not break it, regardless of what we fail to do or don’t do. In John 10, 27 and 28, Jesus said, My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. And I will give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. Now listen carefully. And no one shall snatch them out of my hand. There’s a divine promise from the Lord Jesus Christ himself. If you read 1 Corinthians 3, 11 through 16, you’ll read about the judgment seat of Christ where believers are judged for their production. And you’ll see that some of the judgment implies that much of our production will be burned up as wood, hay, or stubble, and some will be rewarded as precious stones. But here’s what happens. If everything you did for God after you got saved was burned up, and you had no righteousness credited to your account because you didn’t do anything, would you still be saved? And listen to verse 15 of 1 Corinthians 3. If any man’s work shall be burned, he will suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved, yet so is by fire. You can’t burn up a foundation. You may burn up the wood and the hay and the stubble, but you won’t burn up the foundation. You may lose your eternal rewards, but you will never lose your eternal life. One is based on what God does for you. The other is based on what you do to glorify him. So the reversionistic believer will never hear those words, well done, my good and my faithful servant. As I said, I was going to do some education this morning, so I hope that explains it. Why a carnal Christian dies does not lose his eternal life. Were you listening, and did you learn something today? I pray you did, and I pray you’ll come back next week. Same time, same channel. Until then, this is your host, Rick Hughes, saying thank you for listening to The Flatline.
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Thank you for listening to The Floodline with your host, Rick Hughes. If you’d like to contact Rick, please write to him at P.O. Box 100, Cropwell, Alabama, 35054, or online at www.rickhughesministries.org.
