Questions and Answers, Part 41

Selected Scriptures

      All right, tonight we're going to have some time to interact a little bit in question and answer, as you well know.  And I hope you have come prepared to ask some questions that will be significant and helpful.  We have some of our men stationed at each microphone to talk with you.  I don't know who is going to be where...let's see, there's Stan Carter over there.  Good, Stan, did you have a question or are you just....?  And Lance Quinn in the middle and Dr. Dick Mayhew is going over to the other side.  And they're just there to help you kind of form up your question in case it's not clear and so that you can kind of hurry and ask the question, we want to cover as many questions as we possibly can.  So if you just want to step up to the microphone and kind of get in line, we'll get started.  Whew...boy, good....ha...you're after me.  You've been waiting, storing it up, huh?  Okay.  That's great. 

     Scripture talks about dialoguing, you know, it says the Apostle Paul reasoned with them out of the Scripture.  The word it uses is dialego, to dialogue.  That's a very important part of ministry.  So we hope that this will be a good time for you to touch the issues that are on your heart.  Okay?   

     Now the first thing we have to do, gentlemen, in each of these lines is if there are any ladies in the line we have to move them to the front.  Isn't that right?  Isn't that right?  All right, ladies, move up to the front.  That's very good...that's very good.  Chivalry may be dead in our culture but it's not dead at Grace Community Church.  We still understand those kinds of things.  We're not going to have those ladies stand there for a long time.  All right.  Are you ready, Stan?  All right, let's go over there then.  Give me your name first.

ROXANNE:  My name is Roxanne Bartoush(?) and the question I have is Matthew 5:42, "Give to him who asks of you and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you."  Does that mean we give to everybody that asks of us? 

JOHN:  I think that's a general principle, yes.  Give to him who asks of you.  The assumption is that he's not trying to take advantage of you.  The assumption is that the need is real, that the need is genuine.  What you're really asking is if I see a beggar do I give money to a beggar...that's not the point.  There's a general principle and that is the principle that when someone has need, legitimate genuine need, and they come to you and ask for that need to be met and you have the resource to do that, then you should do that. 

     Let me just say this.  One of the principles that I operate on as I travel around the world is never to give any money to a beggar...none.  Because when you do that you make begging successful.  And when begging is successful it becomes a career.  When we were in India, for example, little children come up and literally hang on your clothes, hang on your arm with these great big dark eyes and they plead with you for money.  And, of course, you realize that around the corner is the guy who owns all these little kids who has them doing this and collects 75 percent of everything that they collect.  And it's an absolutely massive enterprise.  You find that in most third world countries of our time.  So you have to be very judicious and very careful that you don't grow a beggar, that you don't feed that kind of thing.  But where there is a situation you know to be a genuine need and you have the opportunity to meet that need, you're to do that. 

ROXANNE:  I see, okay, thank you. 

JOHN:  Okay?  Thank you for asking.  Right here. 

??????  First I'd just like to ask a couple of quick yes or no questions...

 JOHN:  Good. 

?????  Before I get to my main question, if that's all right.

 JOHN:  You're going to warm me up, okay. 

?????  First of all, there's nothing in us that would obligate God to save us, is there? 

JOHN:  No. 

?????  We're all sinners saved by grace. 

JOHN:  That's correct. 

?????  And once saved there's nothing we can do to lose our salvation. 

JOHN:  That is correct, but let me say it another way.  There is neither anything you could do to lose it nor anything you would do to lose it. 

?????  Okay.  All right, then I need to ask you a question about a quote you made a couple of months ago in the second part of the biblical view on abortion.  I'd just like to read what you said that night and then ask you to reconcile it with your answers to the first two questions. 

JOHN:  Okay. 

?????  All right.  You said, "It is my conviction that God redeems murdered infants, that His grace reaches out and takes those little ones to be with Himself.  The Bible is very clear that people perish in hell because they refuse to believe that hell is for those who rejected God and who rejected Christ.  Something an unborn infant could never do.  And so God not having a just basis either internally or externally by virtue of the attitude or the action of an unborn child would have no basis on which to sentence them to hell except for the depravity they inherited in Adam which is never a cause for damnation apart from its evidence and behavior or attitude.  God must then embrace them into His own Kingdom."  I had a problem with this, a couple of problems with it. 

JOHN:  Boy, I thought that was a great statement, did I say that?  Go ahead...what's the problem? 

?????  The problem I had with it was that if an unborn child is saved until he becomes unsaved by a sinful attitude or action, then what does that do to the doctrine of eternal security?  And also the other problem I had is that... 

JOHN:  Let's take the first problem.  The unborn child is not saved until he...he's not saved until he...what was that you said, if he's not saved until... 

?????  Well in your quote you said that God not having any just basis either internally or externally by virtue of the attitude of the action of an unborn child would have no basis on which to sentence them to hell except for the depravity they inherited in Adam. 

JOHN:  Right, now that doesn't mean they're saved.  An unborn child...an unborn infant, a child, a baby before the age of accountability is not saved otherwise they would lose their salvation when they reached the age of accountability, that's your question, right?  Then you don't have eternal security because if all infants and all babies are saved before the age of accountability, when they get to the age of accountability they lose their salvation and they have to get saved over again.  No.  They're not saved.  God redeems them when they die.  There's a difference.  They're in a situation where they are...they're sort of in the middle ground.  They're not saved, or in the technical sense they're lost, of course, but not in the sense of having rejected God in unbelief or unbelief of Christ.  They are not saved which can only occur through faith in Christ.  So there they are, they're not saved and they're not...how can I say it, I don't want to say they're not unsaved...but they're not confirmed in unbelief.  They're neither.  If they live they maintain the same situation of being unsaved, if they die I believe God saves them.  So the salvation doesn't come into play unless they die and at that point. 

?????  Well if that were the case then parents could guarantee the salvation of their children by killing them before they were born, couldn't they? 

JOHN:  That's true. 

?????  That's true? 

JOHN:  That's true. 

?????  Well doesn't it say in Psalm 51 verse 5, "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me?"  &n