Devotional 91: The Possibility of Assurance: Believers May Be Certain

The Confession Read

Although hypocrites and other unregenerate men may vainly deceive themselves with false hopes and carnal presumptions of being in the favor of God, and estate of salvation (which hope of theirs shall perish): yet such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus, and love him in sincerity, endeavouring 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 glory of God, which hope shall never make them ashamed.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 18, Section 1

Introduction

There are questions the natural man never asks. He does not lie awake wondering whether he is in a state of grace, for grace is a currency he does not trade in and a country he has never visited. But let the Spirit of God quicken a soul, let the law do its convicting work, let the beauty of Christ appear to the eye of newborn faith, and a new question rises with the sun each morning: Am I truly His? Is my faith genuine, or have I only persuaded myself that I believe? The question is not academic. It is the ache of every pilgrim who has looked within and found so much remaining sin, who has compared the flicker of his own love with the blaze of Christ's and wondered whether the spark is fire at all. The Westminster Divines, having established in Chapter 17 that those whom God has accepted in the Beloved can neither totally nor finally fall away, now turn to an equally urgent question: may a believer know, in this present life, that he is among that number? May assurance be had this side of glory? And if so, upon what ground does it rest, and by what marks may it be distinguished from the false confidence of the hypocrite? Every system of theology must answer these questions, and the answer given reveals more about that system than its exponents sometimes realize. Rome, at the Council of Trent, anathematized the notion that a believer could be certain of his salvation apart from a special revelation. The Arminian, making final perseverance depend upon the continued fidelity of the human will, can offer no more than a hopeful perhaps. The antinomian, divorcing assurance from sanctification, offers a confidence as hollow as the painted fruit that hangs in a still-life and nourishes no one. Against all these errors, the Confession sets a careful, pastoral, profoundly biblical doctrine: assurance is possible, it is desirable, it rests upon solid ground, and it bears fruit in a life of love and sincere obedience. But the Confession does not begin with assurance. It begins with its counterfeit, and the order is instructive. Before the Divines tell us what true assurance is, they tell us what it is not. They clear the ground of the weeds before they plant the seed, because a man who mistakes a weed for a flower will cultivate the wrong thing and starve in the midst of his garden. The first half of this section is a warning; the second half is a promise. And the warning makes the promise shine the brighter, as a black velvet cloth sets off a diamond.

