Many pastors report that assurance of salvation is one of the most common issues they deal with in counseling their congregants. Individual believers tend to differ in their experiences of assurance. Whether it is due to relative degrees of maturity in theological understanding of the gospel and its implications, differing families of origin and upbringings, or other details of individual paths of sanctification, Christians tend to fall into two large buckets: some enjoy a very full and consistent sense of assurance of salvation for most of their Christian life, and some seem to struggle frequentyl and significantly to experience a consistent sense of peace about their standing before God.
While I have grown quite a bit in this area over the years, historically, I would place myself in the latter category. As a result, assurance is a topic I have frequently come back to in study, meditation, and teaching. I'm sure I still have a lot to learn, but I have learned enough to see that most of the existing resources that address this area are deficient. They are deficient either in theological content (due to inaccuracy in the worst cases, or lack of nuance in other cases), thoroughness (not answering all the questions that must be answered), or in organization and clarity (placing the answers to multiple relevant questions in proper relation to each other).
One of the ways this is manifested is in well-meaning Christian leaders' common responses to questions of assurance. They often answer questions that are important and even relevant to the issue of assurance, but questions that are distinct from the questions actually being asked. For example, a troubled believer with a sensitive conscience may ask his or her pastor, "How can I know whether I'm truly saved?" And the pastor may spend ten or fifteen minutes talking about things like eternal security (or perseverance of the saints), justification by faith, the grace of the gospel, or even the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible. These are all crucial areas of theology to talk about and understand, especially for full-orbed Christian assurance.
But that's not what was being asked.
The questioner was raising the issue of a personal, subjective sense of peace and assurance: "How can I know whether I'm truly saved?" The question could arise in other forms: "How do I know my faith is genuine?" "How do I know I'm not a complete hypocrite?" "How can I know I'm not self-deceived?" "How can I know I'm not among those to whom Jesus will say, 'Depart from me, I never knew you' on the Last Day?"
There are many reasons these questions arise. Some of them are biblical reasons--passages that raise the issue of self-examination, assurance, and sincerity. Some of them are personal, historical reasons related to how a person views God, influenced by their upbringing and other experiences. Some of them are theological and even apologetic--just what does the Bible teach about grace, salvation, and eternity, and why think those teachings are true, anyway? All of these questions and their respective answers contribute to a complete understanding of assurance of salvation. So we need to talk about the truthfulness of Scripture, the grace of the gospel, the benefits of union with Christ, and how to think about perseverance of faith in relation to Scripture's "warning passages" about "falling away." But we need to go further and press in on the question of personal, subjective assurance, relating it to these prior questions. We need to learn from Scripture about proper expectations of the work of the Holy Spirit in sanctification, as well as the Spirit's role in our direct experience of assurance, and faithful use of the ordinary means of grace as we seek to continually grow.
Before going further, let's stipulate a full-orbed definition of Christian assurance: a personal sense of everlasting peace with God based on a knowledge that one has truly received the grace of Christ offered in the gospel.
The key words or phrases in that definition are "personal sense," "everlasting," and "peace with God/grace of Christ/gospel," roughly corresponding to three of four "pillars" of Christian assurance, each deserving at least one chapter of a longer work:
1) The biblical, Christian worldview and knowing truth
This deals with a Christian understanding of the possibility and method of true human knowledge. It is related to the Christian doctrine of revelation--God revealing truth through his Word and his world. As finite creatures, we must reckon with the fact that we depend on a transcendent source of truth which has an unlimited perspective and can fully account for all contexts of every fact in the universe. In fact, the triune God revealed in the Bible as a personal, absolute, living, active, and omniscient Creator and Sustainer of all things, who has created human minds to receive his revelation, is the necessary metaphysical foundation for human knowledge--and his activity in revealing himself is the necessary epistemic foundation. He has in fact spoken and made himself known to all men, whether they acknowledge and worship him or not. Coming to grips with God's pervasive claim of clear self-revelation (and seeing the impossibility of other attempts at justifying human knowledge) will support belief in the truthfulness of everything else we learn from his Word about grace and assurance.
