Just today I was listening to a tape presented at a pastor’s conference this year.1 The speaker, a pastor of children’s ministry, cited 1 John 2:19 as proving that children who make a profession of faith and later fall into serious sin prove they were never born again in the first place. The pastor began

by Roscoe Barnes III I felt a flash of anger when I looked at a tract on the plan of salvation that I had written. What bothered me was the comment made by Ron Bupp, a friend I’d asked to critique the manuscript. Bupp made a number of good suggestions. But near the end of