Joe Hare, a counselor on San Quentin’s death row, had a small caseload — only five. But one of the five was Russell Romero of the Symbionese Liberation Army. He’s the guy who killed Oakland School Superintendent Marcus Foster. Another was Robert Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan. A third was Charles Manson.

Joe was an elder at First Presbyterian Church in Concord where I served as associate pastor. And Joe arranged to take his pastors for an intimate, behind-the scenes look at the big house. When I heard those heavy metal doors slam behind me at each security point, I knew that I never wanted to be in there when I couldn’t just walk back out. We entered death row through the green room that contains the gas chamber. I’ve lived clean ever since.

Sometime in the ‘70s Richard Pryor talked about a similar visit to a maximum-security prison. He talked about how he went up the prison and he talked with the brothers and he rapped with the brothers. He concluded, “All I can say is “thank God we’ve got prisons.”

I felt the same way. We saw it all including the exercise yard, the lock down and a death-row disciplinary hearing. Those were a group of hard-core bad boys. Thank God we’ve got prisons.

But God also sets us free from prisons — prisons of the spirit. The doors of this prison don’t clang as loudly. The people you are with tend to be a lot nicer. But the bars are just as real. The end is just as certain. And we can’t get free unless we are set free from the outside.

Over the past several months we have looked at what the Apostle Paul tells us in Colossians 1 about who Jesus really is. Those sermons are on our web site. Last Sunday we looked at verses 21-22 where Paul tells us who we are and who Jesus has made us to be, "But now in Christ Jesus, you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ."

Paul uses three words in Colossians to describe all people=s condition prior to the cross: We are alienated, enemies in mind, and do evil deeds. But then he uses three words to express our condition after we accept the cross. Because of the cross we are now holy, without blemish, and free from accusation.

Because of the cross, God accepts us as cleansed, forgiven, and completely reconciled. When we stand before Him in confession, He deals with us as if the sin had not been committed. We are "unaccusable" in His sight. We are not only cleansed. We are exonerated of any charge.

That is what God has done for us. But now, in verse

Verse 23, Paul adds some words "Jesus has reconciled you in His fleshly body through death in order to present you before Him holy, blameless and beyond reproach – that’s verse 22 -- if indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard, which was proclaimed in all creation, and of which I, Paul, was made a minister."

This is a very important verse. It has caused endless controversy between believers. I had not planned to devote an entire sermon to this one verse. But I have to. It is pivotal for our understanding of Colossians. And what is more important, it is pivotal to our confidence in our relationship with God and to our ability to experience the joy God desires for us.

Some people read what Paul says here in Colossians 1:23 and declare, “I knew it. Here’s the fine print! There is a condition on our salvation. The condition is that we not only need to come to faith but that we need to continue in our faith without wavering. We need to hold on to God with an iron grip.”

Other people are equally positive that, whatever verse 23 means, is does not mean that a genuine believer can fall so far from God’s grace as to lose his or her salvation.

That’s not just wishful thinking. They point out that Paul has just told us in verse 22 about the total and complete reconciliation in Christ. In verse 17, he has also taught us about the power of Christ and the fact that all things in Christ hold together. That includes our salvation and our position before God. Back in verses 13 and 14, he has told us that in Christ, God has transferred us out of the domain of darkness and into the kingdom of His Son.

Paul tells us that when we come to faith, we are born again. We are made a new creation -- that the old is finished and done and all things have become new. He says that we are sealed in the Holy Spirit of promise.

So the question of interpreting verse 23 becomes, “Can you be unborn again? Can you be unsealed in the Spirit? Can you be made back into an old creation?”

This morning I first of all want to deal with the questions raised in this crucial debate. Then I will explore what Paul is actually telling us.

First, the debate.

Is it possible for a Christian to lose his or her salvation?

Now I'm sure that we've all known people we've wondered about in this regard. I remember a girl up in Concord who was heavily into drugs. At one time she had been very active in the church but as she looked back she called it her "Jesus freak stage" ﷓﷓ something she had outgrown like an old pair of shoes. I also remember the reports about the apparent initial sincerity of Jim Jones of the People's Temple ﷓﷓ before he went off the deep end and brought such pain in Guyana. Or maybe you've wondered about yourself – “Have I finally blown it badly enough for God to give up on me?”

