Hi forum friends!.....( <---just in case any of y'all miss seeing that)
So anyway, I haven't seen a discussion in a while about eternal security through God's grace. Bill argued to the extreme of OSAS doctrine going as far as to believe that no matter what a person who is truly saved does or how they decide to live that they are still saved and that those who don't continue to live what met his criteria of a Christian lifestyle were never actually saved to start with. I saw others that went so far to the other extreme as to believe that one could become a Christian, live a PERFECT life and then seconds before death do something like utter the words "oh crap" and they would bust hell wide open cause they said "crap" and didn't ask for forgiveness before they died.
Neither extreme is correct and Bill was actually closer to having this right than most folks. There are many beliefs on how God's grace is imparted and the truth is that His grace is there for the asking and not through any works or sacraments. Becoming a Christian doesn't mean that we have to walk on eggshells to hold on to our salvation. In John chapter 10, Jesus himself says in reference to believers that "no one will snatch them out of My hand" in verse 28 and then in verse 29 he says that "No one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand".
A lot of the extreme OSAS crowd will use those verses as a claim that once a believer is saved then they are always saved no matter what. To an extent that is true BUT even after being saved, God won't make you stay around. Even though no one can snatch from his hand, you can still make a willful decision to walk away or ask that he let you go and if you ask him to let you go then that's what he'll do.
To sum it up, Christians aren't perfect, we still sin. Some of us have even backslid at one time or another and I can tell you from past experience that even those who are in a state of what seems a perpetual state of living a lifestyle that is deviating from Biblical principals that if you are still feeling convicted of what you know is wrong and are searching for answers about the possibility of needing to find your way back to being an asset to God's kingdom then you are still saved.