One Ticket to Heaven, Please

Posted on Jan 1st, 2012

There is a long-running debate in Christianity about the question of "eternal security" - whether a Christian who was at one time saved can fall away. The problem isn't so much with the alternative answers to this question, both of which are plausibly supportable with Scripture, but with the question itself, which postulates a misconception about the nature of salvation.

Asking whether you can "lose" your salvation automatically assumes that at some point you "got" it. This view sees salvation as a train ticket, bought against the inevitable day when a conductor named Death will call "Tickets, please," and you will need yours in order to debark at the gates of heaven.

But salvation is not a ticket; it’s the train. You don't have it; it has you. This train starts moving, not when you die, but the moment you surrender to Jesus Christ - and it keeps moving until the moment you meet Him face to face.

If you’re on the train you will know it, because you'll be moving - perhaps quickly, perhaps slowly, but you will not stay the same, because you cannot. Paul assures us that "if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (2 Cor. 5:17). A truly saved person can no more stay in a life of sin than a passenger on board a train can stop it from rolling.

When it comes to salvation, our faith shouldn’t be in a doctrine, or in an experience, or in a set of steps we’ve followed. Our faith must be in Jesus Christ alone, whose blood has the power to transform a sinner into a saint. A saint is not one who is perfect, but one who lives by the perfect life of the Son of God rather than by his own natural life of sin (Gal. 2:20). Salvation is not knowing a doctrine, making a decision, or having a "ticket to heaven." Salvation is being a new creation.