2) The grace of the gospel
We are speaking of assurance of salvation, so we need to have a clear and thorough understanding of the nature and method of salvation, by which God graciously brings sinners into his kingdom. The work of Jesus Christ in his death, resurrection, ascension, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is the foundational accomplishment of salvation. The application of the benefits of that accomplished redemption to sinners who would be saved depends on union with Christ, accomplished by the Spirit through faith. These benefits include all the traditional categories of the "order of salvation," like effectual calling/regeneration, justification, adoption, sanctification, and glorification. Ideally, individual Christians grow for decades in deepening understanding of each of these benefits, seeing their blood-bought origin at Christ's cross, their mystical application to individual sinners by the Spirit in union with Christ, and their broader ecclesial and royal-covenantal contexts as God continues to extend his kingdom upon the earth. Understanding the grace of the gospel as fully as possible, especially the doctrines of justification and adoption, will go a long way toward building sturdy Christian assurance.
3) Perseverance and eternal security
A person wondering about their standing before God will care not only about their standing before him today, but about whether that standing is final, immutable, whether they are eternally safe in the arms of the Savior. Therefore we have to continue to study the doctrine of salvation and ask whether those who are united to Christ can ever be severed from him. Protestant Christians, whether of a more classical, confessional tradition or a more contemporary evangelical expression, do not all agree with each other on whether the Bible teaches the "eternal security of the believer," also called "perseverance of the saints." I believe a strong scriptural case can be made for the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, but I also admit it is far from the clearest and surest doctrine I hold to (compared to, for instance, belief in the full deity of Christ). Many godly and highly-trained theologians who esteem the Scriptures as divinely-breathed words have concluded differently. So my approach in recent years has been to lay out a decent scriptural and theological case for perseverance of the saints and then talk about the so-called "warning passages" of Scripture and their proper function.
I fear the warning passages are often misused, and in different ways. On the one hand, a believer falling into a bit of pride and presumption may come to a warning passage, hastily regard it as not possibly referring to him or her, or as not capable of describing any kind of true "apostasy" based on other theological commitments, and so dismiss the warning altogether as inapplicable to them. On the other hand, a believer with a disturbed conscience or a weak sense of assurance may come to a warning passage and feel that it certainly describes them and they are already eternally ruined.
Against these misuses I advise regarding the warning passages as just that: warnings, to be heeded. They are not to be dismissed with pride, nor are they designed to cause despair. They are rather like road signs which warn of upcoming danger if a person continues down a certain path. Rocks falling! Hairpin turn, slow down! Deer crossing! The driver doesn't suppose he or she is the kind of person upon whom rocks could never fall, or who could careen off the edge of a curving mountain road; but nor does the driver give up hope and turn back the way he or she came. The driver presses on, but heeds the warnings, obeys the signs, corrects course as necessary. Whether one is ultimately convinced of eternal security based on Scripture or not, it is imperative that the warning passages are approached with the correct mindset. Even in the case of the most forceful possible articulation of eternal security/perseverance, we should regard these passages as one of the means or tools that God uses to keep his redeemed people on course, to the end of their lives.
4) The work of the Spirit in personal assurance
This brings us to a subject, personal sense of assurance. And it involves both indirect and direct works of the Spirit.
What I call "indirect" would be the fruits of sanctification, upon which a believer can reflect when examining himself. Self-examination is something that Scripture calls for in multiple ways, and therefore is advisable; but it is also something that can be thrown out of balance easily. What is often termed "morbid introspection" is what happens when a believer becomes so absorbed with and obsessed with analysis of his or her own life that the things that should be central in thought (Christ, the gospel, grace, the glory of God, Christian service) become peripheral, and the self becomes the center. Besides morbid excess, self-examination can also be skewed by impatience and tunnel vision, or limited perspective. Sanctification is a long, slow, gradual process, and personal Christian growth can only be rightly judged in terms of months or years or decades, not hours or days or even weeks. Sometimes, only other Christians in a person's life can accurately judge their growth--a believer who is constitutionally prone to guilt or doubt cannot always be objective enough with themselves to see the fruit of the Spirit working in his or her life. "Fruit" is an image Scripture uses for good reason--when looking at growth in righteousness in our lives, we must consider whether our good works and Christian lifestyles are organic (the opposite of "artificial") and whether they are growing. Growth takes time, just to re-emphasize that point.
