Make a careful distinction from the text and the answer comes back as a prefix — hyper, ultra, too far. Then a verse arrives to enforce it. But Paul never wrote strive not about words, and the sentence used to forbid precision commands it in the very next breath.

Opposition to once saved, always saved seldom turns on the verses it quotes. This article traces the objection to its root — a righteousness a man built himself, and the distance from other men that grace erases — then divides the passages. Israel's salvation is an inheritance received at the end; the Body's was handed over at the beginning.

Paul says God hath made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Being seated is not the believer's location, nor merely his posture, but his position — a finished, shared, heavenly, and permanent place in the risen Christ, a seat that is also a throne. Here is what the seat means, and what it does not.

A boom in fitness and body-building ministries has made a single Pauline phrase newly awkward — bodily exercise profiteth little. But Paul is not scorning the body, nor blessing its worship. Read against the ancient games, he is doing something more useful than either the ascetic or the athlete expects. He is setting a priority.

Salvation and reward are not two names for one thing. One is a free gift that cannot be earned or lost; the other is a wage for service that can be gained or forfeited, yet never touches the gift. Rightly divide the two and the trembling conscience and the careless heart are answered at once.

The deepest problem with Reformed theology is not any one of its five points but the method beneath them: a Bible read flat, without rightly dividing the word. Sort the texts — Israel's national election from the Body's election in Christ, predestination from selection — and the system dissolves.

Paul's words fallen from grace are taken as proof the saved can be lost. In their setting they mean almost the opposite of misbehavior: a fall toward law, not into sin. Rightly divided, the standing in grace cannot be lost — what falls is the walk, when a believer trades grace as his operating principle for the law.

Matthew 10:33 and 2 Timothy 2:12 sound like the same threat, but rightly divided they stand worlds apart. The Lord's warning belongs to Israel under the kingdom program; Paul's word to the Body touches the reward of faithful service, never his salvation — and both rest on One who cannot deny Himself.