Pastor John, what role does our church family play and our Christian friends play around

us in the continuation of our faith in us preserving to the end?

Tony, just yesterday I was reading in first John on my way through the Bible and I've

often said that eternal security is a community project rather than something that's

individualistic merely an automatic. God uses means to keep us eternally for himself. It's

not like a vaccination against hell. It's more like a committed therapist who unfailingly,

this is God unfailingly seeing to it that we hold to the health regimen that brings us to

everlasting glory. I totally believe in eternal security. Jesus said, I give them eternal life,

they will never perish. No one can snatch them out of my hand. My father is great and no one

can snatch them out of my father's hand. But I've also said that this keeping, this divine

keeping is a community project in which God uses people, exhort one another every day as long

as it is called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin because

we have come to share in Christ if we hold our original confidence firm to the end. So

our exhorting one another every day is one of the instruments, one of the means by which God

keeps us in Christ to the end of time. So yesterday in first John, here's what I read and I saw

is in a totally fresh way. First John 516, if anyone sees his brother committing a sin,

not leading to death, he shall ask and God will give him life. So I had never paused to think,

you mean the life that we need to make it to the end. The eternal life is given when I see a

brother sinning and I pause and I ask God, oh God, bring him to repentance, bring him to the point

of confession and God will use that prayer as a means of preserving that person's eternal life.

So there is a kind of sinning that shows God has given a person over to depravity. John tells

us that there is sinning that is that is undead. It's like Esau sin in Hebrews 12, 17. He sought

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