Scripture Foundation

The apostle John writes his first epistle with a stated purpose, and it is one of the most pastorally significant statements in all of Scripture: \"These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God\" (1 John 5:13). Two observations follow. First, John writes to those who already believe, \"unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God,\" and yet his purpose is that they may know they have eternal life. Faith and assurance are not identical. A man may possess the thing without possessing the knowledge that he possesses it. The child may be an heir without yet understanding his inheritance. The epistle is written, in part, to close that gap, to bring the believer's consciousness into alignment with his condition, to make the subjective experience of assurance correspond to the objective reality of grace. Second, the Greek verb translated \"know\" is eidēte, from oida, a word that carries the sense of absolute, settled knowledge: the kind of knowing that rests its weight upon a thing and finds it solid. John does not write that we may hope or suspect that we have eternal life; he writes that we may know it. And he writes this not to apostles or martyrs, but to ordinary believers — men and women tempted by false teachers, divided by schism, and struggling with the ordinary difficulties of the Christian life. If assurance were reserved for the spiritual elite, John's stated purpose would be a mockery. The very existence of 1 John is the New Testament's warrant for the doctrine this section teaches: assurance is for ordinary Christians. The apostle Paul, writing to the Romans, traces assurance to its deepest root: \"For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God\" (Romans 8:15-16). Here is a double testimony. There is the witness of our own spirit: the consciousness that we trust Christ, that we love His people, that we grieve over our sin, that we long for holiness. This is a real witness, and a necessary one, but standing alone it is insufficient, for the human heart is deceitful and our self-assessments are liable to error. But joined to our spirit's witness is the witness of the Holy Spirit Himself: to pneuma (the Spirit) bears witness with (symmarturei) our spirit. The preposition syn in the compound verb suggests a co-witness, two testimonies converging upon the same truth. The Spirit does not whisper new information into the ear of the soul; He takes the promises of the gospel and applies them with power, making them more than mere propositions for the mind to assent to — making them realities in which the heart rests. He shines a light upon the work of Christ and upon the marks of grace in the soul, and by that light the believer sees what was always true and rejoices in what he now knows. The text adds one further detail of surpassing tenderness: the cry of the adopted child is \"Abba, Father.\" The Aramaic Abba is the intimate address of a child to his father. Paul preserves this word in a Greek letter because it had become a treasured inheritance of the early church, the very syllable with which Jesus Himself addressed the Father in Gethsemane. The Spirit who indwells the believer teaches him to approach God not as a supplicant before a distant judge, but as a child running into his father's arms. And this cry is itself a ground of assurance. The man who can sincerely cry \"Abba\" has within him the Spirit of adoption, and the Spirit of adoption is not given to the world. The apostle Peter addresses the same theme from the side of human responsibility: \"Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall\" (2 Peter 1:10). The logic of the verse is worth tracing. Peter does not command his readers to make their calling and election sure to God; that is already sure, fixed in the eternal decree, written in the Lamb's book of life before the foundation of the world. He commands them to make it sure to themselves. And the means by which this subjective assurance is cultivated is the diligent pursuit of the graces enumerated in the preceding verses: faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness, and charity. Assurance grows in the soil of sanctification. It is not earned by good works, for the root of all good works is union with Christ, which is itself a gift. But it is ordinarily confirmed by them, as the health of a tree is confirmed by its fruit. The believer who \"doeth these things\" finds his calling and election become increasingly evident to his own conscience, while the believer who neglects them drifts into doubt and darkness. The author of Hebrews exhorts his readers: \"Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water\" (Hebrews 10:22). The expression \"full assurance of faith\" translates plērophoria pisteōs, a phrase that conveys the idea of a ship under full sail, a confidence that fills the soul and carries it forward. The ground of this assurance is not the believer's own worthiness but the sprinkled heart and the washed body: the cleansing that comes through the blood of Christ, signified and sealed in baptism. Assurance does not look primarily inward to the quality of one's faith but outward to the object of faith. The heart is sprinkled; the guilt is removed. The body is washed; the believer is consecrated. Upon this objective foundation, the subjective confidence may safely rest. And the exhortation is to draw near: assurance is not a state into which the believer passively drifts but a privilege toward which he is to press, a throne of grace to which he is invited to come boldly, not because he is bold by nature but because the blood of Christ has made him bold by right. One further Old Testament text grounds the doctrine in the experience of Job: \"For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God\" (Job 19:25-26). The Hebrew is famously difficult at points, but the substance is unmistakable. Job, stripped of children, wealth, and health, sitting in ashes and scraping his sores with a potsherd, surrounded by friends who accused him of secret sin, nevertheless rises to a confession of confidence that has few parallels in Scripture. \"I know,\" he says, not \"I hope\" or \"I wish\" or \"I tend to think.\" And what he knows is that his Redeemer (his Go'el, his kinsman-redeemer) lives, and will stand at last upon the earth, and will be seen by Job's own eyes. Job's assurance was grounded not in his ruinous circumstances nor his veering feelings, but in the character and promise of his Redeemer. The same ground undergirds every believer's assurance: not the shifting sand of inward experience but the solid rock of the Redeemer who lives and will be seen, with these very eyes, in this very flesh, at the last day.

