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“AS LONG AS I’M LIVING, MY BABY YOU’LL BE”

Christians and skeptics love to debate this concept of “once saved, always saved.” Once you’re a born-again believer, and are adopted into God’s family, could you ever lose your position IN that family? Especially when the perfect Dad loves you with a perfect love?

Would you like to chew up about the next five weeks of your life? I can help you do it. Simply go on the Internet, check into a search engine like Yahoo, and type in these three words: “Assurance of salvation.” In about ten seconds you will be looking at literally thousands of web sites and pages where theologians and lay people of every persuasion discuss this question: Can a born-again Christian know that they are saved, and that they are going to be in God’s kingdom? Can we KNOW? Can we be sure? Now, we didn’t spend five weeks slogging from one web page to the next, but we easily could have. And friend, we actually find ourselves, here on this Monday, launching into a fifth and final week of Bible study on this wonderful, parallel pillar of faith: ADOPTION.

Earlier in this series, borrowing as we have from the standout Christian bestseller, Knowing God, by Dr. J. I. Packer, we’ve already visited this question once. You might recall this wonderful sound bite from a couple of weeks ago:

“[In God’s family] you have absolute stability and security; the parent is entirely wise and good, and the child’s position is PERMANENTLY ASSURED. The very concept of adoption is itself a proof and guarantee of the preservation of the saints, for only bad fathers throw their children out of the family, even under provocation; and God is not a bad father, but a good one.”

So Dr. Packer seems to tip his hand early on; he believes that the son or daughter who comes into the family of God can know that they’re going to be permitted to stay there. Their “son-ship” or “daughter-ship” is assured. And here at the conclusion of this great book chapter entitled “Sons of God,” Packer comes yet again to this important truth. We’ve been studying five huge benefits of adoption, and this is his last one:

“Fifth,” he writes, “our adoption gives the clue we need to see our way through the problem of assurance.”

And he immediately concedes that this is one of the great, thorny questions in the Christian faith.

“Here is a tangled skein, if ever there was one!” he writes. Witness those thousands of web sites sharply debating the issue. “This topic,” he continues, “has been in constant dispute in the church ever since the Reformation.”

Now, friend, let me say this. We can’t precisely and perfectly solve the question of “assurance of salvation” in ten minutes on the radio. Not when the Body of Christ has been discussing and studying and praying and researching for five or fifteen centuries. All we can do is to take what the Bible says, and agree that we agree with the Bible. If it says something, we accept it. And yet this continues to be a difficult truth, even with those ground rules.

We have here in the office an exceptional study book entitled Catholics and Protestants: Do They Now Agree?, by John Ankerberg and John Weldon. They are proponents of “once saved, always saved” theology, and they immediately point us to John 5:24. What does it say? Listen to this:

“I tell you the truth,” [Jesus says], “whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me HAS eternal life and will NOT be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.”

We can’t help but notice — and rejoice in — how clear that is. Friend, if you commit yourself to a faith relationship with Jesus, you HAVE eternal life. You’ve been adopted, and by the best Dad in the world. You WILL NOT be condemned, the Bible says; you’ve crossed over from death to life, from homelessness to life in the mansion. I John 5:13 is on the same side of this question of assurance, when it asserts:

“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may KNOW that you have eternal life.”

Bible teachers like James Packer, Dr. Ankerberg, and others — the writers in most of these web sites, for example — also hold high the classic passage in Romans 8:31-39. That’s the one which declares that “nothing can separate us from the love of God.”

Friend, this sounds so clear that we have to ask: why does the Church debate? John 5:24 seems so ironclad that there could be no discussion: “You have crossed over from death to life.” What’s the problem?

Well, Matthew 7 lurks as a problem. That’s the parable of the tree and its fruit, and where some people who THINK they have assurance of salvation, who THINK they are sons and daughters . . . really aren’t.

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus says, “but only he who does the will of My Father in heaven.” That sounds like trouble to any adopted kid who misbehaves. Back to the orphanage! “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from Me, you evildoers!’”

So friend, what we have here is a classic case of hard verses on both sides. The Matthew 25 parable of the ten virgins is a problem. The Bridegroom says to people who really think they are part of the wedding party: “Get out of here. I don’t know you.” Hebrews 6 is a painfully difficult passage for a Christian who believes in the principle of “once saved, always saved.”

I’d like to detour past that hard terrain just now and simply tell you about a certain bad boy named Bob. Speaking of spending a lot of time on the Internet, his web site, RobertMunsch.com, takes a while to journey through. But by his own admission, he “almost flunked first grade, and also the second, third, fourth, and fifth.” His older brother kicked him in the mouth once, the day he had gotten his braces off, and knocked out some of little Bob’s perfectly straight front teeth. He studied for seven years to be a Jesuit priest, and finally flunked out of that. Eventually Robert Munsch discovered that his real gift was hanging around kids in daycare and writing poems for them. And clear back in 1986 he wrote a little thing that went like this:

“A mother held her new baby and very slowly rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And while she held him, she sang: I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always. As long as I’m living, My baby you’ll be.”

Have you ever heard that? It’s only sold more than 20 million copies, this quiet little poem called LOVE YOU FOREVER.

It doesn’t speak directly to the issue of adoption, but this child grows up and has problems and makes mistakes.

“He pulled all the books off the shelves,” Robert Munsch writes. “He pulled all the food out of the refrigerator and he took his mother’s watch and flushed it down the toilet. Sometimes his mother would say, ‘This kid is driving me CRAZY!’”

But then in the midnight hour, when the tired little hellion fell asleep, she would hold him in her arms and quietly say those magical, spiritual words right from John 5:24:

“I’ll love you forever. I’ll like you for always. As long as I’m living, My baby you’ll be.”

When he was nine, the kid wouldn’t come in for dinner; he didn’t want a bath. He said naughty words to his grandma. Sometimes his mom, halfway meaning it, wanted to sell him to the zoo. But as the moon rose over the fading tumult, when fatigue and peace finally reigned: “I’ll love you forever. I’ll like you for always.”

As a teenager — strange friends, strange clothes, strange music. “Sometimes the mother felt like SHE was in a zoo,” writes the poetic Mr. Munsch. But: “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always. As long as I’m living, My baby you’ll be.” And so it is all the way to the finish line, until the mother is too feeble and tired, and the poem turns around, with the grownup son gently holding her and whispering:

“I’ll love YOU forever, I’ll like you for always. As long as I’m living, My MOMMY you’ll be.”

It’s a sweet, wonderful expression of parental love . . . and friend, let me take us again to the reality that God is the best parent that ever was. When we leave our socks on the floor and bump our shins on the rules of the house, God doesn’t angrily take us to the zoo of Lucifer’s kingdom below and abandon us there. Instead He asserts again and again: “As long as I’m living” — which is quite a long time, by the way, “My child you will be.”

Every conclusion we make about the hard verses of Scripture, the difficult-to-parse parables and passages of the Bible that speak of “working out your salvation with fear and trembling” and “he that endureth to the end” have to be read in the quiet shadow of Calvary, and from our position of safety in the lap of God. Friend, we have to read our Bibles while feeling the strong arms of God holding us securely in His grasp. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”