It is not very costly to profess Christ. Anyone can do that. Christianity becomes costly when the professing Christian stands and does not fall away in the face of persecution or pressure to conform to some position or stance that is clearly opposed in some way to God’s clear commands found in His Word. For the Christian to commit this sin will be either to disobey God in an act of commission or omission. In any case, when the professing Christian takes each step in disobedience a layer of scar tissue is burned into their conscious with the searing hot iron of deliberate sin. Over time those professing Christians will each have an inoperable conscious and the processes which caused this will have proven that these compromisers have become victims of the deceitfulness of sin and, therefore, they will become what the Bible refers to as apostate. Some of these will still believe they are Christians, but others will refer to themselves as ‘former Christians.’ The Word tells us though that they “went out” from “us” because they were never in Christ to begin with. All genuine believers “continue” in faithfulness to the end.

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