What does it mean to be born﷓again as a son or daughter of God? And if we blow it, are we removed from the family of God by a retroactive spiritual abortion?

Is it possible to lose our salvation?

This issue, which is formally known as the "perseverance of the saints" is the major historic point of disagreement between the Presbyterian Church and the Methodist Church ﷓﷓ although it is not something we sit around and argue about very often.

The Methodist Church, as it was founded by John Wesley, holds the belief that it is possible for a Christian to fall so far into sin as to lose his or her salvation. This belief is called Arminianism from a Dutch Theologian, Jacob Arminius. One of Wesley' support verses for this belief is Philippians 2:12 where Paul writes: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Wesley interpreted this to mean that we can lose our salvation if we don't watch our step ﷓﷓ if we don't continue to grow toward what he called "perfection." In an extreme case, I had a Nazarene Pastor, who comes out of the same perfectionist tradition, tell me that a Christian who dies with unconfessed sin in his or her life is lost ﷓﷓ that you are only as secure as your last confession and its completeness.

The churches in the tradition of John Calvin however, including our own Presbyterian Church, would interpret Philippians 2:12 as saying that our salvation is something we already have ﷓﷓ as other scriptures say ﷓﷓ but that we were bought with a price and should never treat the gift of God lightly.

So who is right?

Before we can answer that question, we first need to define salvation.

Salvation is not sitting in the church. A person doesn't become a Christian by sitting in the church any more than a mouse becomes a cookie by sitting in the cookie jar. Something else has to happen. Salvation is also not just a verbal assent to a system of belief. In the Godfather movies, Michael Corleone professed his faith in Father, Son and Holy Spirit at the exact moment his men are committing the multiple murders he had ordered.

Salvation doesn't come from sitting is a church or even from repeating a creed. Salvation comes both by a commitment of the mind ﷓﷓ the will ﷓﷓ and a commitment of the heart. As Paul writes in Romans 10:9 "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For a person believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved."

This whole perseverance issue raises a lot of difficulty for some people. They point at example after example of people who, in their opinion, have decisively fallen away from the faith. It does not seem right to them that God should continue to number them among His people. There are those who seem to fall away from the new life in Jesus Christ -- maybe some of our own children or maybe our parents. But we want God to still count them as His own. So this becomes a very personal question.

What do we make of those who no longer walk with God? Well, there are two real possibilities.

The first possibility is that we are dealing with people who were never truly Christians ﷓﷓ who gave lip service without the intention of the heart. We're not talking about any security for them. There is a biblical doctrine of the perseverance of the saints but there is no doctrine of the perseverance of the aints. And there are some in the church who aint Christian. Jesus makes that clear in His parable of the Wheat and the Tares. There Jesus warns us that there will be people who seem to be part of the church who are not Christians at all.

The second possibility is a person who has experienced the renewing of God's Spirit ﷓﷓ whose faith was at one time of the heart and of the will and not just of the mouth ﷓﷓ but who, through a variety of reasons, has pulled away from the Christian life and maybe even denied the reality of what he or she had experienced earlier. What about this person?

In the third chapter of 1st Corinthians, Paul gives us an insight: "No one, "Paul writes beginning in verse 11, "can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." Paul is saying here that we can't expect to build our Christian life on good works, humanism or any worldly philosophy. The foundation has to be Jesus.

He continues in verse 12: "Now if any person build upon the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each person's work will become evident; for the day will show it, because it is to be revealed with fire; and the fire itself will test the quality of each person's work. If anyone's work which he built upon it remains, he shall receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned up, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as through fire."

The person Paul is describing here, the one whose work is burned up is the one who has taken a genuine foundation of the Christian life and built upon it with inferior materials ﷓﷓ or maybe even covered it with a pile of garbage.

What happens to you when you do that?

