There are perhaps more souls lost through a false confidence of salvation than by any other deceit the Devil makes use of. I do not mean those notorious sinners, but among the more decent formalists, who because they have never fallen into any foul, gross sins, or because their lives are somewhat reformed, and they practice some outward duties, make no doubt of the safety of their state. Yet they have no union with Christ by faith; the great renovating change has never been wrought in them; their natures are still unrenewed, their hearts unsanctified; they never saw and bewailed their own vileness; they never felt their real need of a Savior, in a way of renunciation of their own righteousness. They do not pant and labor after higher degrees of grace and holiness, like a true child of God, who can never rest contented with his present attainments [of grace]. They [the deceived] keep plodding on in the same beaten track, vainly thinking to divide their hearts between God and the world and content themselves with a formal, lifeless, luke-warm religion, which only tends to their greater delusion. Thus they go on dreaming of heaven till they awake in hell. Sir Richard Hill
While it is true that volumes have been written concerning false conversion and volumes will most likely be written in the future, this is not a job that should be left to scholars lengthy tomes. This is a vital truth about one of the primary practices of the evil one and that is true of all people. A scholarly tome may indeed have some good points here and there, but this is a basic truth that hits all people at all intellectual levels. This is also a truth that should hit every person that attends church, tries to be religious, and/or tries to be moral. The evil one uses all of those things to give people a false confidence of salvation for the purpose of damning them. This is a particularly diabolical practice in that not only are those with false confidence deceived, but that deceives many others as well. This helps deceive others with false confidence and yet deceives non-believers (in any way) about true Christianity.
The nature of true Christianity has always been under attack and the evil one has always tried to deceive people with the shell of it rather than the true life of it. The people with life in their soul have always been called derisive names by religious people without life in their souls. We must know that religious people can say the right words, have the right external morality, have the right creeds, but still be very, very lost because the evil one has deceived them by all of the things they do right. The severe lack of preaching in discerning the distinction between external religion and the life of Christianity does not help, but the numbers of those who teach the mere externals of Christianity seems to be the vast majority. As Hill notes above, this great deception of a confidence of salvation deceives many, but it appears almost exclusively among those who are decent formalists. This is a terrible deception when a person thinks that because s/he has the external form that s/he must be converted.
The mere formalist makes a huge mistake being deceived by the evil one through the pride, spiritual darkness, and self-love of the formalist. The formalist cannot come to the point of thinking himself as being worthy of damnation for what he has done and is doing. The formalist does not realize that his view of self is skewed by his own pride and darkness, so he does not see his sin and how far short of the glory of God his supposed religion falls. The formalist has never been broken and contrite for sin and instead follows along with the external duties thinking that those are demonstrative evidence of salvation, though indeed he has a wrong idea of God, of sin, and of the Gospel. This type of formalist can be quite orthodox in terms of creed or stated belief, but that intellectual belief of the truth does not sink any deeper into his heart than the teaching of his own sin does.
There are many formalists who will insist that they have loved God since they can remember and so they must have been saved at a very early age, but again this may not be the truth of the matter. If these people were told that God loved them and had a wonderful plan for them, they would have loved that god and not the biblical God. They would then be deceived into thinking that they loved God when in fact they just loved themselves and a false idea of the true God. So this type of formalist thinks that s/he has loved God and has never fallen into any bad sin (according to them), which deceives this formalist into thinking that s/he is converted. Jesus told Nicodemus who was a champion formalist of his time that he must be born again to see or enter the kingdom. That remains true for all people of all time. Being a formal believer is something to repent of rather than trust in for salvation. A formal believer is a deceived believer and on the way to hell. A false confidence of salvation can be eternally fatal.
God Loves... Himself 
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