The Sword Room

For the next few days we will be discussing the basics of the Christian life. If you are a new believer these truths will be foundational, and if you have been a Christian for a few years they will serve as a refresher course.

One thing I found to be really important in the weeks and months right after trusting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior was the assurance of my salvation. After the initial joy and excitement of coming to know Him had leveled off and I was faced with the day-by-day experience of living life, I made a disappointing discovery: I still sinned. My old friends would come around and invite me out, and I am sorry to admit that I gave in to my cravings for the joint and the bottle a few times. I was going with a girl who was not a Christian, and there were some obvious problems there until we finally broke things off. When my mom nagged me or my brothers teased me I would still get angry and say rude things to them. Once I called my older brother Tom out into the yard for a fight after an argument.

Satan had a heyday with me. I remember feeling so guilty sometimes, and it seemed like there was a little demon on my shoulder whispering into my ear: And you think you are really forgiven and that if you die you will go to heaven? Come on! If you were really saved and loved Jesus would you be doing all this bad stuff? You’re no Christian! If you are a new believer–or even an old one–you may be able to identify with my story.

Here’s the deal: our flesh wants to think in terms of salvation as something you earn or deserve. But Scripture tells us in several ways that this cannot be. First there is the direct statement of Ephesians 2:8-9: For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. God’s word tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23) and further that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 6:23).

Notice in that last verse that there is a contrast between wages and a gift. Common sense tells you that a wage is something you earn and deserve based on your own efforts. If you worked for a week and your boss handed you your paycheck and said, “Here, this is a gift!” you might be puzzled and even a bit pissed–you earned the wages, and they are not a free gift. On the other hand, you just received gifts at Christmas. Someone else plodded through the hordes of shoppers at the mall, selected your present, wrapped it and put it under the tree. All you did was receive it. Because we are sinners by nature from birth as descendants of Adam and Eve (Romans 5:12), all we can earn by our own efforts is a wage of spiritual death. If we are ever to receive eternal life from God it must come to us in the form of a free gift with no strings attached.

The reason God is able to offer us eternal life as a free gift is that His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, paid the wage of sin and death in our place. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21). Before Jesus gave up His spirit on the cross and breathed His last breath, He said: It is finished (John 19:30). At that instant the debt of every win you would ever commit was paid in full. Three days later Jesus was raised bodily from the dead and He is alive at this moment seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven (1 Corinthians 15:1-5).

As unbelievers we were spiritually dead, which means we possessed no ability to respond to God on our own apart from his grace. We had to be made alive, or born again so that we could understand and believe the good news about Jesus Christ. He had to open our hearts and draw us to Himself. Check out these verses:

And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1).

Most assuredly I say to you, he who hears my word and believes in Him who sent me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life (John 5:24).

No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent me draws him (John 6:44).

Once made alive you were able to meet the one condition of salvation–faith alone in Christ alone.

And so, my dear brother or sister in Christ, God did not save you because of any goodness or righteousness you possessed in yourself or because you somehow wised up and decided to turn your life over to Him. God was looking at you and seeking you out behind the scenes long before you ever thought about Him–literally from before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:1-14). Had God left you to your own devices you would still be walking in darkness. But God loved you with an eternal love, and He reached down and pulled you out of the pit you had dug for yourself and from which you could never be freed apart from His power.

So today rest assured in His power to keep you. Let your trust in Him be the basis of your assurance. For Jesus has promised that no one will be able to pluck you from His Father’s hand (John 10:27-29). Nothing in all creation can separate you from His eternal love (Romans 8:38-39).

Finally, trust His presence in you. Is it your desire to trust Jesus and what He did for you? Do you feel a hunger and thirst for righteousness? These godly desires would not be there if God had not made you alive and implanted them in you. True, the sinful flesh is still residing in you, and it wants to rebel against God. But now there is another more powerful force, the born-again you that is indwelt by God’s Holy Spirit. And that part of you will win out ultimately, even though you should stumble sometimes. Take courage in those godly desires He has given you, for as Paul assures us: Being confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6).

I am starting to wonder more and more if we as Christians do not place too much emphasis on our initial conversion experience as an evidence of salvation. I remember once talking to a missionary who told me he was not sure whether such-and-such a person was really saved because they could not pinpoint a specific moment when they were born again. I happened to know this specific person, and I was aware that he seemed to exhibit a deep living faith in the person and work of Christ. last time I checked the Scripture taught: Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved, not: Pinpoint the precise moment you crossed over from death to life…

Some of us were saved at ages where we remember the experience quite vividly. My wife was very young, and she in fact recalls very little about what was said to her, or what she heard or felt. Does it matter? She believes on the Lord Jesus now. The past no longer exists–what matters most is that we are trusting Christ as Lord and Savior now. And yet I remember many times in my early life as a believer overhearing conversations in which a believer’s salvation was being questioned because they could not pinpoint the moment of their salvation. For example a person would say they were raised in a Christian home and could not remember a time when they did not believe. Someone would raise their eyebrows and say, I don’t believe that person has ever had an experience with the Lord. My question is: how can you or I or any other believer be in a position to make such a statement? When did having an experience–whatever that might mean–become the litmus test of one’s salvation? I think we make way too much of this business of the experience and too little of the presence of faith in the life of the Christian.