What the Divines Meant

The structure of this section is a careful diptych: two panels, contrasting counterfeits with the genuine, setting falsehood and truth side by side that the one may illuminate the other. Every phrase has been weighed, every term selected with the precision of men who had pastored souls entangled in both errors: the presumption that assumes salvation without evidence, and the despair that cannot believe salvation is possible. The first panel describes those who may \"vainly deceive themselves with false hopes and carnal presumptions.\" The Divines use three qualifiers, each deliberate. \"Vainly\": the deception is empty, producing nothing of lasting value. \"False hopes\": a hope not grounded in the promises of God is a paper anchor that will not hold when the storm rises. \"Carnal presumptions\": the error arises not from the Spirit's illumination but from the reasoning of the flesh, which judges by outward appearances and mistakes common grace for saving grace. Who are these self-deceived? The Confession identifies two categories: \"hypocrites and other unregenerate men.\" The hypocrite is the man whose religion is entirely external, a performance enacted before men but not before God, a mask worn so long that the wearer has forgotten it is a mask. The \"other unregenerate men\" are those who have not yet been born again, who may possess a notional faith, a historical assent to the truths of Christianity, but who have never been united to Christ by a living faith. To both, the Confession delivers a solemn verdict in parenthesis: \"which hope of theirs shall perish.\" The verb shall perish is absolute. There is no qualification, no exception, no suggestion that a false hope might somehow metamorphose into a true one. The hope that is not grounded in Christ perishes, as a house built on sand perishes when the flood comes, and its perishing is final. Why do the Divines begin here? Because the great hindrance to the right preaching of assurance is the fear that it will produce presumption. If we tell men they may be certain of their salvation, will they not take license to sin? Will not the carnal professor seize upon the doctrine as a pillow for his slumbering conscience? The Divines meet this objection at the threshold by making an absolute distinction. Assurance is not for everyone who claims it. It is the privilege of a particular people, marked by particular graces, and the man who claims assurance without those graces deceives himself. The doctrine of assurance, rightly taught, does not produce presumption; it exposes it. The light that guides the pilgrim blinds the impostor. The second panel opens with a strong adversative: \"yet.\" Against the dark background of false hopes and carnal presumptions, the Confession sets the bright reality of genuine assurance. The subjects of this assurance are described by three participles, each identifying a mark of the true believer. \"Such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus\": the adverb truly distinguishes living faith from dead orthodoxy, the faith that receives Christ as He is offered in the gospel from the faith that merely assents to propositions about Him. \"And love him in sincerity\": the love that answers Christ's love with a genuine, though imperfect, affection of the heart, a love that grieves when He is dishonoured and rejoices when He is exalted. \"Endeavouring to walk in all good conscience before him\": here is the syllogismus practicus, the practical syllogism by which the believer reasons backward from the fruit to the root. A life marked by sincere, though imperfect, obedience to the commands of God is a ground of assurance, not because obedience merits salvation but because it evidences the presence of the Spirit who alone produces such obedience. The promise made to such persons is staggering in its scope: they \"may, in this life, be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace, and may rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, which hope shall never make them ashamed.\" Every word counts. \"In this life\": not merely at the hour of death, not reserved for the beatific vision, but here and now, in the midst of trial and temptation and remaining corruption. \"Certainly assured\": the knowledge is not conjectural, not merely probable, but certain, resting upon divine testimony. \"Rejoice in the hope of the glory of God\": assurance is not a cold intellectual conviction but a warm, heart-expanding joy, a foretaste of heaven itself. \"Which hope shall never make them ashamed\": the final clause echoes Romans 5:5 and drives a stake through the heart of every doubt: this hope will not disappoint, will not prove false, will not leave the believer exposed to the mockery of the world and the accusations of his own conscience at the last day. The Divines were writing in conscious opposition to the decree of the Council of Trent, which had declared in its Sixth Session that \"no one can know with a certainty of faith, which cannot be subject to error, that he has obtained the grace of God.\" If justification is a process requiring cooperation with grace, certainty is impossible, for one can never know whether one has cooperated sufficiently. The Reformation answered with justification by faith alone: if Christ's righteousness is imputed to the believer in a moment, the ground of assurance lies outside the believer, in the finished work of Christ. Rome's doctrine of assurance was a doctrine of doubt; the Confession's is a doctrine of peace. At the same time, the Divines were guarding against the opposite error that would soon manifest itself among the sects of the English Revolution: the antinomian claim that assurance is a direct, unmediated revelation, independent of the marks of grace in the life, a voice from heaven that says \"thy sins are forgiven\" without any regard to whether the professed believer walks in obedience. Against this enthusiasm, the Confession insists that assurance is ordinarily cultivated through the means of grace (the Word, the sacraments, prayer) and confirmed by the evidences of a changed life. The Spirit does not ordinarily bear witness apart from His own work in the soul. The same Spirit who testifies to our adoption is the Spirit who produces the fruit of adoption: love, joy, peace, and the desire to walk in all good conscience before God.

