Ask Pastor Mike Live

Pastor Mike: John, you're on the air with Pastor Mike. How can I help?

John: Hey, Pastor Mike, thank you for taking my call. I just wanted to ask about the Lamb's Book of Life and your name being blotted out. What leads up to that? And also, are you redeemable for your name to be rewritten in the Lamb's Book of Life?

Pastor Mike: My view is that the concept of the book that God writes, the Book of Life, is a concept that you can't understand in the New Testament unless you understand it in the Old Testament. What God has done in the New Testament is he's made it more specific in saying there's not only a Book of Life, there's a book of eternal life. We often call it the Lamb's Book of Life, as it's called in the book of Revelation.

Here's the thing. I think we need to start first and say if Moses is there in Exodus 32—which I just read this morning or yesterday—here is Moses saying, "Don't blot me out of your book. Or if you're not going to forgive these people, blot me out of your book, the book that you've written." The idea here of the Book of Life, as we see in the book of Psalms and throughout the Old Testament, is a concept of if you're there, you're alive. If you're not there, then you die, and God will take you out of the annals of the living.

In the New Testament, we're not so much concerned about life here on this earth, though we are concerned about it. We're concerned about eternal life because that's far more important. The reality of eternal life is that anyone whose name is written in that book, as it says in Revelation 3:5, will never be blotted out. That's the point. It won't be blotted out.

People say, "Wait a minute. Why would he mention blotting it out if you can't get it blotted out?" It is because everything about the Jewish mindset is the Book of Life means you can be blotted out of it and you're going to die. When you die on this planet, you're blotted out of God's book of the living. Well, you're never blotted out of this other book.

That's why the need for the statement "your name will not be blotted out of the book." That's the point, and I think Christians are not subject to that. Now, here's what Christians are subject to. For all the people that don't like this answer right now, they're listening to me and they're starting to fume. Here are people whose names are never written in the Book of Life: people that are phony converts.

These are people that come to church and look like Christians. They go forward, pray the prayer, read a Bible, and do whatever, but the Bible says there are plenty of people who are goats among the sheep. They are weeds among the wheat. They go along with us. The book of Hebrews continually calls them out over and over again. They look like they're part of the church, but they're not. They're part of the visible church—they're literally there—but they're not part of the real church.

The problem is they eventually leave, or they die in the church and they get sorted out at the end. The bottom line is those are the people that want Christ, but they don't want to live for Christ. They want Christ, they want all the goodies, but they don't want to persevere in their Christianity. All the discussions about persevering in the Christian life are critically important. Everyone should concern themselves. I should not have assurance that I'm a Christian if I'm not persevering in the Christian life.

If your name's written in the Lamb's Book of Life really is—and I don't have any record of it, we don't have a window to it, there's no webcam there, I can't see it—all I can tell you is your name's not going to be blotted out of it. Just like in the Old Testament, which everyone in the New Testament would know the Old Testament, they would say, "Hey, when you die, you get blotted out." I don't want to be blotted out of the book until my time comes, hopefully when I'm really old. That's what people think. Well, your name's never going to get blotted out of this one.

So it will be. That's the idea. You will have white garments, as it says there in Revelation 3. You will live and not have your name blotted out. So your question, I wouldn't agree with the premise that if you get blotted out, can you get put back in? I don't think that's the case.

Here's what I see the case of, doing pastoral work for almost 40 years now. Plenty of people come to church, they're not real converts, they play along with the game, they sing the songs, they may even teach a Sunday School class. They then depart. They go out from us because they were not really of us, as 1 John 2 says.

But then one day they come under conviction, or they get in a car accident, or they have some disease, or whatever. Maybe life just gets to them—the Ecclesiastes life—and they realize it's nothing out here and they come back to church. They say, "Man, I need to get right with God." They start re-doing all the things they did before, but this time there's meaning in it because there's real conversion in it.

It looks like their name was in the book, then it looks like it was out of the book, and now it looks like it's back in. My view would be different, but it doesn't mean that I don't have the same concerns a lot of pastors have. I think a lot of people think they can just go through the motions and get the benefits, just like Judas did. I want all the benefits. Let me be the treasurer.

Think about that. There are treasurers in churches right now, just like there was a treasurer among the disciples, that aren't saved. They may be on a board as a treasurer of the corporation of the First Baptist Church, or the Calvary Chapel of this city, or First Presbyterian Church of that city, but they're not saved. They look saved, and we trust them enough to give them the books and let them sign the checkbook at the church, but they're not really Christians, just like Judas. I don't know if I made that clear enough for you. Do you understand my distinction and how to view this?

