Ordinarily, I might ask you to turn with me in your Bible. But today, I’ll ask you to turn to the seventeenth chapter of the 1689 Baptist Confession. That chapter, titled “Of the Perseverance of the Saints,” will be our study for the next several weeks.
When I first began preparing for this series, I considered rearranging the material, presenting the later paragraphs first and reorganizing the flow to reduce what might seem like redundancy. If you scan the chapter, you’ll notice that themes introduced early are expanded later. But I’ve since changed my mind. Rather than restructure the material, I’ve decided to work through the chapter phrase by phrase, in order. Yes, that means we’ll encounter repetition, but that repetition is intentional. I believe you’ll see the wisdom in it as we move along.
Each week, then, we’ll begin not with, “Turn with me in your Bible,” but, “Turn with me in the Confession.” For that reason, I want to begin by addressing what some may view as a concern. Isn’t it backwards, some might ask, to start with a manmade document rather than Scripture? Shouldn’t the Bible always come first?
Why confessions?
A few years ago, I had a conversation with a fellow believer about the 1689 Confession. As we talked, he shared several objections, not just to certain doctrines, but to the very idea of using a confession at all. It became clear that his primary issue wasn’t with what the Confession said, but with the notion of having one in the first place.
Eventually, I asked him, “Do you object to the church having a formal, written confession of faith, a summary of what we believe the Bible teaches?” He said yes. Then he added a phrase I’ve heard more than once: “We don’t need a confession. We have the Bible.” Others express the same idea by saying, “No creed but the Bible,” or, “No creed but Christ.”
At first glance, that sounds commendable. There’s a real concern behind it: the fear that any manmade document might be elevated to the level of Scripture, or even placed above it. But as I told this brother, that’s not what a confession is for. In fact, the great Protestant confessions themselves anticipated this concern. Nearly all of them begin with a robust statement about the authority, sufficiency, and finality of Scripture. The authors were not replacing the Bible. They were answering a question: What do we believe the Bible teaches?
That’s exactly how I explained it to him. I said, “Yes, the Bible alone is our authority, as the Confession itself affirms. But what would you do if someone asked you, ‘What do you believe the Bible teaches about—?’ Pick any topic. Would you simply hand them a Bible and say, ‘It’s in there somewhere’? Or would you respond, ’I believe the Bible teaches—’?”
The moment someone says, “I believe,” they’re confessing something. That’s a creed. The only difference between saying it off the cuff and handing someone a well-considered, historically rooted confession is clarity. With the Confession, I can say, “Here’s what I believe. It’s organized, thorough, and filled with Scripture references so you can see for yourself whether these things are true.”
The biblical merit of confessions
In fact, we see creeds even in the pages of Scripture. Take 1 Corinthians 15, for example, where Paul writes:
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. (1 Corinthians 15:3-4)
What is Paul doing there? He’s offering a formulaic summary of the gospel—a fixed, concise statement of faith that can be easily memorized and recited. It has a clear structure, consisting of three parts. We might call it compact theology. It’s a simple way to remember and summarize the gospel, that is, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
More than that, it’s something that can be passed on. Paul says he “delivered” what he had “received” (1Co 15:3). Then he recites that gospel summary. Jesus died for our sins. That’s substitutionary atonement. He was buried. That confirms the historical reality of his death. He was raised on the third day. That declares Christ’s victory. And all of it happened according to the Scriptures, showing that God’s promises and prophecies were fulfilled in Christ.
Do you see how a short, creedal statement like that can serve the church? It’s easy to remember. It captures the essentials. And, importantly, it doesn’t add anything to what the Bible teaches; it simply summarizes what Scripture says. That’s exactly what a confession is meant to do. A good confession doesn’t introduce new doctrine; it faithfully condenses what the Bible already reveals, for the benefit of the church.
Here’s one more quick example. In 2 Timothy 1, Paul tells the young minister Timothy, “Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” (2Ti 1:13).
“Follow” means to hold fast to something. But to what, exactly? Paul says, “the pattern of sound words.” That word “pattern” can also be translated as form or formula. So notice that Paul doesn’t just tell Timothy to hold on to sound teaching in general; he tells him to hold on to the form of sound teaching. He’s referring to a pattern or system of doctrine, not just the individual teachings themselves. That’s instructive.
