Dennis Tuuri

Many years ago, when this church first started, actually I believe the first Bible study, there was a man, a friend of Hobbies, who was involved with a thing called Bridging the Gap Ministries. And I don’t necessarily commend this fellow. I don’t know him that well or his theology. But at the time, at least, he put out a rather interesting periodical. It was a big print newspaper, page by page. I don’t know, there were probably at least twelve or sixteen pages to the thing. And at the very top, it said, “Who told you God loves you?” And underneath that, a citation from the Psalms: “God hates all workers of iniquity.” And then it had two cartoons.

Some of you have heard me tell this story many times, but two cartoons. First, one cartoon with two panels. It was like Mad Magazine if you’re that old. Kind of drawn that way.

In the first panel, there’s a guy with a Bible, and he’s talking to somebody. He says, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” And the next panel, he says, “And if you don’t believe it, he’s going to send you straight to hell.” So the rest of this paper was all about God’s anger at sinners, his election, predestination, all that kind of thing. It was really an excellent thing. I’m not sure I’ve ever, I still have a copy of it, unfortunately.

And it quoted all kinds of the reformers—Luther, Calvin, Rushdoony, etc. I would ask you this morning to ask yourself: Does God love you? Do you know God loves you? Do you know you’re a child of God? No? We’re in trouble. Little ones don’t know yet. So that’s the question I pose to you. Today we’re going to talk about assurance of salvation in its biblical context. And this is contained in the Canons of Dort in the first section dealing with unconditional election, and it has a couple of paragraphs which we’ll read in just a minute about assurance of salvation.

But it’s a very important topic. It’s an important topic for you as you reach your death, right? This song we just sang about death. Death is coming quickly. Will we be comforted on our deathbed? Will we have assurance that we’re God’s people on our deathbed? It’s a real deal as we get older. And secondly, I think that related to the idea of assurance, as well, is the idea that it’s important for conquering, for doing what God has called us to do.

So that’s what we’ll talk about in today’s sermon. And we’re going to return to Romans 8, what we just sang a portion of, and earlier in the chapter, verses 12-17 will be the scripture text. So please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Romans 8:12-17. “So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the great gospel at the center of this text that we just read, that the Spirit is given to us that we might have assurance that we are indeed your children, that you love us, and that we’re headed, Lord God, for eternity with you and with the saints. Thank you for that great truth. Thank you also for the exhortations in this scripture to live our lives in relationship to that, to put to death the deeds of the body.

We pray, Lord God, that you would by your Spirit today given to us give us this assurance, that your Spirit may write these words upon our hearts. Help us to understand this doctrine of assurance. Help us, Father, be comforted, but help us also be challenged to respond to this great gospel with renewed consecration to the purposes of our King, Jesus. In his name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. Thank you.

If I don’t drink it all, I’ll spill it. All right. Well, the doctrine of assurance, and I want to put this—this is a series of messages that I think are absolutely critical for who we are as Christians. And secondly, critical if we want to see reformation and reconstruction or transformation in our lives. I know that several of you get a little tired of the review. I will make no apologies for it today, however, and this is why.

For you to know these things is great. But for you to know these things in a way that you can communicate them to others—this is the goal of this sermon series. We had a meeting with Portland area pastors from New Hope, City Bible, Rolling Hills, and East Hill. Another one? Thank you. I thought he was bringing me something stronger, but okay. And it was a political meeting. I’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes.

But you know, several of these churches that were there have more people as part of that local church than there are Reformed people in the whole state of Oregon. And while some of these churches are moving in the right direction, New Hope is actually the host site for RC Sproul’s Ligonier Conference in Portland this year on the sovereignty of God. Come October, we should really push that conference to our friends and relatives.

RC has a senior, has an excellent windsomeness to him that seems to be able to take evangelicals and lead them into Reformed theology. And so that’s an important thing. But the point is that in terms of self-conscious Calvinist Reformed folks, we are a small, little tiny percentage of the church in Oregon. Now, we’ve been given at this church a tremendous blessing. We’ve been given stewardship, understanding of these truths.

Why? Not because we’re better than other people. Probably because we’re not as good as other people. So we’re able to learn better. We know our neediness. But God has taught us these things. But he doesn’t teach it to us just so we can sit in our bathtub with our rubber ducky of Calvinism and think, “Isn’t this great?” He gives it to us so that we can do things. We can move out. We can conquer. Assurance is the same thing. Assurance isn’t something that just sort of is, “Oh, isn’t that nice? We can be assured of our salvation and wait out the rest of our lives.”

We’ll see later in Romans 8. Assurance is then linked to bringing in the revelation of who we are as sons of God, for which the whole creation groans and awaits. So we’re supposed to change the whole world. We save the world literally, and we’re supposed to do it. The purpose of assurance is to equip us to conquer, to equip us for that task.

Well, we do it through a proclamation of who God is. And specifically today, the attribute of God that is greatly suppressed in evangelicalism and certainly in our culture is his sovereignty. You need to be able to take these sermons, remember them, communicate them in a clear manner. And if what I give you here by way of review isn’t helpful to you, tell me what would be more helpful. But let’s just go through what we’ve talked about so far.

We began by talking about the golden chain of Romans 8:29 and 30. So we set the entire context of what is conceivably a very difficult doctrine for people—can seem cold and abstract, the sovereignty of God, Calvinism, the chosen frozen and all that stuff. We said it in the context of the warm, hot bonds of God’s love. God’s foreknowledge is what drives everything else. His love of the elect is what leads them to that.

So the context of setting this discussion is can be usefully the Lord God’s sovereign love. Now, if foreknowledge is foreseeing of faith ahead of time, I give you some basic arguments here. Because some people say, “Well, foreknowledge just means that God looks down the pike and sees you’re going to exercise faith, and therefore he predestinates you. So it’s who’s going to exercise faith and who is not.”

