Devotional 93: The Attainment of Assurance: Diligence in the Means of Grace

The Confession Read

This infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it: yet, being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation, in the right use of ordinary means, attain thereunto. And therefore it is the duty of every one to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure, that thereby his heart may be enlarged in peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, in love and thankfulness to God, and in strength and cheerfulness in the duties of obedience, the proper fruits of this assurance; so far is it from inclining men to looseness.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 18, Section 3

Introduction

There is a suffering in the Christian life that is scarcely visible from without and yet cuts deeper than any bodily affliction: the suffering of the true believer who cannot find his own name written in the promises. He reads the gospel and sees Christ's beauty shining from every page, but when he turns inward to search for the marks of grace that Section 2 described, he hears only the echo of his own anxiety. He believes, or thinks he believes, but cannot say with the apostle, I know whom I have believed. He loves Christ's people, but wonders whether his love is anything more than natural affection dressed in religious language. He endeavours to walk in all good conscience, but his conscience magnifies his failures and minimises his faint victories. He is a believer without assurance — and his heart is breaking under the weight of the uncertainty. To such a soul this section comes as a balm from the physician's own hand, addressing the question that torments the anxious believer: if assurance is possible, and the marks of grace are present, why do I not possess the comfort of knowing it? Must I conclude I am a hypocrite? Is my faith a delusion because it does not produce certainty? The Westminster Divines answer with a pastoral wisdom that neither dismisses the anguish nor surrenders to despair. They teach that assurance is not the birthright of every newborn infant in Christ: a true believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before its morning dawns upon his soul. And they teach that when it does dawn, it comes not through extraordinary revelation — a voice from heaven, a mystical transport — but through the Spirit's blessing upon the ordinary means: the Word, the sacraments, prayer, and the fellowship of the saints. The road to assurance is not a shortcut; it is the pilgrim path itself, walked with patience and diligence, until the light that was always true becomes, at last, sweetly known.

