Pastor John, we usually serve up specific questions to you, but today I simply want to ask

if there's anything from your personal devotions lately that you want to share with us here.

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. 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.

Exort 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 that it's 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,

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.

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