Carl Trueman, a contemporary theologian and historian, has written extensively about church confessions. In one article, he points to the biblical origins of confessions. He writes:
The Bible offers numerous indications that an agreed verbal confession of belief is an important part of its conception of God’s people. In the Old Testament, the Shema (Deut. 6:4) grounds the identity of God’s people in the identity of God himself in a manner that is confessional in both senses of the word: doctrinally, as a statement of truth, and liturgically, as a public declaration of faith. The New Testament witnesses to a continuation of this pattern, with Paul’s reference to sayings that are true and worthy of all acceptance by the church, and indeed his use of statements which have a creed-like quality (e.g., 1Tim. 1:15; 3:16; Phil. 2:5-11). Paul’s emphasis on faithful adherence to the form of apostolic teaching also reflects this (2Tim. 1:13).
Trueman goes on to highlight how confessions and creeds have been used throughout church history.
The historical merit of confessions
The Bible itself gives warrant for the use of creeds, and the church has always used them. As Christians in the 21st century, we would be unwise to dismiss the confessions that have been written and refined over the course of two thousand years, especially considering the fires in which they were forged. These documents weren’t crafted in a vacuum. They were sharpened in response to the heresies and controversies that arose in every generation. When the church needed clearer articulation on a particular doctrine, wise men—pastors and theologians—rose to the task.
So when someone asks me, “What does the Bible teach about the Trinity?” I can say, “Well, here’s a summary from my church’s Confession.”
“Oh, your church wrote this Confession?”
“No, thankfully, we didn’t have to. We simply affirm this Confession, which comes to us from Christ and the apostles through many generations of the church faithfully working to summarize and defend the essential doctrines of the faith. We’re still walking the same dangerous roads they walked, but we now have the benefit of the roadmaps they left behind, refined over many, many years.”
Some time ago, I made a list of reasons why every church should be a confessional church. There were approximately thirty reasons on that list. Among them was historical continuity.
That may sound strange to some, but I have no interest in being part of a hip, new, trendy church movement of any kind. I want a church grounded, first and foremost, in the Word of God. If thus saith the Lord isn’t central to everything the church does, I’m not interested.
Second, I want a church tied to history. In my experience, Scripture and history tend to rise or fall together in a church. You can often hear it in the preaching. When you listen to a pastor who carefully and faithfully expounds Scripture, it’s not unusual to hear him illustrate a point with a story from church history or to quote voices from the past—Augustine, Calvin, the Puritans. But when you hear preaching that’s full of jokes and light on Scripture, you rarely hear anything of church history. You won’t hear those names. You won’t hear that kind of depth.
History matters because the church didn’t appear in a vacuum. The family of God has gathered to worship the same Savior, preach the same gospel, teach the same doctrines, face the same trials, confront the same errors, and practice the same ordinances for more than 2,000 years since the time of Christ. Just as we will one day be united with those saints in eternity, I want to be united with them now. I want to learn from them. I want to be encouraged by them.
Read the opening chapters of Acts. The Lord has never ceased working through his church, and he won’t stop until the end of the age, when he returns. You and I are just one chapter in that great, ongoing story. I don’t know about you, but I never start reading a book in the middle. I start at the beginning and work my way forward, as only then can I fully understand the later chapters.
Hebrews 12 says that we are “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1). Who are these witnesses? How do they help us? They are the saints who ran the same race before we ever came along, and they finished it well. We look back to them, learn from them, and draw strength from their example.
We should desire unity with the saints of the past. One of the best ways to express that unity is by holding to a historic confession of faith, like the 1689. It reminds us that we’re not the first to walk this path. We’re not inventing a new religion. We’re inheriting “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).
Even the men who gave us the 1689 Baptist Confession understood this. They didn’t start from scratch. Instead, they drew heavily from the Congregationalists’ Savoy Declaration, which itself borrowed from the Presbyterians’ Westminster Confession. Why? For one, why reinvent the wheel?
More importantly, by adopting as much language as possible from earlier confessions, the Particular Baptists were publicly affirming their unity with other Christians of their day. Yes, they made clarifications. They added their distinctives, particularly on baptism and church polity. But on the whole, they didn’t want to be mistaken for a fringe sect. They wanted it to be clear: “We are with you in the gospel, even if we differ on some secondary matters.”
That makes a strong case for confessionalism—that is, churches holding to a specific, shared confession of faith. When a body of believers can gather around a common confession, they have a shared theological foundation. It brings clarity, unity, and accountability. It allows us to say, both to one another and to the watching world, “This is what we believe the Bible teaches.”