But of course, if it’s foreknowledge of faith, the faith that God foresees is the faith according to Ephesians 2:8-10 that He himself created. So that doesn’t get us anywhere, does it? Even grant the point for the moment, it’s not true. But even grant the point, it’s still the Lord God that gave you the faith. On what basis? On the basis of no condition in you. But verse 29a is actually a differentiating statement.

It’s saying certain people. It’s talking about whom, not what. He doesn’t foreknow something about you. He foreknows these people. And it’s a differentiating statement about whom. Assume God foreknows all men. So if it was talking about foreseeing what men did, there would be no reason to differentiate one from the other. So it’s a differentiating object. The object is a whom, not a what. And the context stresses God’s action.

If you look at the whole context of this in Romans 8, it’s about man’s passivity. God is active. We respond. We’re passive. So it’s then a foreknowledge that determines existence, not a foreknowledge that looks at existence apart from him. It’s a fore-love that determines existence. And then we have a couple of verses. Amos 3:2 is a good one. That God knew Israel. So lots of verses I’ve given you in that sermon.

Here’s one: Amos 3:2, that might be useful to you to remember, that knowledge in the Bible is another word for love. To know someone is to love them, to know them in distinction from other people. So God’s love, and there’s some argumentation when you get in your living room and talk to an Arminian or someone that’s just confused about the faith or about God’s sovereignty. You can use these arguments with them, just discussion points.

Secondly, we talked from Ephesians 1 about God’s absolute sovereignty and unconditional election, both from Ephesians 1. So God is sovereign in everything in every little detail. Went over verse after verse after verse. And most people kind of know this intuitively. If all the hairs on our head are numbered and the birds, the created order—you know, I got Jesus, right, walking on the water. He controls the created order. He’s sovereign over everything.

And this tie is a reminder that his sovereignty over everything is the basis for our assurance, because he first sovereignly lets the storm come up without him there, and then he sovereignly comes to them and quiets the storm. So we have trials, but God is sovereign over those trials, and he will come to us. His eye is always on us. Jesus has been watching them from the shore in the middle of the boat in the gospel accounts, and he will come to be with us to rescue us in due time.

But God is sovereign over all things. Jesus walks on the water. Ephesians 1:11 declares that he works all things. So everything. And Daniel 4:35 is a great verse: that God does whatsoever he pleases in the affairs of men. The Acts references are two very important references to teach people to confront them with the fact that the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ, being delivered over for crucifixion, was done according to the predetermined foreknowledge of God.

He decreed and brought to pass sovereignly, using sin sinlessly, the most horrific act that humanity ever did, which was to kill the wonderful Savior. God’s sovereignty! If it applies to that, it certainly applies to everything. And on the basis of that overarching sovereignty of God in everything, a subset of that truth is that he’s sovereign in terms of who he elects for salvation, whom he chooses, whom he predestinates for heaven.

So we believe in unconditional election. There’s no conditions in us that made God elect us and predestinate us and call us. No conditions. Ephesians 1:4-5, 2:1-2, and verses 4 and 5 describe in chapter 2 that we were dead men walking. We were dead in trespasses and sins. Dead men can’t do anything. He can’t fulfill any conditions if there were conditions. And so these are, you know, Ephesians 1 and 2 is a great set of verses. Going under the first part of chapter 2 as you discuss with people, have these things memorized, right? Ephesians 1 and 2. It’s easy. And you just open it up and it kind of falls out: “Oh yeah, God is sovereign over everything. And by the way, you were dead in your trespasses and sins. And so it’s totally of grace because he unconditionally sovereignly elected you.” We’re dead men walking.

And then last week we talked about conditional reprobation. Now, I don’t know if that’s a good phrase or not. But remember that when we talk about this: reprobation is God’s decree to not save particular people. So in the Canons of Dort they say, “Well, we’re all fallen into sin through Adam’s fall. God chooses some, but he doesn’t choose others. He lets them continue on their path to perdition.”

Now, so you know, it’s a conditional election, a conditional reprobation. The condition is, as the Canons describe it, men are already fallen. Now, we can push that back and say that God is sovereign and his decree also brought the fall to place to being, but we don’t have to do that for purposes of teaching what the Canons of Dort and what the Five Points of Calvinism assert.

In terms of reprobation, God decrees that some men will be saved, and the rest he leaves not to be saved. So in Romans 9, this is the central verse to remember: God at least leaves men on the road to eternal torment. God is not a humanist. All of these things correct our indwelling sin and particular cultural bent away from God to drive us back to understanding that the reason why we have difficulties in our culture is because we’ve taught a false view of God. God is not happy with us.

I have a quote here. I won’t tell you who it’s from because I didn’t ask permission from this man to post this, but it was on an email I saw this week. He says: “In truth though, part of the problem with our moral intuition—so the discussion was about our moral sense, at least as we have nurtured it—is that the biggest sin of all, failure to glorify the one true God, is trivialized in our culture. At bottom, our faulty moral intuition itself comes back down to worship of the creature rather than the Creator.”

This is what Romans 1 is about, right? We don’t acknowledge him as God. We don’t give him glory. Our primary sin, you know, there’s two tablets of the law. And we look at the second tablet—violations, bad things going on in terms of theft and suppression of the family, etc. But those things happen because men have sinned in the first tablet of the law, the first five commandments. Men sin against God, and they work out that sin in terms of their fellow man.

So the problem we have today is not just to talk about the sins toward fellow men. We have to get in back of that, in front of that to our culture and proclaim that we need to honor and worship and glorify God. Our sin and our offenses against him first and foremost, right? “Against thee, thee only have I sinned and done this great evil.” We have taught a God who’s dependent upon the creature. And we have taught a God who is there to help all creatures.

