Christians 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 10, 26-29.

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 does 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 sinning 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 "ekousios," and this word is used in 1 Peter 5 too, 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 ekousios." "Willingly" it's translated.

That's the same word that translates "deliberately." Now, what this usage shows, and the reason I cite it, 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 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. It 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 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 10.26, 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.

Now, here'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." In other words, it's not a single act. It's not a few acts.

It's not periodic acts. It's rather a settled, persistent continuation in sin. So what destroys the soul, what puts it beyond forgiveness in verse 26, is not sin per se, but 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 "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, and it 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 for the person who is lost means that we can have the full experience of salvation in Christ and be lost or lose it.

There are two passages, Hebrews 10.14 and Hebrews 3.14. So here's 10.14. See what you think. "For by a single offering," that's the offering of Christ, "God has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified." In other words, there is a kind of being sanctified which absolutely guarantees perfection for all time.

In other words, nobody is lost who is experiencing this kind of sanctification. Here's the second one, 3.14. "For we have come to share in Christ if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end." Now, note, it doesn't say we will come to share in Christ if we hold fast to the end.

It says we have come to share in Christ if we hold fast to the end, which means that if we don't hold fast, like the person in Hebrews 10.26, if we don't hold fast, then we never had come to share in Christ. That's the clear teaching of 3.14. We didn't lose our share in Christ.

We never had it. So my conclusion is that the experience of sanctification referred to in the lost person of 10.26 and 10.29 is a measure of God-influenced moral renovation in a person that has been absorbed by being part of the church, professing some kind of faith, being attracted by many things about the Christian faith and Christian people, but never really coming to believe in Christ in such a way as to be united to him, have a share in him and his eternal life and salvation.

So my answer to Josh is, number one, no, I don't think genuine believers in Christ lose their salvation. And two, I think there is a kind of sinning which is more deliberate, more eager, more persistent than the way a genuine believer sins and confesses and is forgiven. Amen. This is a very helpful dichotomy here, and hope-giving for this life as we battle against sin in our lives and confess them to God.

Pastor John, thank you for walking us through these notoriously hard texts in Hebrews, and thank you for the question, Josh, and thanks for listening to this podcast. You can stay current with the Ask Pastor John podcast and get our latest episodes delivered to your phone or device by subscribing to us through your preferred podcast catcher.

And if you want to search our past episodes in our archive or send us an email, you can do those things through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. And of course, we always welcome questions about what the Bible says about sanctification and Christian growth and assurance. Well, the core beliefs and enshrined practices of Roman Catholicism deeply concerned the reformers 500 years ago, and those concerns remain largely unalleviated for contemporary Protestants today, problems that we still see in the latest version of the official catechism of the Catholic Church.

And it leads to the question over whether or not a devout Roman Catholic who is faithful to that catechism can be genuinely saved. Well, now that is a hot potato. I'm going to toss it over to Pastor John next time. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you on Wednesday.