Scripture Foundation

The apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians, traces the believer's capacity for spiritual knowledge to its divine source: Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God (1 Corinthians 2:12). The verb eidōmen is from the same root as John's great assurance-text, carrying the weight of settled, certain knowledge. The gifts are described by a perfect passive participle, charisthenta: things graciously given and remaining given, unchanged by the recipient's mood. Paul's argument is that the Spirit has been given precisely so that the believer may know these gifts — not merely that they exist in the abstract, but that they belong to him. He is the light by which the soul sees the light that is already there. Yet the Spirit who enables this knowledge does not always confer it at conversion, nor with equal clarity to every believer. The Psalter gives voice to the believer who waits in darkness for a light that has not appeared. Consider the eighty-eighth Psalm, attributed to Heman the Ezrahite, whose song contains no resolution, no turn toward hope. My soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. Lord, why castest thou off my soul? why hidest thou thy face from me? (Psalm 88:3, 6, 14). The psalm ends not with praise but with the declaration, Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness. And yet this psalm is in the Psalter. It is canonised lament. Heman was a believer, a Levite appointed by David to the service of song. His darkness was not the darkness of the unregenerate but of the regenerate who knows the light exists yet cannot find it — whose faith consists, in that hour, precisely in crying out to the God who seems to have hidden His face. The Lord does not cast off such a soul. He has placed its lament in the hymnbook of His church. The prophet Isaiah addresses the same condition from the angle of exhortation: Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God (Isaiah 50:10). Isaiah envisions a person who fears the Lord, obeys His servant, walks in the path of discipleship — and yet walks in darkness with no light. The fear of the Lord and the darkness are not contradictory; they coexist in the same soul. The command is not to examine oneself more rigorously until one finds the hidden spark, nor to abandon hope. It is to trust and to stay — two verbs describing the act of leaning one's full weight upon something outside oneself. Faith can be genuine, active, and saving even when it produces no felt comfort, because the object of faith remains unchanged by the believer's perception of Him. But the Confession does not leave the believer with only the command to wait. It insists that assurance is attainable, and Peter makes its pursuit a duty: Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall: for so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (2 Peter 1:10-11). The verb spoudasate (give diligence) is an aorist imperative carrying the force of urgent, focused effort. The confirmation of one's calling and election is not an optional extra but a duty. The Greek phrase bebaian poieisthai (to make firm or sure) employs a legal term for validating a title-deed. Peter commands his readers to establish beyond reasonable doubt — to their own conscience — that they belong to the number of the called and elect. The means, as the preceding verses make plain, is the diligent cultivation of the graces the Spirit produces. The pursuit of assurance is not a work by which we earn salvation but a work by which we confirm that salvation has already been given. The prophet Isaiah, centuries before the apostles wrote, described the fruit of this diligent pursuit in language drawn from the farm and field: And the work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance for ever (Isaiah 32:17). The Hebrew term translated assurance is betach, a word that denotes security, confidence, a settled trust that is not easily shaken. It is the opposite of panic. It is the opposite of the anxious scanning of the horizon for threats. And Isaiah locates its origin not in a sudden flash of revelation but in the work and the effect of righteousness — a life that has been shaped by the righteousness that comes from God and that produces, over time, a harvest of peace. The metaphor is agricultural: righteousness is sown, cultivated, and in due season yields a crop of quietness and assurance. There is an organic slowness to the process. The farmer does not sow on Monday and harvest on Tuesday. He waits, he tends, he trusts the seasons, and in time the grain appears. So it is with assurance. It is the ripe fruit of a righteousness that has been at work in the soul, not the sudden gift of an extraordinary revelation, but the steady yield of the Spirit's ordinary husbandry. And what is the content of this assurance, when at last it comes? The apostle Paul gives the answer in a doxology that rises from the depths of argument to the heights of adoration: For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39). The Greek perfect participle pepeismai — I am persuaded, I stand persuaded, I have been persuaded and remain so — expresses a settled conviction that no catalogue of created powers can shake. Paul does not say I hope or I suspect or I tend to think. He says I am persuaded, and the persuasion embraces the sum of all possible threats to the believer's security and dismisses them one by one. This is the assurance toward which the believer presses: not a bare intellectual conviction but a persuasion so deep that it can list every conceivable enemy and, having listed them, rest in the unshakeable conviction that none can sever the bond between the soul and the love of God in Christ.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines had already, in Section 2, described the nature of infallible assurance and laid out its threefold ground in the promises of God, the inward evidence of graces, and the testimony of the Spirit. That section, for all its theological precision, raises a pastoral question of the most acute kind: if assurance rests upon such solid ground, and if the Spirit who bears witness is the same Spirit who indwells every true believer, why do so many true believers lack it? Why does the earnest of the inheritance not always produce the conscious comfort of possessing it? Why does the seal of the Spirit not always make its impression felt upon the wax of the heart? The answer that Section 3 provides is at once a comfort to the afflicted and a spur to the negligent. Assurance is not of the essence of faith, but a true believer may wait long — and in that waiting, there is a warfare to be fought, a diligence to be exercised, and a patience to be cultivated. The opening clause of the section is as pastoral as any sentence the Confession contains: This infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith. The phrase essence of faith is a technical term drawn from the scholastic distinction between the esse (the being or essence) of a thing and its bene esse (its well-being or flourishing). Faith, in its