We have taught a God of humanism who says that the value of humanity is ultimate above everything else. And so we cannot have a God sovereignly decreeing and sending men to eternal torment because it violates the basic standard by which we now operate as the Christian church and as a culture. The culture has become humanistic, not caring what they do to God, because the church began that way. It’s our perversion, our failure to honor and glorify God as God that has led to everything else.

People wonder why we’re always getting ticked off about breaking the Sabbath. Well, this is why: it’s his day. Yeah, that’s important. If you waste your time and don’t use your time right during the rest of the week. But everything begins on the Lord’s day. Here’s where we honor and worship him. This is his day. He claims the first part. It’s why, if you’re not tithing, you’re in deep trouble. God’s offended with you.

And God is offended with our culture today. God is greatly offended. We live in times of judgment from an offended God whose laws and honor are ignored. If God is not sovereign in salvation, we’re sure not going to pay much attention to his sovereignty in terms of ethical standards, are we? We’re going to split off all that Old Testament stuff and be New Testament Christians. We’ve got no law left. Oh, we have vestiges of it, little faint images of it in the New Testament.

The whole point is it’s one word from God. He’s given us all kinds of information about civil statutes and judgments in the Old Testament. We ignore them to our peril because he gets angry with us. You know, there’s a natural built-in consequence to breaking God’s law. We all know that. But God’s judgments are very personal because he takes this very personally.

If evangelicalism, if we don’t, you know, promote the law of God as the basic standard for how civil statutes—you know, we know that the law is given to show us our way to how to live. But the law is also given as a means to build civil governments. By political action is absolutely required of us. It’s not so, yeah okay, I know it’s idolatrous, and our nation does instead of worship. But I’m not going to become idolatrous the other way and get so idolatrous relative to worship that I don’t do what worship drives me and equips me to do the rest of the week.

In Deuteronomy 4, it is the framing of the statutes of that nation that was to be the light on the hill that drew other nations to say, “What a wonderful nation was going to great God. These wonderful statutes, these laws. The politics is godly,” and it’s supposed to draw men. You see, we ignore that to our peril. God is unhappy with us if our Christianity is just sort of a way to get ourselves quiet and peaceful and wait for that death we sang about earlier—the rubber ducky in the bathtub.

No, God is angry. He’s angry because we’ve offended him by preaching our antinomianism. He’s angry because we’ve offended him by teaching antinomianism or some kind of law other than God’s law. He’s angry with us. He’s angry with us because we don’t honor his day. He’s angry with us because we don’t honor his ability to give us wealth by giving him a paltry ten percent. And even part of that ten percent he says use it to go to family camp with, and we can’t do it more often than not.

These are truths that we know, and we have to prepare ourselves to help the culture around us, evangelicalism, to understand why things are the way they are. We must help bring evangelicalism to that Pogo moment where we’ve met the enemy and he is us—like the subjects of God’s reprobation in Romans 9, unbelieving Jews. We assert natural privilege. Remember, they didn’t like, you know, what Paul taught them. Their problem with God was they believed in natural privilege, certain rights because they had the covenant signs and seals.

They had the law. They were God’s people, chosen people. They have natural privilege. And we now have taken and broadened that out to the whole idea of human rights. It’s our fault. We’ve started with natural privilege in the context of the church and extends out now to human rights. Like the rebellious question of Romans 9, we put God in the dock. We lecture him and accuse him of injustice as if justice is some sort of Platonic Greek virtue above God.

God is justice every way that he tells us that he is. This is the definition of what justice is. But we would question him, and we would accuse him of coercion. He says he doesn’t coerce us. He’s not telling us, “You have to be evil.” That’s what you want to do every minute of every day apart from his grace. It’s not coercion. Meanwhile, we, in rejecting the sovereign God of Calvinism and Reformed theology—what the scriptures teach over and over and over again—and rejecting this, we exercise instead increasing coercion ourselves in the name of human rights.

Human rights says “right to a clean planet” and this and that and the other thing. And you know, if you don’t believe it, we’re going to, you know, make your life a living hell until you do. We’re going to coerce you. That’s why we have these bills now. They’re trying to coerce you not to help poor women who are being tempted to kill their own children while yet in their wombs. We want to help those women.

And they’re saying, “No, you can’t help them.” That’s what SB 776 is all about. Trying to get them to attack them through investigation so that you can’t do benevolent activities. HB 2996 is an attempt to coerce parents and students to be subject to state education. We’ve got private schools that are free in this state, at home schools that are free. But that’s not what they want. Now, this bill in the Oregon legislature says that all private schools will have to be regulated.

All tutoring services have to be regulated. You got to have state licensure. Same things are going on in Washington state. I guess Peter Mayher was up talking to a Senator a couple weeks ago. It was in the paper about it. There’s a national—all these things are national movements. And I’m sorry to say I’m not a Dem. I’m not preaching Democrat or Republican, but these are coming from democratically controlled legislators.

They are attacking Christian benevolences by coercing you not to do it. They’re trying to coerce parents to subject their children to state-run education instead of their own choice. And now they’re trying to coerce churches not to do their full-orbed ministry or gospel activity. That’s what SB 2 is all about. Yeah, you can be exempt from the discrimination laws against transgenders, transsexuals, bisexuals, and homosexuals, but only for those parts of your ministry that relate to the primary purpose of the church of Jesus Christ.

Well, now who’s going to decide that? They are. Their courts, their legislative assemblies will now decide the primary purpose of the church of Jesus Christ. There is no stronger attack right now, and there has not been in my lifetime, than SB 2. Nothing has been worse. This is now not just an attack on the family, not an attack on marriage the way homosexual marriage was, not an attack on children of the family.

All those things are very important. But I believe that if you lose the church, you lose the rest of it anyway. And we are now in the position where the state is trying to coerce churches by defining their primary purpose in exercising sovereignty over them in that way. Why? Because we have failed as Reformed people in this state to take the message of the sovereign God to our evangelical brothers and sisters.

