Anastasios Kioulachoglou, has been a great blessing to me. He is very kind in his writings and does as the Apostles did many times. They would encourage, then warn of the dangers of falling away. Anastasios is not like most of the teachers in our day, who tickle the ears and do not warn the listeners of the many dangers the New Testament that we can fall away.
We see this in his introduction to his book, as follows.
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The Warnings of the
New Testament
The message of many frequently avoided New
Testament passages
Anastasios Kioulachoglou
INTRODUCTION
In Acts 20:26-27 we find Paul speaking to the Ephesian
elders. Making a summary of his ministry, he told them:
“Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood
of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of
God.”
Paul did not shrink, did not withhold from telling the
Ephesians, and the church of God in general, the whole counsel of
God. One could say that one more study on the matter of salvation
would really be redundant, as salvation is something very
fundamental and one would expect that we would all get it right.
But I do not think we do. At least this is my own experience. I was
born a Greek Orthodox, went as a kid to catechism and followed
the liturgies etc. However, I was already a teenager and had never
heard about salvation by grace through faith. My conclusion at
that time was that God is a rather harsh figure waiting for me to
do something wrong so that He can punish me. Of course this is
not true and I found it out a few years later, at the age of 21, when
I met the true, living and loving God. Then for the first time I
heard about the Bible being the Word of God and about salvation by grace through faith. This was so liberating!
God was not a distant figure any more. He was a real God, as real
as I saw Him in the Bible.
The main teaching I received was that once a man believes
he is immediately, once and for all, saved, regardless of what he
will do with his faith in his life. However, in the more than two
decades since then, I had various trials and temptations which
made me realize that staying in the faith is not something
automatic, something that can be considered as given right from
the moment that somebody believed. What I understood is that
faith is a rather continuous than a one-off decision.
In these 25 years I have seen friends who were so happy in
the beginning when I told them about Christ and were all for it,
praising God, praying etc., only to get mad at me and God soon
after, not wanting to hear anything about Him any more. Why?
Because a girlfriend abandoned them or because a relative told
them that all this was “heretic” etc. In time of temptation and
tribulation because of God’s Word they did not hold up. I have
also seen others who though they accepted Christ, were
eventually carried away by their simultaneous love for the world,
which choked, the seed of the Word exactly as the parable of the
sower says. Thus Christ became to them someone they once heard
about but the fruit or the difference He made to them nobody
could really see. In addition, I came across many warnings and
initially puzzling scriptures that did not appear to reconcile with
the doctrine according to which a person who once is saved is
always saved regardless of whether they later, for various reasons,
essentially discontinue in the faith.
The present study looks at a multitude of Scriptures from
the New Testament, that make clear that faith is more a race that
has to be run to the end than a one-off event which upon
happening it is guaranteed that will be valid forever. Staying in
the faith, ending the race, is neither automatic nor it is guaranteed
for all those who start the race. Some, as the examples I gave
above, in the first difficulties and trials drop out. Others have a
very strong love for the things of the world and they too move away. Only some of those who start the race really run it to the
end. This, as we will see, is very clear from the New Testament.
Anastasios' "Warnings of the New Testament" can be found on my post. 01-04-15. There are 8 daily posts after that. A total of 9. His book is on Amazon.com
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