Fariza

 “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” Philippians 2:12

My sister said something recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

She was visiting from out of town, and the way it always goes with us, we ended up deep in one of those conversations that start with memory and slowly work their way toward something bigger.

We are both ex-Muslims.

We are both Christians now. And we’ve both spent years quietly observing the faith we joined from the outside, noticing things that people raised inside it sometimes can’t see. We were talking about salvation. I told her I no longer believed in once saved, always saved, that the Lord had been taking me deeper into this teaching for a while, and the more I studied it and the more I watched how it played out in people’s lives, the less I could hold onto it.

She thought about it for a moment. Then she said, simply:

“Well, that explains why so many Christians are not very nice people.”

She went on: if you believe you are saved and there is nothing more required of you, why would you keep striving? Why pursue sanctification? Why do the hard work of actually becoming more like Christ — the humility, the repentance, the dying to self — when you are already secured in your spot in heaven?

What she said lingered in my mind.

I have been a Christian long enough to know she was right.

You begin to abuse and misuse the grace of God when you believe that once you said the salvation prayer, you are good to go for your entire life.

It doesn’t work that way…

You stop growing, and it shows. You keep drinking milk, and your teeth never grow to eat real meat.

I have met people who have been in church their entire lives, fifty, sixty, seventy, and even eighty years of Sunday mornings, Bible studies, mission trips, volunteering, and collecting Divinity School PhDs, and yet the depth, the maturity, the Christlikeness was missing. Instead, they speak like unbelievers, react and act worse than unbelievers, and seem largely unbothered by the gap. It seems like they have gotten worse, more judgmental, angrier, more cynical, and in some cases, more evil.

I used to think, “No way, you are this old and still this immature in the faith. By this age, you should be like Jesus; you had all this time in the church to practice it.”

I’m not perfect, but I’m also not pushing sixty.

For years, I couldn’t name what I was seeing. Now I think I can.

Not everyone who professes faith actually has it. And the doctrine of once saved, always saved, taken the way it is often taught in evangelical Protestant circles, can quickly permit people to stay exactly as they are. It can make sanctification feel optional. And optional sanctification is not Christianity. It is Christianity-shaped comfort.

It’s demonic.

A month and a half ago, the Lord took me to a place that resembled purgatory. As a Protestant, I was taught to believe there is only heaven and hell. That whole purgatory thing is not Biblical; that’s something that those weird Catholics believe.

I was genuinely shaken when I found myself there. It was nothing like the dream I once had in hell. Hell was hell — absolute, crushing, final.

Purgatory was something else entirely. It was the in-between. God was absent, but not completely. The sun shone dimly, just enough to light the space. The only way I can describe it is gray — everything gray. Everything felt dull. I felt a constant, quiet regret and a longing that maybe, one day, I would get out. I felt a constant sense of regret from the people around me. They wished they had spent more time paying attention to this Jesus guy when they were here on earth. Hope existed there, unlike hell, where hope is nowhere, but it was a desperate, fragile sense of longing.

The people I saw there were quietly envious that I was going back to earth, back to where hope still exists.

I couldn’t wait to get out of that depressing place.

I used to complain about how unfair life on earth is. After that dream, I stopped!!! I began to love this earth more than I ever had. The earth has hope because the Holy Spirit is here. He is not in hell. He is not in purgatory.

So no, I do not believe in once saved, always saved. We walk out our salvation with fear and trembling. The Eastern Orthodox Church has held this position since Christ instituted His church before ascending to the Father. So what happened to us? Who convinced us to relax, to let our guard down, as if the enemy, who prowls like a lion looking for someone to devour, was taking days off? He extends grace to no one. If he could drag every single one of us to hell, he would. Not even purgatory – hell.

Purgatory is grace. That in-between space is reserved for those whom God, in His mercy, wants to give a second chance. When exactly? I don’t know. How does it work? Ask your Catholic friends.

What I do know is this: you make it to heaven by the condition of your heart.

That is the only thing God is looking at.