We retreat typically to our little Reformed ghettos with our rubber ducky of Calvinism and don’t take it out ever when we talk to our friends and neighbors and relatives. It is time to take it out. You think all this is happening apart from the sovereign God? Of course not. We should praise God for SB 2 because the churches are finally becoming awake to the threat that’s happening. Are they awake yet? Do they have the Pogo moment?

No. That’s our job to help them. These pastors met last week and decided to do SB 2. We’re going to try to bring out three, four, maybe five hundred pastors to Salem on one day to assert the sovereignty and autonomy of the Christian church against state control. Now, if we do that and don’t intend to use those churches to press the crown rights of Christ in the context of the broader culture, God will not bless us because he’s angry with us—because our churches have become little ghettos.

Ghettos in a world of pluralism that because of our Arminianism we spawned—on this horrible thing. Even the institutional church is not all that important for evangelicalism. Christianity is about individuals’ relationship to Jesus. They’ve jettisoned the church, individual traditional creeds and confessions. And by jettisoning those things they have stripped themselves of every defense against a sovereign state.

It’s like in that movie A Man for All Seasons. “Well, let’s just tear down the laws. The laws are in our way,” the son-in-law of Thomas Morris says. And Morris says, “Well, you do that. You tear down all these laws, and you get to the end of the country after having done that, you’ll turn around. There’ll be Satan. And how will you defend yourself against him?” The institutional church, the creeds and confessions of the church are given to defend us against the enemy while we actively pursue the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And it is high time we did just that. God will continue to bring his rod of judgment and correction down on our backs if we don’t. Now I know some of you got worried last week when I put out the email about the politics. So this next statement is very important: In the midst of the growing judgment, we can sing assured of his love and salvation. We’re to redeem the dying because the days are evil.

That’s what we did Friday night. We sang praises to God. We encourage each other in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what he wants us to do. We can rest assured, and my job today is to convince you that you are Christians or to put at ease the doubts that you might have, to cause you to grow in your assurance of his love. I thank God that it’s becoming difficult to do that because then maybe we’ll attend to what he says about our position as children of God, and we’ll attend to the verses that command us to increase our assurance by objective means, by diligent means, by the secondary means by which he gives us assurance.

We’ll see that in just a couple of minutes. All right. So from Romans, well, we get to Romans 8 in just a couple of minutes. But first I want to just read a couple of definitions. What is assurance? Assurance is the theological concept of certainty and persuasion communicated in the gospel to the eyes of faith about God and God’s utter trustworthiness as the faithful promiser. This implies neither personal tranquility nor robust confidence, neither blanket security nor rosy optimism.

This assurance is created by God’s self-witness and is sustained by the experience of the repeated righteous fidelity of God. So this is the assurance that we are in, that God’s promises are true. You know, assurance is first of all assurance that God, who has promised, “The things you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved. He who believes and is baptized has been saved. He’s a new creature.”

God has made these wonderful promises to those who believe in him. And assurance begins by saying that God is trustworthy. We are assured first of God’s trustworthiness to these promises. And then secondly, that trustworthiness is specifically applied to us as individuals. God makes these great promises to a class of people, right? All those that believe, the Christians, these people. But assurance doesn’t stop there.

Assurance can be personal as well. Paul was assured that for him to die was Christ, that he would be present with Christ. And so assurance has to do with first the promises of God, and secondly those promises are to a particular class of people. But third, those promises have to do with you individually, you individually as well.

Assurance is closely connected to the work of the Holy Spirit as we just read and as we read all throughout the New Testament. The Holy Spirit’s job is to bring us this assurance. We just read in Romans that the Spirit is a spirit of adoption. The Spirit enables us to know that we’re children of God, by which we cry out “Abba, Father.” So walking in the context of the Spirit being led by the Spirit—which Romans 8 says, right? So we’re to be led by the Spirit, not by the flesh. This is the Spirit’s job. Assurance of salvation, assurance of right standing with God, is very explicitly an area that is tied to the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.

Another definition of assurance: the state of certainty. Both testaments depict faith as a state of assurance founded upon divinely given promises. We read, for instance, of the riches of the full assurance of understanding in Colossians chapter 2. Art’s translation says this: “We have a wealth of assurance such as understanding brings.” So when we are brought to this assurance, there is a full assurance that’s differentiated from a partial assurance, and we’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes.

So the Bible says that we can know that we know that we know that we know that we are Christians. We can have assurance of salvation. God’s witness is the ground of this assurance. God’s Spirit is the author of this assurance.

Assured faith in the New Testament has a double object. First, God’s revealed truth viewed comprehensively as a promise of salvation in Christ. And second, the believer’s own interest in that promise, you know. God says that, you know, the resurrection of Jesus is assurance that he will judge the world. So he gives us assurance about what he’s going to do in relationship to his promise. But a subset of that assurance is he assures us that we are children of God. God testifies to believers that they are indeed his sons.

The gift to them of the Spirit of Christ in Galatians 3:2, for instance, is itself God’s testimony to them that he has received them into the messianic kingdom, and that now they know him savingly. So God testifies this to us. This gift, the guarantee of our inheritance, Ephesians 1:14, seals us as God’s permanent possession and assures them that through Christ, they are now his children and heirs. The Spirit witnesses to this by prompting them to call God Father. Romans 8, which we just read, giving them a sense of his fatherly love. Hence the boldness and joy before God and men that everywhere characterize New Testament religion.

Now in addition to this, however, we have to be careful about self-deception. We’re going to read in a minute from the Westminster Confession of Faith. But it begins this discussion of assurance by talking about false assurance. Self-deception is a danger here, for strong persuasions of a saving relationship with God may be delusions. You say, “Well, I don’t know if I’m a Christian or not. Maybe I’m self-deluded. Maybe there’s delusions going on here.”

