How sure are you that you are a Christian?  How sure are you that you are truly a believer?  Maybe you’re just deceiving yourself.  We’re pretty good at convincing ourselves of lies.  How can you really know that you’re a true believer and saved?  What if down the road you betray everything that you say you love and cherish now?  What if you abandon the faith sometime in the future?  Can you lose your salvation?

These are the doubts and questions that come up all the time in the Christian life.  And the story of Judas often becomes a source of insecurity.  If Judas, who spent 3 years of his life with Jesus himself, could betray Jesus and abandon the faith, what kind of assurance of salvation can I have?  As we look at the story of Judas this week, the question at the heart of the misuse is, “Can I lose my salvation like Judas did?”.  Who Judas really was has a profound impact on the question of whether or not we can lose our salvation.  Both sides of the argument have to deal with Judas, and so we will have to deal with him too.  We’ll be starting in John 13:21-30, but we’ll be jumping to John 6, John 17, and a few other places to look at the biblical evidence about Judas.

But ultimately, we’re not going to spend all of our time looking at Judas.  We’ve got to look at Jesus too.  And I think that even the questions about Judas and who he was point us back to our great need of Jesus as well as the great comforts that we have in Christ.  Hopefully, we’ll see that all of these questions lead us back to the great truth that our salvation doesn’t depend upon us at all, but upon the finished work of Jesus.  Even our assurance and perseverance don’t depend on us, but upon Jesus.  So come this Sunday looking to explore the story of the most infamous traitor in history so that we might see Jesus’s surpassing greatness in preserving us unto salvation.  See you Sunday!