More benefits of confessions
These confessions aren’t short or vague. The Protestant confessions, in particular, are robust and precise. They don’t replace Scripture, but they help us understand, affirm, and defend what Scripture teaches.
For those still tempted to ask, “Why not just affirm the authority of Scripture together? Isn’t that enough?” By affirming a confession, we’re saying that we not only believe in the authority of Scripture, as the confession itself makes clear, but that we also believe Scripture actually teaches something. It doesn’t leave us with ambiguity on the essentials. As Paul told Timothy, Scripture lays out a “pattern of sound words” (2Ti 1:13). We don’t have to assume that each member of the church interprets the Bible’s core doctrines in the same way. We can know because we’re all affirming the same confession together.
More than a century ago, B.H. Carroll rightly observed:
The modern cry, “less creed and more liberty,” is a degeneration from the vertebrate to the jellyfish, and it means more heresy. Definitive truth does not create heresy — it only exposes and corrects. Shut off the creed, and the Christian world would fill up with heresy unsuspected and uncorrected, but nonetheless deadly.
As more and more Christians and churches move away from confessionalism, that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen.
There are many benefits to confessionalism, but let me just highlight two more. First, a confession serves as a valuable study aid for believers. Second, it’s a powerful discipleship tool, both for those inside the church and for those being introduced to the faith from outside.
Perhaps I didn’t need to spend so much time defending the use of a confession, but I wanted to clarify why my church adheres to one and why I plan to expound on the Confession itself. Again, we’re going to walk through this chapter phrase by phrase, beginning to end. However, while we may start with the Confession, it will not have the final word. We’ll examine what the Confession says, why it says it, and then we’ll turn to Scripture, our final authority, to test whether its words are true.
Perseverance? Preservation? Once saved, always saved?
If you’re looking at the 1689 Baptist Confession, chapter 17, you’ll see the title, “Of the Perseverance of the Saints.”
The very mention of this doctrine is controversial. Some reject it outright. Others embrace something by a similar name, but what they mean is quite different from what this Confession teaches.
I’ll explain what I mean, but let me begin with a concise definition of what I believe the Bible teaches, and what the Confession affirms, regarding the perseverance of the saints. I’m borrowing this definition from Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. He writes:
The perseverance of the saints means that all those who are truly born again will be kept by God’s power and will persevere as Christians until the end of their lives, and that only those who persevere until the end have been truly born again.
In other words, if you are a genuine believer, you will continue in the faith to the end. If you do not, then you never truly were. No one who is truly saved can ever become unsaved. And—don’t miss this, because it’s absolutely key to understanding the doctrine—those who are truly saved do not remain in the faith by their own power. They are kept by the power of God.
Think of Philippians 1:6, where Paul says, “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”
Some of us may already be asking important questions: What about the passages in Scripture that seem to suggest we can fall away? If we’re kept by God, does that mean we can live however we want without eternal consequences?
The Confession addresses those questions and many others, but before we get there, I want to illustrate just how controversial and even confusing this doctrine can be.
Not too long ago, I was listening to an episode of Renewing Your Mind with R.C. Sproul. Sproul wholeheartedly affirmed the doctrine of perseverance as defined earlier, and he agreed entirely with the way the 1689 Confession articulates it. Yet, he said he doesn’t like to call it the perseverance of the saints. He prefers the term preservation of the saints. Why? Because, in his view, it’s more important to emphasize God’s grace in keeping the saints than to stress the saints’ endurance. I understand where he’s coming from. Still—
The church tradition I grew up in also taught salvation by grace, but they rejected the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. They believed that once a person is saved, they will always be saved, but they did not believe that salvation would necessarily result in a life marked by faith and good works. In their view, a truly saved person could drift far from Christ and show little or no evidence of spiritual fruit and still be saved. So, while they wouldn’t have agreed with Sproul on much, they did share his preference for the term preservation of the saints. The difference is, they meant something else by it. Namely, God will preserve his people even if they don’t persevere.
Imagine expanding the conversation. Bring Christians from various churches and denominations into the room, and ask them what they believe about this doctrine. Mention preservation, and some might react with suspicion or even hostility. Mention perseverance, and many would affirm it, at least on the surface. But press a little deeper, and you’ll find a wide range of definitions.
For instance, some might say they believe in “once saved, always saved.” But what do they mean by that? For some, it simply means that if a person once made a profession of faith, that’s enough. They’re saved. End of story. They may never show evidence of true conversion. They may never bear fruit. But because they walked an aisle or prayed a prayer at some point, their salvation is considered secure.