And the Bible acknowledges that inward assurance must therefore be checked by external moral and spiritual tests. You know, “Test yourself to see if you’re in the faith.” John’s epistles deal directly with this. John specifies right belief about Christ, love of Christians, and righteous conduct as objective signs of being a child of God. So there’s a differentiation between false assurance and true assurance.

Turn to First John chapter 3, and we’ll look at that a little bit. Verse 14. And you know the crux of this epistle—it’s all about the invisibility of God. And what do we do about that? It’s a problem. You know, God is not visible, assuring us that he’s with us. He’s invisible. And so John’s epistle here is given to people to help them understand the visibility of God in ways other than his own personal visibility.

Okay? So here’s what he says: “We know that we have passed from death to life. So this is a statement of assurance, assurance of salvation. Because how do we know it? We love the brethren. Because we have a special revelation from God? Because we have a warm feeling about the Holy Spirit? Because we sort of just, “Oh yeah, the Spirit’s really empowering me”? Uh-uh. John says the Spirit is invisible. It’s awful tough.

And you can be prone to deception if you rely upon these subjective truths. But instead, he says there’s some objective stuff. You know, if you love the brethren, then you can know that you’ve passed from death to life. “He who does not love his brother abides in death. Whoever said, you know, God is invisible. You say you love him, but you don’t love your brother who is visible. How does that work? It’s self-delusion.”

So love of the brethren is given to us in verse 14 as one objective evidence of whether we can know and be assured of our salvation. And then in verse 16: “By this we know.” Oh, by the way, in verse 15: “Whoever hates his brother is a murderer. And you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” So you can know that you have eternal life by loving the brethren. Verse 16: “By this we know because he has laid down his life for us, and we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”

“Whoever has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need and shuts up his heart from them—how does the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth. And by this we know that we are of the truth and shall assure our hearts before him.” So we come to increasing assurance of our hearts before him by loving our brothers. And then very explicitly again, he makes this very visible.

You don’t love them just, you know, in what you say. You love them in what you do. So if you’re engaged in positive acts of love toward brothers and sisters in Christ, this is an objective way to become assured of our salvation.

Verse 20: “For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart and knows all things. Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence toward God. And whatever we ask, we receive from him because we keep his commandments and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.” So now we’ve got a couple more objective criteria. We’ve got to talk about the heart. And if your heart doesn’t condemn you, don’t try to work up a condemnation of yourself. But this is tied explicitly—the confidence of the heart—to the keeping of the commandments.

Well, now right away, ninety-five percent of evangelicalism is in trouble relative to assurance, aren’t they? Because they don’t believe the commandments are supposed to be kept. But God says that the basis for our assurance, an objective test of it, is whether we keep the commandments. And in that way, our heart is at peace within us. Or even if our heart condemns us and we look at it, we’re loving the brothers, we’re doing the commandments of God, we can assure our hearts before him. You see, we can overrule that doubt in our hearts.

Verse 23: “This is the commandment, that we should believe on the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another as he gave us commandment. Now he who keeps these commandments abides in him, and he in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given to us.”

Now, a couple of things here. The third objective criteria for our assurance is belief in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, right? That’s what it says here. “If we believe on the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another.” So do you believe that Jesus died for your sins today and that he was raised up for your justification? You do? I hope you do. And if you do, that is another point of assurance of our hearts, even if they get weak before us and start to doubt.

So we’ve got the objective love of the brothers in actions and deeds and words. And we’ve got walking in the commandments. And the central commandment is to believe that Jesus Christ is who he says he was. And if we’re doing those things, there’s one last thing that John actually says, rather, at the end: that we can be assured that we’re abiding in him by the Spirit whom he has given to us.

Now, understand that the Spirit, this is the witness. This is, you know, basically our assurance comes from the indwelling Holy Spirit. But how does the Spirit work? The Spirit works to encourage us to obedience of the law. The Spirit works to bring us truth, the knowledge that Christ has indeed, he is the Son of God, and he’s died and been raised up. And the Spirit urges us to deeds of love for our brothers. The Spirit is tied here to objective criteria, not to some sort of subjective, “Well, gosh, I don’t know if I feel quite like it today or not.” No, that’s not what goes on here.

God says that we can know these things through these objective standards and thus differentiate our assurance from the false assurance that the scripture says are real and need to be avoided. All right. Now, turn to the second page of your handout, and we’ll read these sections from the Canons of Dort on assurance.

Article 12: “The Assurance of Election.” And this is all the first section. Remember, TULIP is really ALTIP. They don’t start with total depravity. They started with unconditional election. And actually, what they call it here is “Divine Election and Reprobation: Judgment Concerning Divine Predestination.” And by the way, it says: “And this is from their document which the Senate declares to be in agreement with the word of God and accepted till now in the Reformed churches.”

So not just our church in general, not just a specific church. The church has talked on and given us a witness on this stuff already. We don’t, you know, really—it’s evangelicalism that has cut itself off from the confessions of the church, that’s led men into errors, in terms of Arminianism and rejection of hell or reprobation, or being able to have full assurance. It’s cutting ourselves off from this united witness of the historic church.

Well, here’s the united witness of the historic church in Article 12 on the assurance of election. “Assurance of this their eternal and unchangeable election of salvation is given to the church chosen in due time.” So you don’t have it today. You didn’t know what to answer when I said, “Are you sure you’re a Christian? Are you assured?” Well, understand that it comes according to our church fathers in due time, though by various stages and in differing measure.

You’re going to doubt your assurance because you’ve been doubting your assurance? No. Understand that at times you will doubt your assurance. You will question it. That’s what it says. This assurance comes through various stages and in differing measures. “Such assurance comes not by inquisition or searching into the hidden and deep things of God. Am I elect? No. How does it work? Predestination. Did I do—I know, if he did it with me or not?”

