There are certain things in life that you want to be absolutely sure of. If you’re married, you want to be sure to remember your anniversary—hopefully before your spouse surprises you with a present! If you’re going on vacation, you want to be sure that you left your house in good order. Have you ever been through an entire vacation with the nagging feeling that you forgot to close the garage door, or you forgot to turn off a hose that was running?
If you’re like me, you want to be absolutely sure that your alarm is set before you go to bed. My wife counted one evening as I checked the alarm 31 times before getting in bed! I’ll admit that was a little excessive, so I’ve cut that number down to a mere 7 or 8 times!
You may not be as concerned about your alarm as I am, but I suspect we share a mutual concern about our salvation. When we consider the stakes that are at play between going to heaven or going to hell, we want to have complete assurance that we will go to heaven.
Over the last several weeks, I hope you have grown confident in the belief that our salvation is secure—that once we have received it, we cannot lose it or forfeit it. That’s a comforting belief, however its one thing to believe that salvation is secure, but its another thing to be confident that I have salvation. No matter how secure we think salvation is, we will not have rest in our souls until we answer the question, “Am I truly saved?” This morning, we are going to address that question, and I hope that you will discover that you can have assurance of your salvation through the Holy Spirit.
1. What kind of question are we asking?
As we think about this question, we need to make sure that we understand what kind of question we are asking. When we deal with this question, we often commit what philosophers call a “category mistake,” which simply means that we put this question into a category in which it really doesn’t belong.
In our quest for absolute certainty, we often treat the question, “Am I truly saved?” the same way we treat the question, “What does 2 + 2 equal?” There is a very specific way to answer a mathematical question like that. You can place two oranges on a table, place two more oranges on the table, count them up, and then discover that you have four oranges. You can be certain about your answer because you’ve followed the correct mathematical procedure.
Sometimes we try to take the same approach to the question, “Am I truly saved?” We think to ourselves, “If I add up the good things I’ve done and subtract the bad things I’ve done and divide all of that by the bad thoughts I’ve had and then multiply by the number of people that I’ve witnessed to, then I can figure this thing out!”
But a mathematical procedure can’t answer a question like, “Am I truly saved?” because the question doesn’t belong in that category. This question is more like the question, “Does my spouse love me?” You can’t answer that question with a calculator, either, but in the context of a growing relationship with your spouse, you can come to a certainty about their love for you that you rarely—if ever!—doubt.
The same is true in our relationship with God. As we grow in our relationship with Him, we can enjoy an assurance of His love for us that is provided by the Holy Spirit. Romans 8:16 says, “the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” By walking with God and allowing His word to fill our hearts, we can come to an assurance of our salvation that we will rarely be tempted to doubt.
Nevertheless, our doubts do come, don’t they? Normally these doubts spring up from the presence of sin in our lives. We don’t walk with God perfectly, and when we fail Satan uses those opportunities to tempt us to doubt God’s love and forgiveness. So what can we look to in order to restore our assurance in those moments? I believe we have both a primary and a secondary path to assurance available to us.
2. The Primary Path to Assurance
We can walk the primary path to assurance simply by taking God at His word and resting in His promises. You might say that this is simply preaching the Gospel to yourself all over again. By bringing to mind the promises that God has made about salvation, we can defeat our doubts by faith through believing that God will be faithful to do exactly what He has said.
Just think again about the powerful promises of the Gospel. You may even want to write these references down in the front of your Bible:
• John 5:24—“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.”
• John 3:16—“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
• John 6:37—“All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.”
Reminding yourself of God’s promises is the bedrock of assurance. After all—it is faith in Jesus that brings salvation in the first place, so to defeat doubts about your salvation, you simply need to look to Him again in faith. Focus on Christ—not on your feelings or your failures!
Now sometimes, we find ourselves wrestling with the question, “How do I know I’ve truly believed? I think I’ve believed, but how do I know I’m not fooling myself?” This question can drive us into a long discussion about philosophy and psychology and “how we know that we know” something, but let me simply say this—I believe that faith is a form of what philosophers call “knowledge by acquaintance.” In other words, since you are acquainted with what goes on in your mind, you know right away what you think, what you feel, and what you believe. You don’t have to search the depths of your soul in order to discover those things, because you already know them.
Think about this for a moment with the question that we used earlier—do you believe your spouse loves you? You might wish that they expressed their love more often, but that’s not the issue right now—the issue is what you accept to be true about their love for you. You know that right away—don’t you?—because you know what you think and what you believe.
