APOSTASY
Remember that
if you are a child of God, you will never be happy in sin. You are spoiled for the world, the flesh, and
the devil. When you were regenerated
there was put into you a vital principle, which can never be content to dwell
in the dead world. You will have to come
back, if indeed you belong to the family.
Apostasy
isn’t an unintentional departure or personal struggle with doubt. It is
deliberately abandoning the truth for erroneous teaching. “The faith” refers
specifically to the body of Christian doctrine, not the act of believing. Some
will depart from “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3).
People who understand and outwardly affirm Christian doctrine but don’t have a
heart for God are prime candidates for being seduced by demons away from the
faith.
The Master’s Plan for the Church,
Moody, 1991, p. 140.
No
one sets out to become an apostate - it's never the result of one abrupt,
drastic turn away from the Lord. Instead, apostasy is most often the product of
a pattern of sinful compromises that harden and gradually steer a professing
believer away from the truth.
John MacArthur
GTY
Newsletter, May 15, 2009, www.gty.org.
© 1969-2008. Grace to You. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Apostasy is a
perversion to evil after a seeming conversion from it.
A Puritan Golden Treasury, compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 20.
None sink so
far into hell as those that come nearest heaven, because they fall from the
greatest height.
A Puritan Golden Treasury,
compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 20.
Religion
which is begun in hypocrisy will certainly end in apostasy.
A Puritan Golden Treasury,
compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 153.
Yes, apostasy
happens. Sometimes the catalyst is
flagrant sin. The pain of conviction and
repentance is refused, and the only alternative to it is wholesale rejection of
Christ. But sometimes the catalyst is a
thorn growing quietly in the heart, an indifference to the way of the Cross, a
drifting that is not reversed by the knowledge of biblical warnings.
Apostasy and How it Happens, Tabletalk,
April. 2004, p. 28, Used by Permission.
The universal
witness of the New Testament is that apostasy if persisted in not only damns
but shows that salvation was never real in the first place. The New Testament
reveals how close one may come to the kingdom – tasting, touching, perceiving,
understanding. And it also shows that to come this far and reject the truth is
unforgivable.
D.A. Carson
Matthew, The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Zondervan,
1984, p. 292.