No. “But by noticing within themselves with spiritual joy and holy delight the unmistakable fruits of election pointed out in God’s word: True faith in Christ, childlike fear of God, yeah, that Spirit it brings us into a position of being sons of God—a childlike fear of him. A godly sorrow for our sins. A hunger and thirsting for righteousness, and so on.” So they say, you know, don’t get too worked up if you don’t have full assurance, but you got some assurance going on, but it kind of wavers sometimes. That’s okay. That’s the way it works.

They say, “And then the fruit of this assurance and their awareness and assurance of this election—God’s children daily find greater cause to humble themselves before God, to adore the fathomless depth of his mercies, to cleanse themselves, and to give fervent love in return to him who so first greatly loved him.” So the end result of assurance, and we know our hearts are sure with God, then the response to that is humility and greater love.

So this is what they say.

Drop down to the Westminster Confession material, and we read—as I said, they have a whole chapter on it, a whole chapter, not just a couple of statements. And the Westminster Confession of Faith says this: “Although temporary believers and other unregenerate men may vainly deceive themselves with false hopes and carnal presumptions of being in the favor of God and state of salvation, which hope of theirs shall perish, yet such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus and love him in sincerity, endeavoring to walk in all good conscience before him, may in this life be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace and may rejoice in the hope of the calling of God, which hope shall never make them ashamed.”

So you know, both sets of secondary standards say that we can know, we can be assured with certainty, that we are children of God. And in fact, faith itself—faith in Jesus—faith is assurance. Faith is not some sort of, you know, optimism, some hoping, some wishing. Faith is believing what God’s promise says, and specifically believing what God’s promise says about me in my belief in the Lord Jesus Christ right now.

We go to the outline points on the handout. First: the assurance of this promise-keeping God.

So assurance is first of all related to the promises of God. God over and over again declares himself to be faithful. In Hebrews we read about that. “God by two immutable things, which is his promise and his oath in which it was impossible for God to lie, we then might have strong consolation who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set for us in the gospel.” So the assurance of faith is tied to the promise-keeping nature of God, his absolute trustworthiness to keep his promises to us.

God promises it to us. We must begin with that. We don’t begin with the internal evidence. We begin with the scriptures, which engender faith in us. And those scriptures assure us that God is faithful. And he goes out of his way to provide two witnesses—Hebrews says—to make us sure that we can have assurance of consolation as we come to him for salvation. So we can know these things because God is first of all a promise-keeping God.

In Psalm 35:3, David says this: “Take hold of shield and buckler and stand up for my help. Also draw out the spear and stop those who pursue me. Say to my soul, I am your salvation.” See now, David is in a time of doubt. David doesn’t say that assurance is such that I could never doubt. David understood what the standards we just read said: that there are times when we may doubt what we have. It’s not wrong to doubt.

David was, you know, greatly beloved by God. He was a man after God’s own heart. And yet David, this exemplar of faith to us, himself has doubts. But David knows where to turn in those doubts. He knows that first of all, he’s not to rest in doubt. He wants to move into greater assurance of his salvation, of his right standing with God, and of God’s deliverance for him, right? He begins by doubting, but he knows that doubt’s supposed to be relieved.

And he knows who to turn to relieve that doubt. He looks to the promise-keeping God, and he looks to God alone as the one to assure him that indeed God is going to save him. “Say to my soul, I am your salvation.” David delights to hear the promises of God. And we can read those promises in the scriptures.

Prayer. Prayer is what David is doing here. And when we doubt, we can pray this way. Yeah, I know I doubt. I know that doesn’t mean I’ve been thrown off forever from you. I know that David doubted. But I also know that David wasn’t content with doubt. He wants to move toward assurance, fuller assurance. And to do that, he prays to God, to the one from whom—who is the promise-keeping God and whose promise is assurance of salvation. So in our prayers, we reach out to the God whose Spirit is to witness in the context of our lives that he is indeed our salvation.

Now notice also that David doesn’t say to “our souls, I am your salvation.” David knows that there are general promises to these classes of people I talked about before. And that’s good. That’s the beginning place. But David isn’t content with that. He moves on to look specifically for his own personal individual assurance from God. And that’s perfectly legitimate. And in fact, I would say it’s an obligation of us when we doubt to engage in this sort of prayer: “Lord God, say to my soul, to me, not to the church in general. Say to my soul that you indeed are my salvation.”

You see, so David is an example. We look to the promise-keeping God. God is the source of assurance.

But secondly, we have the assurance of the Spirit’s witness. Here in Romans chapter 8, we read, you know, various asurances of the Spirit’s witness to us. We’re referred to in the Bible as brothers. “So then, brothers,” Paul says, talking to them about the need for assurance and the Spirit doing that to us. He says that we are now sons of God. We’re referred to as children of God and heirs. Verse 16: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit of what? That we’re children of God. That we’re heirs of God.”

And you see the third thing. In verse 17: “If we’re heirs with Christ, then we’re also heirs, provided we suffer with him.” The assurance that the Holy Spirit brings to us is an assurance that we’re children. That because we’re children, we inherit the whole world, but we also share in the sufferings of Christ. So our doubt, our sufferings are not outside of the will of God. Somehow the Spirit of God assures us. It is the evidence of the Spirit of God that takes this promise-keeping God’s promises, makes them personal and individual to us, and tells us that’s what he is going to do for us.

So we have the asurances of the promise-keeping God. The assurance of the Spirit’s witness in the context of our heart.

Now the Spirit speaks by means of the word. This is what the Reformers always said. Again, this is where we’ve slipped. We think that the Spirit speaks in kind of strange ways, ecstatic utterances, apart from the word of God. It’s like the word is the actual truth of God, and then the Spirit’s the subjective truth. All that’s holy baloney. That’s wrong. The Spirit first of all wrote the word, right? Spirit-empowered men wrote this word. And the Spirit speaks through that word. The Spirit takes the word of God and writes it upon our hearts.