The truth is our memory gets distorted with time anyway. I got saved 39 years ago, and to be quite honest with every year that goes by I have a harder time remembering the details of that day. So what–I know Jesus is my Lord and Savior TODAY, and I’m banking on Him all the way. Not only that, but experiences don’t always mean that much. Back during the Jesus Movement I saw scores of kids go forward at Christian concerts and “accept Christ.” Many of them seemed emotionally touched and had tears streaming down their faces. I ran into one of them recently and he is into eastern religion and does not profess faith in Jesus at all. Once a few years back I ran into another such person at a wedding and he was smashed. He said the whole Jesus thing never really took with him, and apparently it didn’t.

Regeneration and sanctification are an ongoing process in which there is growth on many levels. For sure justification is a one-time experience in the life of the believer, but I don’t think the presence of bells and whistles is necessary. Sometimes the Lord gives these cool encounters with Himself, but often it happens like it did for my little brother Chris.

After I got saved I wanted Chris to experience Jesus the same way I did, so I took him with me to a midweek service at a church that was part of what was called the Charismatic Renewal. The singing was quite spirited that night, and the preacher thundered forth. At the end of the service during prayer the crowd broke into a mass tongues-fest. Several girls behind us were weeping and trembling. One was repeating the word dadia, dadia, dadia, dadia, dadia…. I felt something shaking and looked over to see Chris busting a gut laughing.  We cut out of there, and on the way home he mimicked the female glossalist—dadia, dadia, dadia….speaka’ dadia?…speaka’ dadia?…

I gave him a little gospel tract before he went to bed. The next day he got up and gave me the pamphlet and said, “Is that it?” He told me he already knew about the gospel and had recently trusted the Lord himself. I quickly drove him over to the office of a pastor I knew, and it turned out Chris was indeed a believer. He never did have a dramatic experience with the Lord as I had. But I can tell you one thing: I would bet anything that if you called him right now and asked him if he knows he’s saved he would say yes; and he would be basing that assurance on the person and work of Christ. At the end of the day, what else matters?

Listen–if you are trusting the Lord Jesus as your hope of eternal life and it is your desire to love Him and grow in His grace more each day, then call it good.

In a recent comment someone asked how we can truly have assurance of salvation. That is one of the most important questions for the believer, and in addressing it there are two extremes to avoid–both man-centered rather than God-centered and Christ-centered.

First there is the view of assurance promoted by those who believe in what I call decisional regeneration. According to proponents of this view the believer bases his assurance of salvation on the fact that he made a “decision for Christ” at some point in the past by praying a sinners prayer, walking and aisle, filling our a card, raising his hand, or inviting Jesus into his heart. When the believer doubts his salvation he remembers that crucial point in his life when he chose Christ, thereby gaining assurance. The problem with all this is that it results in assurance based on something one has done. In extreme cases you will see professing believers walking for decades in rebellion against the Lord in full assurance that heaven will be their home one day based on having made a decision for Christ years earlier. Such a position ignores the many warnings in Scripture against the deception of living a life of license.

On the other end is the extreme view of perseverance taught by many of the Puritans. Proponents of this view teach that the believer must be constantly taking inventory of his life to be sure he is one of the elect. But how could anyone have assurance of salvation based on his own faith or so-called good works? Such an approach is just as man-centered as in the decisional view.

The answer is to stop basing your assurance of salvation on what you have done or are doing and instead focusing on what God has done and is doing. Here is the kind of evidence in your life that should make you feel secure in the Lord. Are you trusting in Christ alone and His finished work as your only hope of eternal life? Do you really desire to know Christ? Is it your desire to believe and obey His Word? If you can say yes to these questions you need to see the faith, hope, and desire for righteousness as evidence of the Lord’s working in your life. For the truth is that if God was not in you to will and do of His good pleasure none of these things would be present in your life. In your flesh dwells no good thing. Your flesh hates God.

Now it is true that you sin, sometimes repeatedly and grievously. Do you wink at your sin? Do you try to sidestep the word of God and say your denial of biblical truth or disobedience Him is somehow o.k.? Or do you know it is sin? Do you feel guilty and wish you could do better? Do you keep trying even after repeated failure, asking Him for strength to keep going? Again, these are things you would not want to do if God’s Spirit was not in you. Your flesh loves sin and would not feel bad at all about rejecting truth or walking in disobedience. But the Holy Spirit in you is quenched and grieved when you sin, and you are miserable. Again, look at all this as evidence of God’s presence in your life. If it is your desire to trust Christ as your Lord and Savior, to walk in obedience to Him and overcome sin in your life, then you have every reason to rest assured that you are saved–not based on what you are doing, but on what Christ is doing in you.

It’s called walking in the light. If you want more on that google chemotherapy for sin and you will find my recent post on that subject.