F. Leroy Forlines on the Assurance of Salvation

        John 10:28, 29 gives the Christian strong grounds to stand on. In Christ he has eternal life and will never perish. When a person is saved, he is baptized into Christ’s body; and as long as he is in Christ, he has eternal life and will never perish. This is what we have in Christ, and we are also promised that no one can take us out of Christ. Salvation is a personal matter between the believer and Christ. No outsider can, in any way, take the believer out of Christ. If he is ever taken out, it will be an act of the Father as husbandman, as is set forth in John 15:2, and that only on the grounds of not abiding in Christ (John 15:6). To be in Christ means to have eternal life, and no outside force nor combined forces can take us out of Christ.
        Another ground of security is that God will not cast us out at the least little thing we do. We are saved by faith and kept by faith. We are lost, after we are once saved, only by shipwreck of faith.
        This view, as we have given it, gives a person all the assurance he needs to have joy. It does not keep him in fear of constant falling; yet, at the same time, he is aware of the fact that it is possible to fall. It also keeps salvation on a faith basis instead of mixing it with works. It is not just a line of reasoning, but has the support of the Scriptures.

Leroy Forlines, The Doctrine of Perseverance (Nashville, TN: Randall House, 1986),[1] pp. 17–8, emphasis in original

Copyright © Randall House Publications, 1986. All rights reserved.

Note

        1. Unfortunately, this booklet is currently out of print. For further reading on the assurance of salvation from Arminian perspectives, see Jack Cottrell, The Faith Once for All: Bible Doctrine for Today (Joplin, MO: College Press, 2002), pp. 375–87; idem, Set Free! What the Bible Says about Grace (Joplin, MO: College Press, 2009), pp. 295–316*; F. Leroy Forlines, Classical Arminianism: A Theology of Salvation, ed. J. Matthew Pinson (Nashville, TN: Randall House, 2011), pp. 350–3; and Robert E. Picirilli, Grace, Faith, Free Will: Contrasting Views of Salvation: Calvinism and Arminianism (Nashville, TN: Randall House, 2002), pp. 197–208 (repr. in idem, Understanding Assurance and Salvation [Nashville, TN: Randall House, 2006], pp. 1–20).  —J. D. Gallé

        * Jack Cottrell’s twenty-first chapter in idem, The Faith Once for All, ‘Assurance of Salvation’, is essentially the same as, although not identical to, the fifteenth chapter, ‘Assurance of Salvation’, in Jack Cottrell, Set Free! (as noted by Cottrell himself in idem, Set Free!, p. 295 n. 1).

Addendum (24 Sept. 2022).  Franklin Leroy Forlines (1926–2020) died on Tuesday, 15 December 2020, aged ninety-four.

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Latest revisions: 2 January 2017 (emended pagination for one volume in note); 25 December 2017 (converted an en rule to a colon); 28 February 2018 (slightly modified note); added to note (8 Mar. 2022).