So how does the Spirit speak to you assurance? Yeah, there’s this subjective element—our heart testifying within us—but the Spirit speaks by means of the word. And this very text contains the Spirit’s asurances to you that you’re brothers, sons, children of God and heirs.

The Spirit speaks through the word. Secondly, the Spirit speaks through the community. If a man isolates himself from community, he will not hear the Spirit working through other men’s voices to tell him, “Yeah, sure. We encourage each other in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ.” You know, again, here we sort of think the modern world is all individualism. The church is an institution that has been jettisoned. It’s all about each of us individually. And so our assurance has to be individual. The Spirit’s got to speak through some kind of feeling or vision or whatever it is.

But the scriptures say that the Spirit speaks through the word, and the Spirit speaks. We can use grace-giving words to one another. The Spirit speaks in the context of community. This afternoon, you’re going to be built up in the assurance of your salvation by being in community. “Forced” fellowship this afternoon with other believers. We need to force ourselves to fellowship, don’t we? I do. The older we get, we kind of tend to get tired or we sort of, “I don’t know.” But God says it’s really important to attend to community because the Spirit of God ministers in these communities. And I always leave these things refreshed in the Lord and encouraged.

The Spirit assures us, but he assures us by means of the word and by means of the church. And then also, the Spirit moves us in terms of the sacraments.

The Heidelberg Catechism, question 69, says this: “How art thou admonished and assured by holy baptism that the one sacrifice of Christ on the cross is of real advantage to thee?” The answer is: “That Christ appointed the external washing with water, adding thereto this promise: that I am as certainly washed by his blood and Spirit from all the pollution of the soul—that is, from all my sins—as I am washed externally with water by which the filthiness of the body is commonly washed away.”

In question 71 it says: “Where does he promise that?” And the answer is: “In the institution of baptism, he says, ‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’ ‘He that believes and is baptized shall be saved. He that believes not shall be damned.’ This promise is also repeated where the scripture calls baptism the washing of regeneration and the washing away of sins.”

So the historic witness of the church is that the Holy Spirit speaks to us by means of baptism to give us assurance. As certainly the water came upon us, so surely the Holy Spirit cleansed us from all our filthiness. They say the same thing about the Lord’s Supper. Lord’s Day 28, question 75: “How art thou admonished and assured in the Lord’s Supper that thou art a partaker of that one sacrifice of Christ accomplished on the cross?”

And they say the same thing. “Well, Jesus has promised things to me. He’s promised—we read first that his body was offered and broken on the cross for me, and his blood shed for me, as certainly as I see with my eyes the bread of the Lord broken for me and the cup communicated to me. And further, that he feeds and nourishes my soul to everlasting life with his crucified body and shed blood as assuredly as I receive from the hands of the minister and taste with my mouth the bread and cup of the Lord as certain signs of the body and blood of Christ.”

So the Holy Spirit, in his word, promises to give assurance through one’s baptism and to give assurance through participation in the Lord’s Supper. If we’ve not suspended you from the table, don’t you do it. If you’ve got sin that needs to be addressed, talk to us about it. But if the elders say to you, externally to you, the Spirit of God says, “We know your life. We know you love the Lord Jesus Christ. We know you’re loving the brethren, the people of God. We know that you have faith in Jesus. We know you’re committed to Christ’s kingdom. Take this Supper.”

Then you can rest assured by the Spirit of God, not by the hands of men. The Spirit of God says, “As surely as you eat this bread and drink this cup, with the permission of the ministers of this church, you can believe that you are assured of the faith that you have in Jesus, of your right standing.” It should build your assurance.

So the Spirit speaks through the word. The Spirit speaks through the community. The Spirit speaks through the sacraments.

And then third: So we got the promises of God. The promises of God come to us by means of the Spirit who ministers these asurances to us.

And then the third aspect of assurance is the assurance of our own witness. We are told in Romans 8 that we are to put to death the deeds of the body, that we’re to be led or governed by the Spirit, and we’re to suffer with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, the Westminster standards say something very odd in their next section of the Catechism on assurance. Let me read this to you: “This certainty of assurance is not a brute or bare conjectural and probable persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope, but an infallible assurance of faith founded on the blood and righteousness of Christ.” And it goes on to say some more things, and you can read it later on.

Years ago I talked to Greg Bahnsen. They were talking about trying to build denominations that would affirm both the continental standards and the three forms of the Island Reformer standards of the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. And Greg said, “Well, there’s a big problem trying to do that because the Westminster says we can have infallible assurance. This is differentiated. The Belgian Confession, Heidelberg Catechism doesn’t really say a lot about assurance. We just read the two references to it, and that’s it. But the Westminster divines thought it important to spend a whole section of the Confession dealing with assurance.

And not only do they say that you have assurance—you have some degree of assurance. If you don’t have some degree of assurance, you don’t have faith because faith is belief in the promises of God. And not only can you have assurance, but you can actually attain to infallible assurance, really strong assurance, full assurance of faith. We read in the New Testament.

Now, that’s an important development in Reformed theology. A good one. Why? Because what it tells us is that we are not to be satisfied with a minimum assurance, with a little bit of assurance and a lot of doubt. We are supposed to actively pursue infallible assurance, great assurance, full assurance. We have an obligation then to attend to the secondary means whereby assurance is given to us. And we’ve already talked about some of them: the word, prayer, the Psalms, the love of the brothers, a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit, being led and governed by the Spirit, ministering that word in our lives.

We have a positive obligation to develop in that manner. We are told in Second Peter 1, verse 10: “Be even more diligent to make your call and election sure. Not probable. Not a little bit assured, but to make your calling and election sure. Sure. If you do these things, you shall never stumble. An entrance will be supplied to you. For this reason, I’ll not be negligent to remind you always of these things.” He’s saying you have an obligation.