essence, is the act of receiving and resting upon Christ alone for salvation as He is offered in the gospel. Where that act is present, saving faith is present, however weak, however assaulted, however clouded by doubt. Assurance is not of the essence of faith but belongs to its well-being, its flourishing, its mature development. A man may truly believe and yet not know that he believes, just as an infant may truly live and yet not know that he lives. The Divines were careful to avoid two equal and opposite errors: the error that makes assurance so essential to faith that a doubting believer cannot be a true believer at all, and the error that makes assurance so incidental to faith that its absence is of no consequence. The truth lies between: assurance is not essential to the existence of faith, but it is essential to the comfort of faith, and the believer is to pursue it with all diligence. What follows from this distinction is a word of hard-won pastoral realism: a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it. The verb wait is not passive; it is the active, sometimes agonised, waiting of the watchman for the morning. The believer who lacks assurance is not to sit idle, resigning himself to perpetual doubt as though doubt were a virtue. He is to wait upon God in the means that God has appointed, and in that waiting he will often find himself in conflict — conflict with the accusations of his own conscience, conflict with the temptations of the evil one who would drive him to despair, conflict with the remaining corruption that clouds his spiritual vision. Some believers, the Divines acknowledge, receive assurance early, perhaps even at the moment of conversion, when the Spirit shines with unusual brightness upon the newly opened eye of faith. Others wait long years, even decades, and only taste the comfort of assurance near the end of their pilgrimage. Some receive it and lose it again through negligence or some grievous fall, and must wait for its restoration through renewed repentance. In all these cases, the absence of assurance does not prove the absence of grace. It proves only that the God who gives assurance gives it in His own time and by His own means, and that His timing is often a discipline by which He teaches His children to trust Him in the dark. The means by which assurance is ordinarily attained are then enumerated with a precision that reflects the Divines' settled opposition to the enthusiastic claims of the radical sects. The believer may, without extraordinary revelation, in the right use of ordinary means, attain thereunto. The phrase without extraordinary revelation is aimed squarely at the antinomian and Quaker movements of the seventeenth century, which taught that the Spirit communicates assurance through immediate, unmediated revelations — an inner voice, a sudden impression, a text of Scripture flashed into the mind apart from its context. The Divines deny this root and branch. The Spirit does not ordinarily work apart from the means He has appointed. He works through them: the preaching of the Word, the reading of Scripture, the administration of the sacraments, prayer public and private, fellowship with the saints, meditation, fasting, the singing of psalms. To seek assurance by neglecting these means is to demand that the Spirit serve us on our terms rather than to submit ourselves to His ordinance. If a man will not open the window, let him not complain that the sun does not enter. The expression ordinary means is worth pausing over, because it reveals something about the Divines' understanding of the Christian life that is easily lost in an age that craves the dramatic and the instantaneous. Ordinary means are precisely that: ordinary. They are not glamorous. They do not make for gripping testimony in a prayer meeting. No one writes a best-selling memoir about the years he spent reading the same passages of Scripture every morning and finding nothing spectacular in them — and yet those years, in the economy of grace, are often the very means by which the Spirit builds the deep, steady, unshakeable assurance that spectacular experiences rarely produce. The farmer who tends his fields day after day in unremarkable weather reaps a harvest that the man who waits for a miraculous shower never sees. And because assurance is attainable through ordinary means, the Divines press the logic to its conclusion: And therefore it is the duty of every one to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure. The imperative is universal — every believer — and the adverb all diligence leaves no room for half-heartedness. The believer is not to drift passively toward assurance, hoping that one day it will descend upon him like a dove. He is to pursue it, to labour for it, to give himself to the means of grace with the focused intensity of a man digging for hid treasure. This is not legalism, for the diligence is exercised not to earn salvation but to confirm it, not to purchase the inheritance but to read the title-deed. Yet it is effort — real, sustained, sometimes wearying effort — and the Divines do not apologise for calling the believer to it. The remainder of the section describes what this diligence, when blessed by the Spirit, produces. The heart is enlarged — the metaphor is spatial and organic, suggesting a soul that has been cramped and constricted by doubt now expanding into the spacious freedom of the gospel. The specific dimensions of this enlargement are then catalogued: peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost, and love and thankfulness to God, and strength and cheerfulness in the duties of obedience. Each of these is a fruit, not a root. They do not produce assurance; assurance produces them. The assured believer does not obey to become assured; he obeys because he is assured, and the knowledge that he belongs to God fills his obedience with a new quality — not the grudging compliance of the slave, nor the anxious striving of the hireling, but the glad, free, cheerful service of a son who knows his Father's heart. And then, in the final clause, the Divines deliver the coup de grâce to the objection that has dogged the Reformed doctrine of assurance from the beginning: so far is it from inclining men to looseness. The Roman controversialists had argued for a century that if men are taught they may be certain of their salvation, they will take license to sin. The Divines answered not with a theoretical rebuttal but with an empirical description of what assurance actually produces. It does not produce looseness; it produces love. It does not produce license; it produces thankfulness. It does not produce carelessness; it produces strength and cheerfulness in obedience. The man who knows he is a son of God does not reason, Therefore I may live as I please. He reasons, Therefore I must live as my Father pleases, and I do so not with the grudging heart of a servant but with the eager heart of a child. The objection confuses assurance with presumption, and the two are no more alike than a living child and a painted portrait.