Is that biblical?
Don’t we have clear examples in Scripture of those who professed faith but did not endure to the end? What does the Bible say about those who don’t persevere?
For reasons we’ll explore more fully in time, I believe this chapter of the Confession might just as well have been titled “Of the Perseverance and Preservation of the Saints” because the two are inseparable. They are two sides of the same coin. The saints persevere because God preserves, and if God preserves, the saints will persevere.
The history of the doctrine of perseverance
This controversy is not a modern one. It didn’t begin with Sproul or Southern Baptists or the Reformation. To see that, I will walk you through roughly 500 years of church history, not as a history lecture, but as a way to better understand the context of the Confession. Just as importantly, this history helps us understand our own context. The church in the 21st century didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Why do we believe what we believe about this doctrine, while the church down the street might believe something else entirely?
We could go all the way back to the early church, but for our purposes, let’s begin with the medieval church.
At the time of the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church vehemently denied that a believer could have any certainty of their salvation. In 1547, the Council of Trent formally codified this position, stating, “If anyone says that he will for certain, with an absolute and infallible certainty, have that great gift of perseverance unto the end, let him be anathema.”
Let him be accursed, condemned under God’s judgment.
The Catholic Church taught that no one could presume to be eternally secure. To claim such assurance was not only arrogant but heretical. A person could be saved one day and lose it the next. While salvation could, in theory, be regained, that was only possible if one had not committed a so-called mortal sin, which could permanently bar any hope of restoration. The entire system was based not on God’s preserving grace, but on the fluctuating efforts of the individual.
Then along came Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. You might be surprised to learn that Luther didn’t affirm the doctrine of perseverance in the same way later Reformers would. He once said, “Even if he wants to, [the believer] cannot lose his salvation, however much he sins—unless he stops believing. For no sin can condemn him save unbelief alone.”
In Luther’s view, a sinner is justified by faith alone, not by works, and will ultimately be saved by that same faith. But if that person were to fall into unbelief, he would be lost. In other words, though God may sustain the believer in many ways, he will not stop someone from walking away in willful disbelief. If that happens, the person is no longer saved, even if they had once been a true believer.
Not all the Reformers agreed with Luther on that point. John Calvin, for example, took a different position. He wrote, “Those who fall away have never been thoroughly imbued with the knowledge of Christ but only had a slight and passing taste of it.”
In other words, a true believer will remain a believer. Anyone who turns back in willful unbelief was never truly converted in the first place, despite appearances. Calvin’s understanding came to represent the overwhelming consensus among Reformed Protestants.
Then, in the late 16th century, a new challenge emerged with Jacobus Arminius. Arminius questioned many of the Reformed doctrines, including unconditional election and perseverance. To be fair, Arminius himself was somewhat cautious. He often stated that he hadn’t reached a firm conclusion about whether true believers could fall away, but his followers were much more definitive. In 1610, they published a formal creed, the Remonstrance, which stated, without hesitation, that a believer could “through negligence, forsake again the beginning of his life in Christ.”
In other words, the Arminians taught that perseverance is conditional, entirely dependent on the believer’s free will and continued cooperation with God’s grace. If a person keeps the faith, he remains saved. If he turns away, he falls from grace and is condemned. Practically speaking, this wasn’t far removed from the Catholic view. In both systems, salvation ultimately rests on the shoulders of the sinner.
In response, Reformed theologians gathered at the Synod of Dort in 1618–1619 and wrote a robust answer to the Arminians. Among other things, they declared, “God does not take His Holy Spirit from [believers] completely, even when they fall grievously … but by His Word and Spirit He certainly and effectively renews them to repentance.”
From this controversy, the Five Points of Calvinism were formulated, commonly remembered today by the acronym TULIP. Of course, the “P” stands for the Perseverance of the Saints.
Just one generation later, some of the sharpest theological minds in England came together. Over the course of six years, English Puritans drafted the Westminster Confession of Faith. Here’s what that confession says about the perseverance of the saints: “They whom God hath accepted in His Beloved … can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved.”
The Westminster framers acknowledged that believers may fall into sin for a time and lose their sense of God’s favor. But they were also clear that such believers will, without fail, be restored. Perseverance, then, is not grounded in human effort but in divine grace from beginning to end. It rests on God’s eternal election, Christ’s continual intercession, the Spirit’s indwelling work, and the unbreakable covenant of grace. In a word, perseverance is infallible. It will always be effective, secured by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
That was the Presbyterian confession. But what about the Congregationalists? What about the Baptists?