Theological Depth

Calvin, in the third book of his Institutes, devotes sustained attention to the nature of faith and the possibility of assurance. For Calvin, faith and assurance are not two separate graces but two aspects of the same grace. Faith is a firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence toward us, founded upon the freely given promise in Christ, revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit; not a bare assent to abstract truth but a personal appropriation, a conviction that the promises are true \"for me.\" Calvin acknowledges that this certainty is often assaulted by doubt; the believer's faith is not the unclouded confidence of the angel but the embattled confidence of the pilgrim. Yet the essence of faith remains a sure and steadfast trust, and where that trust is absent, faith itself is absent. The crucial instrument by which this certainty is produced is, for Calvin, the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, the testimonium internum Spiritus Sancti. The same Spirit who inspired the Scriptures illuminates the mind of the believer to recognize their divine origin, and the same Spirit applies the promises of the gospel to the heart with such power that the believer can no more doubt their truth than he can doubt the existence of the sun in the sky. Calvin recognizes that the hypocrite may experience something that resembles this certainty: a temporary illumination, a flash of joy, a fleeting confidence that fades when trial comes. But the true witness of the Spirit produces a lasting conviction, one that endures through temptation and even through the darkness of desolation, because it is grounded not in the believer's variable feelings but in the unchanging promise of God. Thomas Brooks, in his treatise Heaven on Earth, sets out a catalogue of the differences between true assurance and its counterfeits. True assurance, he observes, is ordinarily the fruit of a long and careful observation of the work of grace in the soul, not given at the moment of conversion but growing over time as the believer watches the Spirit's operations in his heart. False assurance, by contrast, is hasty; the stony-ground hearer receives the word with joy immediately but has no root. True assurance humbles the soul, making it more tender and watchful; false assurance puffs up, making the professor careless and secure in his sins. Brooks insists there is a difference between the want of assurance and the want of grace: a man may have grace and yet lack the comfortable sense of it. The remedy is not to abandon the means of grace but to press into them more earnestly, plead the promises with greater importunity, and wait upon the Spirit whose office it is to bear witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. William Guthrie, whose little book The Christian's Great Interest has been prized by believers for more than three centuries, approaches assurance from the angle of self-examination. The chief mark, for Guthrie, is the believer's closing with Christ as He is offered in the gospel: not merely assenting to the truth about Christ, but actually receiving Him, resting upon Him, taking Him as Prophet, Priest, and King. Where this closing with Christ is present, there is saving faith, whether the believer feels the comfort of it or not. Guthrie's pastoral wisdom is evident in his treatment of the believer who cannot find assurance. He does not counsel such a one to abandon hope, but to distinguish between the direct act of faith (looking to Christ and resting upon Him) and the reflex act of faith (looking back upon one's own faith and concluding from it that one is in a state of grace). The direct act may be present and saving when the reflex act is impossible, as when a man looks through a telescope at the sun and sees nothing but the sun, though he cannot at that moment reflect upon the act of seeing. The believer who cannot say \"I know I am in Christ\" may nevertheless say \"I come to Christ; I rest on Christ; I desire Christ above all things.\" And in that coming, that resting, that desiring, there is true faith, even if the reflex knowledge of it is for a season withdrawn. A. A. Hodge, expounding this section of the Confession, emphasizes the distinction between the ground of assurance and the evidences of assurance. The ground (its sole and sufficient foundation) is the promise of God in the gospel, sealed by the Spirit and received by faith. The evidences (the marks of grace in the life, the fruit of the Spirit, the testimony of a good conscience) are not the ground but the confirmation. A building rests upon its foundation, not upon the scaffolding that surrounds it during construction. Yet the scaffolding serves a real purpose, bearing witness that the building is under construction, that the Spirit is at work. The believer who neglects to examine the evidences cuts himself off from a chief means by which the Spirit confirms assurance. And the believer who mistakes the evidences for the foundation builds his house upon sand, for the evidences will always be imperfect and variable, as unreliable as the human heart.