The "direct" work of the Spirit in assurance is one of the more difficult topics to get our heads around. And that's no big surprise, for as Jesus told Nicodemus, the Spirit blows wherever it wants, has its visible effects, but no one knows where it came from or where it's going. He works subtly, invisibly, and sometimes in unexpected ways. But there are some relatively reliable ways by which we can encounter the Spirit's ordinary working, and put ourselves in the "path" of spiritual blessing, including the blessing of increased assurance. These "reliable ways" are the ordinary means of grace--the instruments God has chosen to use to channel his grace to his people. This communication of grace through certain means is not a mechnical or magical process, and it is not under an institutional church's or priest's control (although elders of local churches do wield a kind of declarative authority that is related). It is also not as if "grace" is a substance that fills up our metaphysical tanks somewhere in our souls. Rather, it is an experience of the presence of Christ himself to bless and to empower for relationship with God and with God's people. The ordinary means of grace--Word, sacraments, prayer, fellowship, discipline, and worship--faciliate union and communion with Christ.
And it is often as the eyes of our hearts are focused on Jesus that the Spirit opens our eyes to more of the glory of who he truly is, as the victorious Son of God, that our hearts, by reflex, as it were, reverberate with a loud "Yes!" of faith in him, and we at once know who he is and who were are in him. His Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are children of God and fellow heirs with Christ (Romans 8). So we must grow in skillful use of the means of grace, experiencing deeper and deeper communion with the triune God, to enjoy the fullness of what he intends to experience in terms of peace and fullness of assurance.
But there is so much more to say.
Wise believers of the past have wondered about, and written about the relationship between true saving faith and assurance. In other words, they asked the question, "Is assurance so much of the essence of true saving faith that without significant assurance you need to question the sincerity or adequacy of your faith?" In my opinion, the wisest answered "No" to that question. But is there biblical evidence that this is the case? In fact, there is.
What is the relationship of physical health to one's experience of assurance or lack thereof? Does the state of our physical bodies impact every area of our sanctification including this one? What about mental health? What do mental illnesses like anxiety, depression, OCD, bipolar disorder, PTSD, eating disorders, etc. have to do with our spirituality? Is a simplistic, callous noutheticism pretending to be holistic biblical counseling the answer, which treats people like souls trapped in irrelevant bodies? Or are reductionistic, modern pharmacological and psychotherapeutic approaches better, which at worst treat people like animals with no moral agency or accountable spirituality? How about an arbitrary middle-ground? By the way, how much mental health depends on other aspects of physical health, in as-yet under-recognized ways in mainstream medicine?
As we can immediately see, a full discussion of assurance of salvation must involve a sophisticated theological anthropology (doctrine of man in his constitution, purpose, function, etc.), with a concomitant approach to holistic health and wellness. Mental disorders of depression, anxiety, and obsession are especially relevant to such discussions. We are body-soul unities in which each component of our being strongly affects the other. We are glorious beings made in God's image but fallen, living in a good and beautiful but fallen world. We experience a mixture of sin and misery. Some of the misery is due to our own sins. Some of it is due to others' sins in our lives. Some of it is due only to the sins of our first parents. Who can disentangle it all but God alone? But we must be mindful, balanced, and careful of all of these factors when seeking to grow in assurance or helping to counsel others towards the same.
I want to get as much of this information packed into one place as I can. I want it to be written relatively simply and clearly, at a level that a high school student can read (or these days, at least a college-aged student), which will already be a level down from some of the above. I don't know if I can do it, but I've wanted to try for a long time. I've started the project again and again. Over the years, my theology has matured (and I hope it will continue to do so even after I complete the project, if I ever do...which always makes later re-reading or editing harder and cringe-inducing). So perhaps 2024 is the time...time to learn some discipline for weekly writing goals(?!).
