Remember those earlier days after you received the light. You remained strong in a great battle that was full of suffering.Sometimes people spoke badly about you in front of others. Sometimes you were treated badly. At other times you stood side by side with people being treated like this.You suffered along with people in prison. When your property was taken from you, you accepted it with joy. You knew that God had given you better and more lasting things.So don’t throw away your bold faith. It will bring you rich rewards.You need to be faithful. Then you will do what God wants. You will receive what he has promised.“ In just a little while, he who is coming will come. He will not wait any longer.”And,“ The one who is right with God will live by faith. And I am not pleased with the one who pulls back.”( Habakkuk 2:3, 4)But we don’t belong to the people who pull back and are destroyed. We belong to the people who believe and are saved.
Because you believed the good news, you are saved. But you must hold firmly to the message I preached to you. If you don’t, you have believed it for nothing.
What if some people fall away from the faith? It won’t be possible to bring them back. It is true that they have seen the light. They have tasted the heavenly gift. They have shared in the Holy Spirit.They have tasted the good things of God’s word. They have tasted the powers of the age to come.But they have fallen away from the faith. So it won’t be possible to bring them back. They won’t be able to turn away from their sins. They are losing everything. That’s because they are nailing the Son of God to the cross all over again. They are bringing shame on him in front of everyone.
“ Suppose a godly person stops doing what is right. And they sin. They do the same evil things a sinful person does. They do things I hate. Then they will not live. I will not remember any of the right things they have done. They have not been faithful to me. They have also committed many other sins. So they are guilty. They will die.
They may have escaped the sin of the world. They may have come to know our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But what if they are once again caught up in sin? And what if it has become their master? Then they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning.Suppose they had not known the way of godliness. This would have been better than to know godliness and then turn away from it. The way of godliness is the sacred command passed on to them.What the proverbs say about them is true.“ A dog returns to where it has thrown up.”( Proverbs 26:11) And,“ A pig that is washed goes back to rolling in the mud.”
