I just thought that when God saved me, He’d look after everything from A-Z. Why am I feeling such coldness? Why has the chill of Christian experience set in? I feel like He’s not shining down upon me anymore. The honeymoon period has certainly ended. I feel like I have been shunted off to the shadows. My smile is gone, and tears have returned. I understand now why Christians ask: ‘Can I lose my salvation?’

There has been a misunderstanding on your part. Fortunately, you do not have to stay where you are just now in your Christian experience. The frustration you have just expressed can be put behind you. It’s time to figure out what happened and then move on.

If you can be directed towards a remedy, will you take the corrective action required?

The moment you trusted Christ as your Saviour, you were brought into an amazing eternal relationship with God the Father. Jude, a half-brother of Jesus, makes that clear in the opening verses of his short epistle. He writes to those who are beloved in God the Father. If you haven’t already thanked God today for welcoming you into His tight-knit circle of eternal love, do it now.

If you struggle with insecurities and are a chronic doubter, you should take great courage in the next thing Jude wrote in his opening verse. He said you are kept, guarded, preserved by Jesus Christ and kept for Jesus Christ. If you study this verse more closely – you will see that most translations say ‘kept for’ Jesus Christ but there are those who say it means ‘kept by and for’ Jesus Christ.

We will allow the scholars to parse the words more fully but Jude makes it unmistakably clear that you, dear child of God, are an insider forever. You are one of the Father’s beloved children. You don’t have to strenuously labour to keep yourself within the family circle. You are kept by Jesus Christ! There’s no danger of you ever losing His love for you. But, what can be lost is your love for Him. That’s the crux of the matter!

The Father’s beams of love for you are always shining down – just as brightly as ever. The problem is – sometimes our feet walk or stray away from where the sunbeams of His love for us are shining. We move ourselves out of the direct sunlight – into the shadows.

Before Jude concludes his brief letter, he speaks directly to your current problem. He gets to the root of why you are having misgivings about the benefits of salvation. The problem is not on God’s end. Here it is:

But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. Jude 1:20-21

The father, in Luke 15, never ever stopped loving his son. The rough road and the cold darkness the prodigal experienced was not the fault of the father. It was his own choice to take the direction he took; his own eyes that looked for something else and his own feet that took him into the shadowy paths – outside the radius of his father’s love-beams. As soon as he returned, he walked out of the shadows back into the light and felt the warmth of his father’s love again.

It is humbling to admit what has really happened in my Christian experience. It’s easy to blame God when, in fact, I am the one to blame. The sooner I realize I have strayed from where His love-beams are shining, the sooner I will want to return and enjoy the fullness of the relationship that’s mine to enjoy forever.

Walk carefully and closely with the Lord today.

Warmly in Christ
Peter Ramsay

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