There's a lot of people, a lot of believers, probably most believers at some point in their
life end up going through a time where they may end up doubting their own salvation or
thinking on it, did I really get saved, you know, and having these types of thoughts.
Now normally this happens for people, especially when you're earlier on after getting saved,
you can start having doubts, or maybe you hear some preaching on a subject that might
rattle you or shake you, you hear some real hard preaching and you start wondering, whoa,
wait a minute, you know, did I not do something right, did I, you know, did I really get saved,
you know, and I want to cover multiple issues when it comes to this and hopefully be able
to provide some reassurance, but you know, many times people will think, you know, maybe
they were young when they got saved, right, this is kind of a common one, and they go,
I don't know if I fully understood everything, I don't know how much I knew, you know, my
mom or my dad, you know, they led me in a prayer, but I'm not sure if I really got it,
and sometimes people have a hard time, because when we go out and preach the gospel, we try
to bring people to a point to where they're making a decision to put their faith in Jesus
Christ, that's what we're doing, we're trying to persuade, provide a lot of verses, scriptural
evidence, give the understanding, help them to just to this realize and get it and see
that they need a savior, and you can pinpoint it and say, that's the day that that person
got saved, because when we walked up to the door, they were trusting in their own works,
but when we showed them the gospel, they, you know, they saw it, they realized it, they
changed their mind, and they put their faith in Jesus Christ, and it's pretty clear cut,
pretty cut and dry, right, that's what happened, and you have that moment, but some people,
they say, I don't really remember that happening, and it'll cause you to doubt, well, I'm not
sure if I'm really saved, because I, like, it didn't happen like that for me, I don't
know, you know, and I've heard that quite a bit, and it caused people to start to doubt,
well, just right off the bat, and this is an answer, a question you could just ask yourself,
just for any situation, any scenario is, what do you believe right now? What do you believe
right now? What do you believe it takes to be saved? If you're believing that salvation
is a free gift, it's completely by grace, through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, you
could never lose that salvation, it's nothing what you did, you're trusting in the finished
work of Jesus Christ, when he died on the cross and rose again from the dead, you're
trusting in him, you know you can never lose it, you're secure in Jesus Christ, if you're
believing that, you're believing the right gospel, you're saved. That's the bottom line,
so you know, sometimes you just need to make it that simple, instead of getting complicated
and going back, like, I don't know about this time, was it then, I don't know, you know,
this other thing happened in my life, I don't know, look, if you believe today, you're saved,
it doesn't matter when the time was that you actually made the decision and put your
faith in Christ, you don't have to doubt your salvation if that's what you believe today,
because if that's what you believe, then I don't care what anyone says, that's all the
Bible says, you know, whosoever believeth should not perish. So that's what scripture
says and scripture can't be broken. So if you believe, then you are saved and you have
eternal life. So that's a good, I mean, that's just right off the start, you know, I could
just close the sermon here, we're done, right? No, but we're going to go into some more things,
because there's other things that pop up and can cause people to doubt, and I do want to
try to deal with that, help people out, and there's the next point is actually a kind
of a big one, we're going to park it on this, because I've heard a lot of people also say,
well, what if I was already a reprobate? What if, you know, I've gotten phone calls on this,
I've talked to people about this, where they think like, well, I just don't know, I mean,
I don't know, like, because I'll ask, I'll go back to the same thing, well, what do you
believe? You know, it's like, yeah, but I don't know, I mean, I might, you know, these
things happened when I was young, and, you know, maybe someone was abused, or some other
thing went on, you know, and they had some issues in the past, and they're just like,
I don't know, I might have, I might have just, you know, like, there's a point in my life
where I really hated God, I've heard that before, too, you know, they lost a loved one,
and I just, there's just a point where I just really hated God, I was just really angry
at him, you know, and they start thinking of these things, because, you know, you hear
preaching on Romans one, you hear preaching on the reprobate, and these are for the vast
majority of people these days, it's a new concept, because it's not being taught in
most churches, it's not a new doctrine, doctrine's been around forever, but it's been, it's kind
of gone by the wayside as far as just historical preaching is concerned, it's just been one
of those things that's just kind of faded away, and is now making more of a resurgence,
and one of the problems with that, and this is actually, it kind of irritates me a little
bit, people hear things, and they get, and out of a zeal, and being on fire, and you
know, like, you know, loving the hard preaching, some people have a tendency to go overboard
and just start labeling, oh, that person's a reprobate, oh, this person's a reprobate,
oh, this person's a reprobate, oh, they don't, you know, they don't believe exactly like
I do, they're a reprobate, you know, and just, they start throwing this word around
very loosely, and that is not right, because people who do that, you don't even understand
what a reprobate is then, and it's actually kind of hurting to the point to where some
people now are going to be thinking, you know, people start seeing this, especially people
who are younger in the faith, they don't know as much, it's going to make them say, wow,
this person's a reprobate, that person's a reprobate, this person's a reprobate, then
they're like, maybe I was a reprobate, and especially nowadays, I've heard it even more
frequently that, you know, maybe you've seen some people that have been around our movement
for a long time, and they go out soul winning, and they seem like, man, they're really solid
people, and they're really these, you know, these pillars and these strong soul winners
and all this stuff, and then they turn out to be false prophets, and that also adds the
confusion, but I just want to say right now, that also demonstrates the amount of damage
that these people do when they do creep into churches, they creep in unawares, and they
gain confidence of people, and then when they're finally exposed as being a false prophet,
that causes people to think, oh, wow, I just had so much trust in them, then they start
questioning themselves, and I call it the Lord is it I mentality. Keep your place here
in 1 Timothy 1, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but turn if you would back to Matthew
26, because there's one thing about a reprobate that needs to be understood. They're wicked
from the beginning. It's not like they used to be really good, and then they got into
some heresy and became a false prophet, and now they're bad. They crept in unawares, they
snuck in, they infiltrated, and when you think about an infiltrator, a person doesn't infiltrate
unless they have bad motivations from the beginning. That's what a treacherous person
does. They're not sneaking in and creeping in unawares with only good motives from the
beginning, because then they don't have to creep, right? They don't have to be sneaky
about it. And this is one thing that we need to recognize and understand about the reprobate
is that they are bad from the beginning. Like Jesus said of Judas, he was a devil from
the beginning. But Judas was so good at keeping his cover that nobody suspected him. And he
was with Jesus Christ's ministry for three and a half years, and remember we read this
morning about Jesus Christ saying, you know, when people said they wanted to follow him,
he's like, well, I don't have a place to stay and all this other stuff. Well, his disciples
did follow him. The 12, the apostles, they were with him, traveling with him, and they
did stay out where he stayed out, and they spent a lot of time together, and they devoted
their whole lives into doing this, and one of them was there the whole time as a devil.
But in all outward appearances, nobody was, no one was the wiser on who he was on the
inside.