Theological Depth

Calvin, in the third book of the Institutes, addresses the very distinction upon which this section turns with his customary clarity. He acknowledges that the faith of believers is often assailed by doubt, and he does not pretend that the certainty of which Scripture speaks is always felt with equal strength. The believer, he writes, is in perpetual conflict with his own unbelief, and far from placing his faith in a state of undisturbed repose, he is engaged in a ceaseless struggle in which his faith is often shaken and sometimes seems to tremble on the brink of defeat. Yet Calvin insists that faith, in its essential nature, is a firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence toward us, founded upon the freely given promise in Christ, and that where this certainty is entirely absent, faith itself is absent. How, then, does he account for the believer who lacks felt assurance? He distinguishes, though not in these exact terms, between the seed of faith and the full-grown tree, between the infant who possesses life and the adult who possesses the consciousness of life in all its vigour. The faith that clings to Christ in the dark, crying out with the father of the demoniac, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief, is true faith — embattled, desperate, barely articulate — but still faith. The infant who cannot say Papa is no less a child for his inability to speak. Calvin's pastoral counsel to such souls is not to abandon hope but to press into the promises with greater urgency, for the promises are the appointed means by which the Spirit kindles certainty in the heart. The very act of looking to Christ, however trembling the look, is an act of faith, and the Christ to whom one looks is not a reluctant Saviour but a willing one, who will not quench the smoking flax. John Owen devoted an entire treatise to the exposition of the one hundred and thirtieth Psalm, a psalm that begins in the depths of conscious guilt and rises, through the discipline of waiting, to the heights of confident hope: Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope (Psalm 130:1-5). Owen observes that the psalmist does not resolve his crisis by a sudden revelation or by an immediate lifting of the burden. He resolves it by waiting, and the waiting is active, oriented toward the word of promise: in his word do I hope. The movement from the depths to the hope is not a leap but a pilgrimage, and the means of the pilgrimage is the Word, which the psalmist holds before his soul as a lamp in the darkness. Owen notes that for many believers, the season of waiting is prolonged not because God is unwilling to give assurance but because He is teaching them lessons that can only be learned in the school of affliction: the anatomy of their own hearts, the sufficiency of His grace, the sweetness of the promises when at last they are tasted after long hunger. The man who receives assurance immediately may never know the depths from which the psalmist cried; the man who waits long knows those depths and, knowing them, prizes the hope that finally rises from them with an intensity that the early recipient cannot match. Thomas Goodwin, whose careful pastoral psychology equipped him for the delicate work of dealing with doubting souls, wrote extensively on what he called the delayed delivery of assurance. The Holy Spirit, he observed, is given to the believer at the moment of regeneration as a Spirit of sanctification, to mortify sin and quicken grace. But He is not always given at that same moment as a Spirit of consolation, to shed abroad the love of God in the heart and to bear witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. There is often an interval between the first and the second gift, and the length of that interval is determined by the wisdom of God, not by the merit of the believer. Goodwin likens the distinction to the difference between a title-deed that one possesses but has not yet read, and the same title-deed after one has studied its provisions and understood the extent of the inheritance. The Spirit's indwelling is the deed; the Spirit's witness is the reading of the deed. Both are acts of the same Spirit, and the second follows the first in God's timing, ordinarily through the believer's diligent use of the means of grace. Goodwin is also careful to distinguish between the causes of delayed assurance that lie in the sovereign purpose of God (who ordains the seasons of His children's comfort) and the causes that lie in the believer's own negligence or sin. Some wait long because God, for reasons hidden in His unsearchable wisdom, withholds the light. Others wait long because they have neglected the means by which the light ordinarily comes, or because they have grieved the Spirit by some indulged sin, or because they have substituted introspection for looking to Christ and have become so absorbed in examining their own hearts that they have ceased to look at the Saviour whose beauty alone can make the heart sing. In such cases, Goodwin counsels not passive resignation but active repentance and renewed diligence. The believer is to ask not only, Why has God withheld assurance? but also, Have I sought it in the way of His appointment? Richard Sibbes, whose gentle spirit earned him the title of the heavenly Doctor, wrote a treatise whose very title is a balm to the anxious believer: The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax. The image is drawn from the prophecy of Isaiah, as quoted in Matthew's Gospel: A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench. Sibbes argues from this text that Christ's tenderness toward weak believers is an essential part of His character as Saviour, and that the believer who concludes he cannot be a true Christian because his faith is weak and his assurance absent has fundamentally misunderstood the Christ to whom he comes. Christ does not demand strong faith as a condition of receiving the believer; He receives the believer to strengthen his faith. The reed that is bruised, bent over, barely standing — this reed He will not snap. The flax that smokes, giving more stench than light, whose flame has almost gone out — this wick He will not extinguish. Sibbes counsels the doubting believer to look not primarily at the quality of his faith but at the object of his faith. The weakest hand that touches the hem of Christ's garment receives the same virtue that the strongest grasp would receive, because the virtue is in Christ, not in the grasp. Assurance may be lacking while faith is real, but the remedy for the lack is not to abandon faith but to exercise it, however feebly, upon the Christ who welcomes the feeble. Robert Shaw, whose crisp and orderly commentary on the Confession has instructed generations, draws out the practical implications of this section with his trademark precision. He notes that the Confession guards against two extremes. On the one hand, there is the error of those who hold that assurance is of the essence of faith, and therefore that no one can be a true believer who is not fully assured of his salvation. This error drives the doubting soul to despair, for it tells him that his doubt is proof of his unbelief, and his unbelief proof of his reprobation. It is a cruel doctrine, and the Confession refutes it by the plain testimony of Scripture, which records the experience of believers like Heman and Job and David who knew the darkness of felt abandonment without ceasing to be the Lord's. On the other hand, there is the error of those who treat assurance as a matter of indifference, an optional luxury for the spiritually advanced that ordinary Christians may safely neglect. Against this error, the Confession insists that the pursuit of assurance is a duty, and a duty that carries the richest promises. Shaw presses the point: if the Spirit has promised to bear witness with our spirit, and if that witness is attainable through the ordinary means, then the believer who neglects those means is not merely missing a comfort but disobeying a command.

