Pastor John, we usually serve up specific questions to you, but today I simply want to ask if there's anything from your personal devotions lately that you want to share with us here. Tony, just yesterday I was reading in 1 John on my way through the Bible, and I've often said that eternal security is a community project rather than something that's individualistic merely and automatic.

God uses means to keep us eternally for himself. It's not like a vaccination against hell. It's more like a committed therapist who unfailingly, this is God unfailingly seeing to it that we hold to the health regimen that brings us to everlasting glory. I totally believe in eternal security. Jesus said, "I give them eternal life.

They will never perish. No one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father is great. No one can snatch them out of my Father's hand." But I've also said that this keeping, this divine keeping, is a community project in which God uses people. Exhort one another every day as long as it is called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin because we have come to share in Christ if we hold our original confidence firm to the end.

So our exhorting one another every day is one of the instruments, one of the means by which God keeps us in Christ to the end of time. So yesterday in 1 John, here's what I read, and I saw that it's in a totally fresh way. 1 John 5 16, "If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life." So I had never paused to think, "You mean the life that we need to make it to the end, the eternal life, is given when I see a brother sinning and I pause and I ask God, 'Oh God, bring him to repentance, bring him to the point of confession,' and God will use that prayer as a means of preserving that person's eternal life.

So there is a kind of sinning that shows God has given a person over to depravity. John tells us that. There is sinning that is that is unto death. It's like Esau's sin in Hebrews 12 17. He sought repentance and he couldn't find it even though he sought it with tears, which is a fearful prospect that we could ever sin so long God would just give us up.

But 1 John is mainly devoted to helping us see that there is sin that is not unto death. We write these things to you that you may not sin, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate. That's chapter 2 verse 1, "Or if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just and will forgive our sins." So John is so eager to help Christians not despair that if they sin, they are proving themselves to be unregenerate.

And what I hadn't noticed before in 1 John is that God says one of the means by which he will preserve us in Christ is when we pray for each other. If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he'll ask and God will give him life.

So eternal life is sure for the bride of Christ and for those who are called and justified, but it's not automatic like a vaccination. It involves exhortations from Hebrews 3 and it involves prayers like this one in 1 John 5:16. And then just as I was pondering that, the Lord brought to mind James 5:20 where it says, "Let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death." And I thought, "Okay, how do you bring back a sinner from wandering?" And you do it at least in those two ways, don't you?

Hebrews 3, exhort him and 1 John 5:16, pray for him and the Lord will give him life. So here's the personal impact it had on me. I'm out here in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee and that's a scary place to be, isn't it? Because this says, in essence, don't separate yourselves from the very people who could be the means of your life, be the means of your preservation.

So I just hope that everyone who's listening to this won't leave the fellowship of believers. They'll keep themselves grafted in to believers who can pray for them, that they won't lose their life, and who will exhort them to hold true to the end, and that they'll do that for others.

And I hope people will pray for me, that God will reveal to me any sins that I may have in my family or in relationships, that if I spot them, I could repent of them, get forgiveness for them, and thus be preserved. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.

Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.