Are You As Persuaded as the Apostle Paul about His Eternal Salvation? Read His Persuasive Testimony? I Hope His Testimony is Your or Will Become His! A Point to Ponder . . .

Is someone pulling your strings? Who are they? Christ or others?

A Devotional for Friday October 17, 2025

Paul:

A Persuaded Apostle

“. . . But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced [persuaded] that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me”

2 Timothy 1: 12.

Thus, the apostle reckons [1] up all the disadvantages that a justified person is incident to in this life and by way of challenge declares: That not any one of them, nor all together, shall be able to separate us from the love of God; that is towards us by Christ, his death, and his intercession.

[There] . . . may be [a] further object[ion], that the apostle does here leave out sin, unto which we know the saints are subject, after justification. And sin of itself, we need no other enemies is of that nature as to destroy the whole world.

[The answer comes:] Sin is sin, in the nature of sin, wherever it is found. But sin as to the damning effects thereof is taken away from them unto whom righteousness is imputed for justification. Nor shall any or all the things, though there is a tendency in every one of them to drive us unto sin, drown us, through it, in perdition and destruction. I am persuaded, says Paul, they shall never be able to do that. The apostle, therefore, does implicitly, though to expressly, challenge sin. Yea, sin by all its advantages and then glories in the love of God in Christ Jesus. From which he concludes, it shall never separate the justified. Besides, it would now have been needless to have expressly here put in sin by itself, seeing before, he had argued that those he speaks of were freely justified therefrom.

[1] “Reckon” is a bookkeeping term meaning to put on the account of someone.