Puritan Application

First, let this section teach you the difference between the foundation of your hope and the comfort of it. The foundation is Christ alone, received by faith alone, on the authority of the promise alone. No sin, no weakness, no fluctuation of your feelings can shake that foundation if you are truly resting upon it, for Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. But the comfort of your hope (the felt sense of assurance, the joy of knowing you are His) may rise and fall, and ordinarily does. There are seasons when the pilgrim walks in the light of God's countenance and could scale any wall; and there are seasons when clouds cover the sun and he gropes in grey twilight, uncertain of his standing. Both seasons belong to the normal Christian life. The absence of felt assurance is not the absence of saving faith. Do not un-Christian yourself because you cannot at this moment find the evidences; cling to Christ in the dark, and the light will dawn again in His time. Second, let this section make you diligent in the great work of self-examination. The apostle's command is plain: \"Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves\" (2 Corinthians 13:5). This is not an invitation to morbid introspection. The man who spends every hour dissecting his own motives and measuring his own affections will soon find himself staring into an abyss, for the human heart is deep, and the more one gazes into its darkness the less one sees. But the measured, periodic, Scripture-governed examination of the soul is a duty and a means of grace. Ask yourself, not whether you have attained perfection (you have not) but whether the direction of your life is Godward. Do you trust Christ, however weakly? Do you love His people, however imperfectly? Do you grieve over your sin, not merely because it threatens your peace but because it dishonours your Saviour? Are you endeavouring to walk in all good conscience before Him, however many times you stumble? These are the marks by which the Spirit ordinarily confirms assurance, and the soul that can answer them with a sincere, though trembling, \"yes\" has grounds for confidence that are more solid than the mountain's roots. Third, let this section unmask the false assurance that is the bane of the professing church. There is a confidence that comes from ignorance: the man who has never examined himself, never tested his faith, never compared his life with the standard of Scripture, and yet assumes that all is well. There is a confidence that comes from comparison: the man who looks at the openly profane and congratulates himself that he is not as other men are, forgetting that the Pharisee compared himself with the publican and went down to his house unjustified. There is a confidence that comes from emotional experience: the man who once wept at a sermon and concludes from that feeling, perhaps decades old, that he must be regenerate. And there is a confidence that comes from doctrinal orthodoxy: the man who can recite the creed and defend the five points and yet has never closed with Christ. All these are built upon sand, and the storm that is coming will sweep them away. Examine your foundation, beloved. Better to lose a false peace now than to hear those dreadful words at the last day: \"I never knew you: depart from me\" (Matthew 7:23). Fourth, let this section teach you the right relationship between assurance and sanctification. The two are distinct: assurance is the knowledge that we are saved; sanctification is the process by which we are made holy. Yet they are intimately connected. The man who grows in grace ordinarily grows in assurance, because the evidences become clearer, the fruit more abundant, the conscience more tender, and the Spirit's testimony more distinct. But the assured believer does not thereby outgrow his need for holiness. On the contrary, he serves not from the slavish fear of losing his salvation but from the filial love of a son who knows his Father's heart. \"Make your calling and election sure,\" Peter exhorts. And how? By adding to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity (2 Peter 1:5-7). Assurance is not the destination; it is the provisions for the journey. The man who says \"I am assured, therefore I may relax my vigilance\" has never known true assurance, for true assurance always produces watchfulness, always quickens diligence, always inflames love. Fifth, let this section fill your mouth with praise and your heart with boldness at the throne of grace. What the Confession holds out to you is not a distant possibility but a present privilege. You may, in this life, be certainly assured that you are in a state of grace. The same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells in you, and He is not silent. The same Word that declared the heavens into existence declares the forgiveness of your sins, and it does not lie. The same Christ who prayed for Peter that his faith would not fail prays for you, and the Father always hears the Son. Why, then, should you go mourning all your days? Why should you hang your harp upon the willows when Zion's songs are yours by covenant right? If you have truly believed in the Lord Jesus, if you love Him in sincerity, if you are endeavouring to walk in all good conscience before Him, then take the comfort that belongs to you. It is not presumption to believe what God has said. It is not pride to rest in what Christ has done. It is the obedience of faith, the most fundamental act of the new nature, to take God at His word and to rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, a hope that shall never, never make you ashamed.