Their response was essentially, “Amen.”
Both the Congregationalists and the Baptists drew heavily from the Westminster Confession when composing their own. The Congregationalists produced the Savoy Declaration, and the Baptists, in turn, used both as a template for the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), altering the language only when necessary.
When it comes to the chapter on perseverance, perhaps the only significant difference is in the opening line. The Westminster reads, “They, whom God hath accepted in His Beloved, effectually called, and sanctified by His Spirit, can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace.”
The 1689 Baptist Confession adds just one phrase: “Those whom God has accepted in the Beloved, effectually called and sanctified by His Spirit, and given the precious faith of His elect, can neither totally nor finally fall from the state of grace.”
The Baptists made a small but meaningful addition, emphasizing that those who persevere are those who have received saving faith, a gift of God to his elect.
It’s estimated that during the 17th century, at least among Protestants, the Westminster/1689 view of perseverance was held by 70%, possibly up to 90%, of churches. While that changed over the following centuries, the Baptist Confession’s view of perseverance represented the dominant understanding in the immediate wake of the Reformation.
This doctrine was so central to the churches involved in the 1689 Confession that they described themselves as those “owning the Doctrine of Personal Election, and final Perseverance.” In other words, if you asked who they were, they would say, “We believe in God’s sovereign election and the final perseverance of his saints. That’s who we are.”
This confessional identity continued to shape Baptist life well into the 19th century. The very first Baptist association in the American colonies formally adopted the 1689 Confession, though they did add a couple of chapters, one on congregational singing and another on the laying on of hands.
Things began to shift, however, in the 19th century. Churches started to emphasize emotional experiences, human decision, and free will in salvation. Many abandoned the formal use of historical creeds and confessions. Along the way, the doctrine of perseverance was rebranded as “eternal security” or simply “once saved, always saved.” In doing so, much of the theological clarity and precision inherited from the Reformation was lost.
This shift gave rise to what has been called “easy-believism” or “free grace theology,” the idea that someone can profess faith, be saved, and yet never be sanctified. They never change. They never grow in Christlikeness. Yet they’re still told they’re saved. These groups may affirm “once saved, always saved,” but they avoid the term perseverance of the saints for obvious reasons. In their view, the saints don’t need to persevere in order to be saved.
As B.H. Carroll warned, “Shut off the creed, and the Christian world would fill up with heresy unsuspected and uncorrected, but nonetheless deadly.”
Jesus said, “The one who endures to the end will be saved” (Mt 24:13). It’s heartbreaking to consider how many have been given a false sense of assurance.
Yes, the 1689 Confession does teach what we might call “eternal security” or “once saved, always saved,” but I try to avoid those phrases, not because the idea is wrong, but because the terminology lacks clarity. I much prefer the title found here in the Confession: “Of the Perseverance of the Saints.” If it helps, I’m more than happy to compromise with R.C. Sproul and call it “The Perseverance and Preservation of the Saints.”
The point is, perseverance is a far more accurate and faithful term than “once saved, always saved.”
9 reasons the doctrine of perseverance matters
Before we begin working through the actual text of the Confession, I want to briefly explain why this doctrine matters. The church has debated it for centuries. We’re still debating it. John MacArthur reignited much of the modern debate in the 1980s with the release of his book, The Gospel According to Jesus. But I want us to understand that this is not merely an academic issue. This is not a topic for theologians only. This is a vital doctrine for every Christian—you, for me, for all of us.
Why? Let me give you nine reasons.
- Assurance of salvation: It grounds our confidence not in ourselves, but in God’s sustaining grace.
- Endurance through trials: It gives us strength to press on, knowing God will never abandon his people.
- Corrects false assurance: It warns against shallow professions of faith that bear no fruit.
- Guards against legalism: It reminds us that salvation is preserved by God, not maintained by human effort.
- Encourages holiness: True perseverance involves a growing love for righteousness and hatred for sin.
- Honors God’s faithfulness: It exalts God as the covenant-keeping Lord who finishes what he begins.
- Frames apostasy biblically: It helps us understand why some fall away: they were never truly converted.
- Strengthens the church’s teaching: It keeps preaching and discipleship both urgent and hope-filled.
- Equips us to counsel others: It helps us shepherd doubting or suffering believers with clarity and care.