Puritan Application

First, and most urgently, let this section deliver you from the false logic that would un-Christian you for want of assurance. The reasoning runs like this: true believers possess assurance; I do not possess assurance; therefore I am not a true believer. The Confession dismantles the first premise. True believers may possess assurance, and ordinarily should pursue it, and in God's timing will attain it — but their faith does not consist in assurance. It consists in receiving and resting upon Christ alone. If you are looking to Christ, however dimly; if you are clinging to Him, however desperately; if you are saying with the father of the afflicted child, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief — then you are exercising saving faith, even if the reflex knowledge of that faith has not yet been given to you. The infant does not know he is alive, but the life is in him nonetheless. The sapling does not know it is rooted, but the roots are drawing nourishment from the soil. Do not dig up the root to see whether it is there. Water it with the means of grace, and in time the leaves will testify to the life beneath. Second, let this section teach you to wait upon God in the ordinary means, even when those means seem dry and unprofitable. The temptation of the doubting believer is to abandon the means in despair: if reading Scripture brings no comfort, why read? If prayer yields no sense of God's presence, why pray? If the preaching of the Word leaves the heart cold, why attend? But the logic is exactly backwards. The means are not rendered useless by the absence of felt comfort; they are rendered more necessary by it. The farmer does not abandon the plough because the harvest has not yet appeared. He ploughs in hope, sows in hope, waits in hope, and the harvest comes in its season. So it is with assurance. The Word read in dryness is still the Word of God, and the Spirit who inspired it can, in a moment, make a single verse blaze with the light of personal application. The prayer offered in emptiness is still heard by the Father, who knows the Spirit's groanings when the believer has no words. The sermon heard without emotion may yet be the sermon in which a sentence lodges in the memory and bears fruit weeks or years later. Wait upon God in the means. Do not prescribe to Him the moment of His appearing. The watchman waits for the morning through the darkest hour of the night, and the morning comes — always comes — not a moment before the appointed time, and never a moment after. Third, let this section rouse you to the duty of giving all diligence to make your calling and election sure. The imperative is not addressed to a spiritual elite but to every believer, and the diligence it commands is comprehensive. Give yourself to the Word: not merely the hurried perusal of a daily chapter but the meditative, prayerful, lingering study of the Scriptures, in which you ask the Spirit to show you Christ in every page and to apply the promises to your own soul. Give yourself to prayer: not merely the recitation of petitions but the wrestling of Jacob, who would not let the angel go until he had received the blessing. Give yourself to the Table: where Christ is set forth, not as a distant figure but as the present host, and where the elements speak to the senses what the Word speaks to the mind — that Christ's body was broken and His blood was shed for sinners, and that the sinner who receives Him in faith receives all that He is and all that He has done. Give yourself to the fellowship of the saints: where the discouraged believer may hear from the lips of a brother the very word that his own heart needs, and where the mutual exchange of experience confirms that he is not alone in his struggle. Assurance is not a passive acquisition. It is a harvest, and the harvest demands labour. Labor for it, and the Lord of the harvest will not send you away empty. Fourth, let the catalogue of the fruits of assurance serve as a diagnostic test for your own soul. The Confession lists these fruits with striking particularity, and each one can be turned into a question. Is your heart enlarged in peace, or is it habitually cramped by anxiety and fear? That peace does not depend upon circumstances — Paul sang in a Philippian dungeon — but upon the settled conviction that God is for you in Christ. Do you know joy in the Holy Ghost — a joy that is not the froth of natural temperament nor the excitement of novelty, but the deep, sober gladness of a soul that has seen the King in His beauty? Does love and thankfulness to God characterise your religion, or is your service rendered from duty without delight? There is a vast difference between the obedience of a son who loves his Father and the obedience of a servant who fears his master. Are strength and cheerfulness present in your duties of obedience, or do you drag yourself through the commandments like a man trudging through mud? The assured believer runs in the way of God's commandments, not because the way has become easy but because his heart has been enlarged. These questions are not meant to condemn but to diagnose. If the answers convict you of the want of assurance, let the conviction drive you not to despair but to diligence — to the means that God has appointed, in the confidence that the Spirit who has begun a good work in you will bring it to completion. Fifth, beware of the two extremes that flank the narrow path of this doctrine. On the left hand lies despair: the conclusion that because assurance has not been given, it never will be, and that the darkness is proof of reprobation. This despair is not humility but disguised pride, for it presumes to know what only God knows and to decide what only God can decide. The humble response to the want of assurance is not to pronounce sentence upon oneself but to wait upon the Judge who alone can pronounce the verdict of justification — and who has promised, in His Word, that the one who comes to Christ will in no wise be cast out. On the right hand lies presumption: the confidence that rests not upon the promises of God confirmed by the evidences of grace and sealed by the Spirit, but upon a single past experience, or a comparison with others worse than oneself, or a doctrinal orthodoxy that has never closed with Christ. This confidence is the counterfeit against which Section 1 warns, and its end is destruction. Walk the narrow path between them. Do not let the want of assurance drive you to despair, and do not let a false confidence substitute for the real thing. The path is narrow, but it is well-marked, and the Spirit who indwells you is a faithful guide. Sixth, and finally, let this section fill you with a hope that looks forward as well as inward. The assurance you seek is not only about the present state of your soul; it is about the future inheritance that Christ has purchased and that the Spirit guarantees. When assurance comes, it will bring with it peace and joy and love and thankfulness and strength and cheerfulness — a foretaste of heaven itself, the arrabōn of the Spirit that makes the believer long for the full possession. And if the foretaste is so sweet, what will the feast be? If the first fruits of assurance are so strengthening, what will the full harvest of glory be, when faith shall give way to sight and hope to possession and the earnest to the inheritance itself? Let the hope of that day sustain you in the waiting. The night is far spent; the day is at hand. And the God who has promised to bring you to that day will not fail to bring you through this night.