Prayer

Almighty God, who hast caused all holy Scripture to be written for our learning, and who hast declared through Thy servant John that these things are written that we might know we have eternal life, we bless Thee for the gift of assurance and for the solid ground upon which it rests. We thank Thee that our confidence is not built upon the shifting sands of our own righteousness but upon the finished work of Thy Son, whose blood speaks better things than the blood of Abel. We thank Thee for the Spirit of adoption, who beareth witness with our spirit that we are Thy children, and who teaches us to cry, Abba, Father, with a confidence that the world can neither give nor take away. We confess, with shame and sorrow, that we have often lived far below our privileges. We have listened to the whisper of the enemy rather than the testimony of the Spirit. We have gazed upon our sins until they loomed larger than our Saviour. We have examined ourselves until we saw nothing but corruption, and we have neglected to look again to Christ, in whom all fullness dwells. Forgive us, O Lord, for the dishonour we have done to Thy promises by our unbelief, and for the gloom we have spread over our own souls by our refusal to take Thee at Thy word. Grant us, we beseech Thee, the grace of a well-grounded assurance — not the false confidence of the hypocrite, built upon ignorance and carnal presumption, but the true confidence of the child of God, built upon the promise of the gospel, sealed by the Spirit, and confirmed by the evidences of a life that, however imperfectly, loves Thee and endeavours to walk before Thee in all good conscience. Let us not rest in any false peace, and let us not refuse the true peace that Thou holdest out to us in the gospel. Give us wisdom to distinguish between the foundation of our hope and the evidences of it, and let us cling to the foundation even when the evidences are obscured. And for those of Thy children who walk in darkness and have no light, who long for assurance but cannot find it, who cry out with Job for a glimpse of their Redeemer's face and hear only silence in reply — we pray Thy special comfort for them. Let not the enemy persuade them that they are cast off. Let not their own hearts condemn them more severely than Thy Word condemns them. Speak peace to their troubled souls, O Thou who didst speak peace to the stormy sea, and let the light of Thy countenance break through the clouds that hide Thee from their sight. Restore unto them the joy of Thy salvation, and uphold them with Thy free Spirit. Bring us all at last to that blessed state where faith shall give way to sight and hope to possession and assurance to the beatific vision, where we shall see Thee as Thou art and know even as we are known, and where no doubt shall ever trouble our peace again. Until that day, keep us in Thy fear, uphold us by Thy grace, and seal us by Thy Spirit unto the day of redemption. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the Author and Finisher of our faith, and who is not ashamed to call us brethren. Amen.