Welcome back to Aspastor John. This summer Pastor John is out of the studio preaching in Belfast in Scotland before returning to the States for a 40-day writing leave to finish up a book on Providence on the sovereignty of God a book he started last summer and hopes to finish this summer I cannot wait to see it and all of it the travel the book writing in this very podcast is all made possible by you we are supported by the prayers and the funding of God's people so thank you for generously and

investing in this important and eternal work so with Pastor John busy we're diving into our archive of 1500 episodes and this summer we're pulling out some of your favorites about once every 50 episodes we release one that touches a nerve and touches the 300,000 play mark these are the elite episodes in our six and a half year history we only have about 30 of them and here's one of them

Christian struggle with sin because we Christians in this life are sinners still the presence of sin in us will not be eradicated until that glorious day when we will see Jesus face to face and what a glorious day that will be but until then we fight sin by faith and we can experience assurance inside of that fight but we also believe that there are forms of willful sin that evidence a heart that has not been saved patterns of willful sin

that show the heart is not truly converted which leads to today's question from Josh hello Pastor John my question is regarding some of those hard verses in the book of Hebrews specifically Hebrews 1026 to 29 the writer seems to be speaking to the ability to lose salvation by engaging in willful sin as it has been called my question is what is the opposite of a willful sin is it an accidental sin or something else seems to me that due to the presence of the Holy Spirit's conviction all sin done by the

believer is done willfully is there something I'm not seeing within these verses Josh is right that Hebrews 10 and Hebrews 6 often give people the impression that a person possesses the fullness of salvation

and then loses it and these texts can easily look that way but there are clues that this is not what this author of Hebrews wants to communicate so Josh's question is twofold do these verses that he refers to teach that we can lose our salvation that's his first question and second

what is verse 26 of chapter 10 mean by referring to sinning deliberately or willingly since in one sense all sin is an act of the will and thus deliberate so the key verse that he's referring to is verse 26 of chapter 10 in the ESV goes like this for if we go on sending deliberately

after receiving the knowledge of the truth there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins in other words we're beyond salvation now two observations about this phrase go on sinning deliberately are really important number one

the word deliberately translates the Greek Eccucius and this word is used in first Peter 5 to like this shepherd the flock of God that is among you you elders shepherd the flock of God that is among you exercising oversight not under compulsion but exorcios willingly it's translated that's the same word that translate deliberately

now what this usage shows the reason I cited is that there are two different kinds of willing aren't there one is eager and wholehearted and the other is under compulsion in both cases one could argue that the elders are in fact exercising their will

to shepherd the flock of God but in the one case it's glad it's an act that engages the the whole will happy energized and in the other case it's begrudging an act that evidently goes against significant parts of the will that would rather be doing something else doesn't really want to shepherd the flock of God but for money or for fame

or to avoid guilt feelings or something you gut it out and and shepherd the flock of God so this is a correction to Joshua's assumption that all sinning is equally willing or all human acts are equally willing since all acts including sin are acts of the will that's true they are acts of the will

we choose them but this text Hebrews 1026 is saying something more than that the sin which destroys the soul is an act of the will of course it is but it's more than that all sins are acts of the will and not all sins destroy it's a more intentional

eager wholehearted act of the will an act which shows that there isn't a real identity of spiritual newness inside that acts as a constraint holding back the will at least in part

there's the second thing to notice in the phrase go on sinning deliberately or willingly or eagerly it's that phrase go on sinning which is a good translation of the present tense of the Greek verb sin

it's not a single act it's not a few acts it's not periodic acts it's rather a a settled persistent continuation in sin so what destroys the soul what puts it beyond forgiveness in verse 26 is not sin per say

an eager deliberate willing persistent settled pattern of sin and we can see how serious this is by looking at what comes just before and what comes after verse 26

verse 26 begins with the word for which shows what kind of sin is being referred to in the preceding verses namely the sin of forsaking the Christian fellowship

and the rejection of all brotherly exhortation in other words this person is walking away from Christ and his church then if you look after verse 26 especially at verse 29 you see that the pattern of sin is so deep and repeated and committed that it's called

it's called trampling underfoot the son of God profaning the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified and outraging the spirit of grace and right here is where it looks like we can lose our salvation because of the reference to

by which he was sanctified so you can profane the blood by such a deliberate continued settled pattern of sin you can profane the blood of the covenant by which you were sanctified which sounds like oh well he was saved

and so now he's beyond forgiveness and so you can lose your salvation there are two passages in Hebrews that keep me from going there from saying that this reference to some kind of sanctified condition

...