Prayer

O Lord, who dwellest in light inaccessible and yet condescendest to dwell with the contrite and humble spirit, we bless Thee for the tenderness with which Thy Word handles the souls that wait for Thee in darkness. We thank Thee that our faith, weak and trembling as it so often is, is yet true faith when it rests upon Thy Son, and that the bruised reed Thou wilt not break, nor quench the smoking flax. We thank Thee that assurance is not reserved for apostles and martyrs but is held out to every believer through the right use of the means that Thou hast appointed, and that no extraordinary revelation is required — only the ordinary grace that Thou art pleased to give through Word and sacrament and prayer. We confess, O Lord, that we have often grown weary in the waiting. We have doubted Thy goodness when the light seemed withdrawn and the promises felt like words on a page rather than living words from the mouth of the living God. We have neglected the means by which Thou dost ordinarily convey comfort, and then we have complained of the discomfort as though the fault were Thine. Forgive us, we pray, for every hasty conclusion, every surrender to despair, every hour spent in fruitless introspection when we should have been looking to Christ. Restore unto us the joy of Thy salvation, and uphold us with Thy free Spirit. Grant us, we beseech Thee, the grace to give all diligence to make our calling and election sure. Stir us up to the Word with a hunger that is not satisfied by a cursory reading. Teach us to pray with the importunity that will not let Thee go until Thou bless us. Draw us to Thy Table, where Christ is set forth as the bread of life and where the elements speak to our senses of a love that surpasses knowledge. Knit us into the fellowship of Thy saints, that we may bear one another's burdens and speak the word in season to the weary soul. And when, in Thy good time, Thou art pleased to shed abroad the peace and joy and love and thankfulness that are the fruits of assurance, let us not grow proud as though we had earned what Thou hast given. Let us not grow careless as though the battle were over when the skirmish is merely won. Let us rather serve Thee with the glad heart of a son who knows his Father's love, obeying Thy commandments with strength and cheerfulness, and longing for the day when faith shall give way to sight and we shall see Thee as Thou art. Until that day, keep us in Thy care. Let the anchor hold. Let the seal remain. Let the earnest of the Spirit be the daily pledge that the full inheritance is coming, and let the foretaste make us hungry for the feast. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with Thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.