You will be saved, Paul says, because of the foundation of the cross. But it will be with the smell of smoke on your clothes. You will come to stand before the judgment seat of Christ with the knowledge that you have simply wasted much of your life ﷓﷓ a life you were called to live according to the will of God and in the abundance of God. The person whose work stands the test will receive a reward. But if you build with inferior materials, you will miss some of the rewards – the opportunities we will have for service in addition to salvation.

But you will be saved, Paul says.

On this basis, the belief of the Presbyterian Church is "once saved, always saved." As the Westminster Confession of Faith declares: "They whom God has accepted in His Beloved, effectually called and sanctified by His Spirit, can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved."

The doctrine of the perseverance of the saints really needs to be renamed. It is actually the doctrine of the perseverance of God with the saints. Our confidence is not in our love for God, which is faint, fickle and faltering, but in His love for us which is steadfast, faithful and persevering. The key for my hope is not how well I hold on to God but how well God holds on to me. God’s love will never let us go because it is committed to bringing us safe home in the end.

So what do we do with Colossians 1:23. What does this verse mean?

Well remember that Colossians 1:22 says that there is a goal to our salvation. Jesus desires to present us to Himself “holy, blameless and beyond reproach.” That is what God wants to do for us. But if we don’t continue in the faith firmly established, then we will miss the freedom and the abundant life that God wants us to enjoy. We will not lose our salvation but we will certainly lose the joy of our salvation.

The result, in the image of 1 Corinthians 3:11, is that we will be saved “as through fire.” Remember that the inferior materials — the wood, hay, straw of 1 Corinthians 3 — aren’t just poor lifestyle choices – the things we do. Inferior materials can also be our theology -- what we believe.

Colossians 1:23 is actually the great transition verse in this Colossian letter. Remember that the Colossian Christians are being attacked by all sorts of heretical teachers. On the one hand there are the legalists. On the other hand, there are the super-spiritual Gnostics. Chapter 2 of Colossians is largely devoted to Paul’s warnings not to allow either group to sway us from the gospel of the cross into one kind of belief trap or another.

This verse introduces that whole section. It is not that the Colossians will lose their salvation. But if they buy into these false gospels, they will lose their joy. They will put themselves back in prison after Christ has set them free.

What Paul is saying in Colossians 1:23 is that there is no other true gospel than the gospel of the cross. There are a lot of peddlers coming to Colossae with alternate gospels ﷓﷓ Gnostic gospels and legalistic gospels. Paul is saying that the Colossians will never reach maturity in holiness if they listen to the wrong voices. They could not be presented to God in the spiritual state which fulfills the aims of the cross.

We face the same thing today. People come preaching the Jesus of the New Age, the Jesus of Feminism, the Jesus of political revolution, the Jesus of health and wealth and materialism. Paul warns us that if we buy what they are selling, we will no longer be holy and blameless and beyond reproach. Yes, we will still be saved if the genuine foundation in Christ is laid. But we will be saved “as through fire.” We will enter the Lord's presence with a messed up theology looking are like something the cat dragged in and lose our reward. John says in his first letter: "Let us so live that we shall not be ashamed before Him at his coming." Let us believe the same way.

What we listen to matters.

What is your life going to be built on? What is your life going to count for? Those are the questions. Every one of us here is investing his or her life in something. You cannot live without making an investment. What is it in? Will it be permanent? Will it stand the test? In the great day when all the universe sees things the way they are, will you be filled with joy that your life was invested in what stood the test and contributed to the glory of the Lord Himself? Or will you be ashamed that you wasted all these years making an impression on people and teaching and influencing others to do so, and it was all burned up in the fire ﷓﷓ saved, but as though you had to run through the flames and lost everything besides?

I know there are people who do not like this kind of preaching. They say we ought to all preach the grace of God – “all grace, all the time.” But the Scriptures teach us that our beliefs and our behaviors matter. Are our lives going to be lived on the basis of gold, silver and precious stones, growing out of that revelation of God in the cross of Christ, or are they going to reflect the empty, vain philosophies and speculations of the world around so that we live only for pleasure, fame and power instead of being an instrument of the living God?

It matters what you believe. It matters to your confidence. It matters to your joy. It matters to your future. It matters to your God.