I think our faith in Jesus falls into the same category. You know your own thoughts and beliefs, and you know if you believe in Jesus or not. Sometimes we’re tempted to put our faith in Jesus in a different category because the stakes are so high, but that’s not necessary. If you’re tempted to doubt the sincerity of your faith, the answer is not to take a long look at your faith, but to take a long look at the Savior! Look again at Jesus—remember what He has done and what He has promised. If you want to examine something, examine the message of the Gospel and renew your faith in it. Ultimately, our assurance isn’t based on our faith anyway; it is based on the faithfulness of God.
3. The Secondary Path to Assurance
There is a secondary path that can also provide a smaller measure of assurance. It will never provide the same kind of assurance that the primary path will, but I mention it for two reasons: 1) because it can help to calm our emotions when we’re dealing with doubt; and 2) because it is a very popular idea that is frequently mentioned by pastors and authors.
We walk down this secondary path by looking for God’s work in our lives. When our relationship with God is strong and healthy, we can see how the Lord is working in our lives by producing spiritual fruit and by using us to touch the lives of others. Galatians 5:22-23 lists the fruit that he will produce in our lives when it mentions love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. When we see these qualities present in our lives, it gives us a small measure of assurance about our salvation. It can’t be more than a small measure of assurance, however, because we also see things in our lives that are displeasing to God, don’t we? Those are probably the very things that led us to doubt our salvation, so this examination of our lives can only be a secondary path to assurance, at best.
It is popular, however, among some pastors and authors to elevate this examination of your behavior to the position of the primary path of assurance. In other words, they say that I cannot personally rest in God’s promises until I see enough evidence of God’s work in my life. Thus, they encourage us to examine our behavior to see how closely it lines up to biblical standards. Our assurance is therefore tied to the outcome of this self-examination.
This is a very common idea that you will read in books and study Bibles and hear from radio preachers, but I cannot agree that such a self-examination is the primary path to assurance for several reasons. First—and most importantly—I think this idea is based on an incorrect interpretation of passages like James 2 (which talks about a dead faith) and 1 John 3 (which talks about sin and the child of God). I think some pastors and authors who have strongly emphasized a theology called Calvinism have read their theology into those passages rather than drawing the author’s meaning out of those passages.
Second, it is impossible to define how much holiness must be present in my life before I can conclude that I am a Christian. How holy must I be before I can have assurance? Some people would say that a true Christian could not have an habitual sin in his or her life, but what is an habitual sin? Is it a sin that I commit once a day? How about once a week, or does it have to be once an hour before it becomes habitual? What if regularly fail to do the good things that I know I should do? James 4:17 calls that sin. Would that mean that I am not a Christian?
Ultimately, we all end up defining an habitual sinner as “someone who sins a bit more often than me.” If we put too much emphasis on examining our behavior, we will be set adrift on a sea of uncertainty with a current that will always pull us away from having assurance of salvation.
Third, we are not saved by good deeds, so why should we look at our deeds to try and find assurance of our salvation? Some people would say that God will not fail to produce the fruit of the Spirit in us if we are truly saved, but why does God need to command us to love each other if He will automatically produce love within us? Why does He command us to rejoice if He will automatically produce joy within us? Why does He command us to put away anxiety and fear if He will automatically produce peace within us? If He commands us to do these things, I think we must conclude that they are not automatic results of salvation; rather they will come as we learn to draw strength from the Holy Spirit.
Fourth, our behavior is not solely the product of what we believe. There are other factors that influence our behavior, such as our desires; thus, your behavior is not a perfect representation of what you believe. For example, I firmly believe that it would be good for me to get some vigorous exercise every day, but often times I choose to follow other desires in the way that I actually behave. I may desire to sleep longer in the morning, so I choose to stay in bed rather than get up and exercise. Or I may desire to simply relax in the evening, so I’ll choose to turn on a ballgame and watch other people exercise!
Our behavior is to our beliefs what a light is to the contents of a room. A light can reveal the contents of a room when it is turned on, but the contents of the room are there whether the light is turned on or not. In the same way, your behavior can reveal what you believe, but you can genuinely believe something whether your behavior reveals it or not. We fail to reveal our faith in Christ every time we choose to sin, but that doesn’t mean we’re not saved. It simply means that we chose to follow the other factors that influence our behavior.
We should be very concerned about our behavior, but NOT for the purpose of trying to assure ourselves that we are saved. Our assurance is found on the primary path, which we follow simply by taking God at His word and resting in His promises.
Someone once asked Martin Luther, “Do you feel your sins are forgiven?” He replied, “No, but I’m as sure of it as heaven, for feelings come and feelings go, and feelings are deceiving. My faith is in the Word of God; nothing else is worth believing.1 The stepping stones on the path to assurance are the promises that God has made. If we will walk through life on those promises, we can live with the assurance that we are saved.
Notes:
1. From Emery Nester, “Assurance of Salvation,” http://bible.org/seriespage/assurance-salvation-session-5. Accessed 11-29-11.
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