We are commanded. The Westminster divines saw this. And they talked about two different kinds of assurance. And the secondary assurance—a full assurance, what they call an infallible assurance. We argue with the word—but a strong assurance. We could say this is to be sought for by us.

So today’s sermon is a sermon of comfort, reminding you that you are children of God. But it’s also the good news of that which elicits a response from us to attend to the secondary means whereby assurance is built up and established.

God doesn’t want weak Christians. We think of spirituality as weakness. It is not. In Romans 8, we’re not supposed to have the slavish fear in us anymore. We now have the Spirit of God witnessing assurance. And that assurance makes us strong and powerful in the Lord Jesus Christ. And we’re supposed to work toward that end. We’re supposed to apply ourselves to the word of God. If you don’t read the word and have doubts, don’t come to me crying about it.

Well, I’ll encourage you. I’m sympathetic. I’m empathetic with these things. But I will encourage you not to seek assurance apart from the word. And if you don’t get together with other Christians and love them actively, I’m going to tell you, “Well, I’m sorry you’re doubting, but the way to get more assurance of your salvation is to serve brothers and sisters in the Lord.” That’s what God says.

And if you come to me saying, “I’m not quite certain of my salvation. I have lack of assurance,” I’m going to tell you: “Do you pray to God? Do you cry out to him as David did? Tell me you are my salvation.” You see, if we attend to the secondary means—prayer, the scriptures, loving the brothers, a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit—then we’re going to build this infallible assurance.

If, on the other hand, and the standards go on to talk about this—they say, “Well, sometimes, you know, it goes away, not because of our sin, just because God withdraws his presence.” Why does he do that? Because he wants to have us labor and endeavor for fuller assurance by taking his means.

On the other hand, we undermine our assurance when we sin, when we grieve the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit’s job is to be a strengthener, encourager, comforter to us of assurance, and it is, then when we grieve the Holy Spirit, we’re grieving the source of our assurance of salvation. You see, so positively, the idea of infallible assurance is a goad and a prick to us to not be satisfied with where we’re at now, but to press on.

Paul had it. He had no doubt that if he were to die that night, if you know, if death just robbed him of everything here, he’d be present with Christ. Do you have that assurance? I bet you don’t. I bet you’re mostly assured. And you try to gin up some optimism about it. But that’s not what I’m asking you to do. I’m asking you to attend to the secondary means of putting away the sin that eats away at assurance and to put on reading the Bible, prayer, loving the brothers, attending to the sacraments of Christ, and being part of the church.

This is the means whereby we grow in infallible assurance.

Now, it’s important. It’s important for your own well-being. It’s important because, you know, it’s—I want you to feel happy. I want you to feel comforted today. I want you to know that Jesus is with you and that he loves you. I want all that stuff for you. But it’s important also because Romans 8 goes on to talk about what this assurance is given to us for.

And as I said earlier, it’s not given just so that we feel good. God loves us. He wants us to feel good. He wants us to do that. But he goes on to say this: after giving us these asurances in the first part of Romans 8: “I consider the sufferings of this present age are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God.”

He’s saying we have not revealed who we are yet. We have not moved in the context of assurance to be strengthened and strong enough not to be fearful about who we are as Christians. We still have a little bit of the mask on us. We still have a little bit of the, you know, fake stuff on us so the world won’t see who we really are. The creation groans for you to come to a fuller assurance of your faith, that you will have the courage and conviction to speak into this world and to remove the groaning of the creation under the horrible tyranny of the growing coercion of the state and man.

That’s what’s going on. And Paul tells them, “I didn’t give you the doctrine of assurance just to make you feel good. I gave it to you so that you could, as your work in progress, change the world, so that you could conquer.”

I mentioned this last week: center of the first commandment section of Deuteronomy—transition from death to life through the death and resurrection of the high priest. And as soon as he tells them about the great stuff and Moses interceding, he immediately says, “Go conquer.” He gives them assurance of the death and resurrection of the high priest through the Levites ministering to them, through Moses interceding for them. At the heart of the first commandment section of Deuteronomy is assurance by God that they’ve been moved from wrath, from curse or curse to blessing, from wrath to love. But it’s to the end that they would then conquer.

That’s what’s going on in Romans 8. Assurance of salvation is not some comfort-giving doctrine if by that we mean comfort to let us alone in our inactivity for Christ. It is just the reverse. It goes on to talk here. That indeed we read that verse 21: that creation itself will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Oregon will be delivered from the coercion of the civil state and the tyranny of it into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

For that purpose, God assures you that you can know that you know that you know that you know that Jesus Christ is your Savior. You head for an eternal home. You are saved. You are empowered by the Holy Ghost. The Holy Spirit witnesses to you that you are fully assured. You’re children of God. You can cry out with certitude, “Abba, Father,” to the end that you might then go into this world and push back the tyranny of men, push back the effects of the fall.

Paul says we’re to be led by the Spirit to put to death the deeds of the body. He wasn’t a Gnostic. He wasn’t a Greek philosopher. He didn’t mean the deeds of a single body. He meant put to death the sinfulness of humanity. The body represented the whole. And the body of humanity today is sinful. And we are called to be led and governed by the Spirit, assured by him, so that we might aggressively press the crown rights of Jesus Christ in every area of life and thought.

This is the biblical doctrine of assurance of salvation.

Let us pray. Father God, we thank you. Forgive us for our weakness, for our cowardice, and for not turning to you in our weakness, our doubt, and our cowardice, and to the means that you have so clearly given us to build up our confidence of your love. We pray, Lord God, that we would commit ourselves afresh today to diligently seek after, to add to the faith that you’ve given us all these other things that will provide for us assurance before you that strengthens and encourages us to take the message of Christ into every part of the created order.

We thank you, Lord God, for your great love for us, for your assurance of our salvation, and that assurance is tied to the inevitable assurance that the world will indeed be conquered by Christianity. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.