John: Yeah, I do. I guess I've never understood it from an Old Testament reference. I've always understood that's a New Testament that applies and it's something that's very real that can happen for those who have once received Christ and walk away.

Pastor Mike: We lost a little bit of your sentence there, at least in my studio it did. Yes, there are people that are walking away that show they're not with us. That's the problem. I think too many people say, "Well, Johnny was a good Christian when he was in youth group, and now he's just walked away."

The part that neither of us likes, because we have the same concern, is don't say Johnny's fine because he's living like the world. When you live like the world, you'll know them by their fruits. If his fruits were good when he was a junior in high school, well, that's cool. He went on all the youth trips and all that. But he's not cool because he's not living for Christ.

What I'm going to say is there are so many illustrations, so many parables, and so many passages that remind me there are a lot of fakes in the church today. I can't even separate them. Matter of fact, here's the parable of the weeds and the wheat. Don't go out and try to separate them yourself. Don't try to pull people out and say, "You're not real, you're not real."

Can you imagine if I gave you the job, John? Go to your high school youth group at your church and just get to know them for a month and then just kick the ones out that are fake. It would be impossible because we don't really know. But give them time, we'll find out. We'll know who's real and who's not.

Anyway, passages would be Exodus 32. Look at the concept of the book. Psalm 69, verse 28 is a good passage that reminds us of this book of the living. If you're thinking only in terms of the Book of Life, the book of the living, of course everyone gets taken out of it. What's eternal life? You never die. It's like Jesus talking at Lazarus's funeral. You believe in me, even though you die, yet shall you live. And if you believe in me, you'll never die. That's the weird part. So you'll never get blotted out of the book of life, the Lamb's Book of Life, that is.

John: And how can you test to know that the inner man within you is not a goat but is actually a sheep? How can you be for certain?

Pastor Mike: Here's a great passage. Let me pull this up and read it to you. Colossians chapter 3, here's what it says: "Do not lie to one another"—and that's just one aspect of Christian living—"because you've put off the old self with its practices and you've put on the new self."

So far we all have that testimony. "Yeah, I was a non-Christian, now I'm a Christian." Then it says, "which is being renewed in the knowledge after the image of its creator." That's a great line. It's being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. So the new self, John, if you and I are real Christians, we have a new heart and the creator of that heart is God.

The thing about that is if you have the new heart, it's being renewed in knowledge and it starts conforming us increasingly to the image of its creator. We should have in our spiritual disciplines—Bible study, Bible memorization, going to preaching, fellowship—those things as the knowledge of God keeps coming into my new heart. I'm going to see it being renewed over and over in the image of Christ.

I'll get to see my inner man, as Paul said, get stronger as my outer man decays. My outer man is dying, but my inner man should be growing. If I'm not growing as a Christian, then I would say, are you really a Christian? Real Christians grow. That's what verse 10 of Colossians 3 is reminding us of.

Look at your growth. The passages that scare us are the passages that are trying to say, "Hey, if you're a Christian and you're not growing, what's wrong with you? You may be a fake." That's why in James 2, where's your works? You can say you have faith, but if you have no works coming out of that, the thing about a growing Christian is they keep bearing fruit. They keep going.

I would say we don't go to church, you and I, John, I hope, because we wake up on Sunday and say, "I want to go." No, we go even if we don't want to go. Just like we should say no to sin even if we want to sin. We should say yes to doing what is right even though we don't want to do it, because we're telling our flesh it doesn't matter because my inner man is stronger and is going to be renewed.

It's going to the gym every day and my inner man's getting studly so I can tell my flesh to take a hike and I'm going to do the right thing. That's what growth is, spiritual growth. It's a great phrase: "which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator." I just hope that all of us listening right now to this program would say, "I can see growth. I can see the inner man getting renewed. I read my Bible this morning and it helped me understand God better. I went to church this week and heard a sermon and it's starting to take root in my life."

I'm growing. As you're growing, you're not growing just to be a Pharisee to know more stuff. You're growing to be more like Christ because your character is being changed because the Word of God is having its effect in your life. Does that help, John?

John: That helps. Thank you so much, Pastor Mike.

Pastor Mike: All right, brother. Thank you so much. Thanks for calling.