CHAPTER 18: Of the assurance of grace and salvation
(Parts Four and Five)
Assurance is routinely communicated wrongly by well-intentioned Christians who tell every person who recites “the sinner’s prayer” that they must have assurance of their salvation because they “prayed the prayer.” Listen, the only assurance a person has, based on the fact that they repeated a prayer, is that they repeated a prayer. That is not the same as assurance of salvation.
While salvation is by God’s grace alone, received through faith alone, the grace and faith that saves is not alone. It is necessarily followed and validated by a changed life (1 John 3:4-10*). Granted, no Christian is sinlessly perfect, either instantly or even after a lifetime of devotion to the Savior; but if there is no fundamental shift in a person’s affections away from self and the world, toward Christ and His kingdom, there is no basis for assurance. “Now by this we know we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.” (1 John 2:3) Again John is not demanding sinless perfection as the standard, because a few verses earlier, speaking to Christians he writes, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8) Assurance is not for the sinless, but it is for those who find themselves growing in grace and sinning less.
* The sins that reveal that a person is not saved are not isolated acts of sin,
but a continuing life-style of sin.
(Part Five)
The doctrine of assurance of salvation is summed up perfectly in 1 John 5:11-13. It begins by claiming to be a testimony given under apostolic authority. In other words, you can count on it.
What is the testimony? The testimony is that God has given believers eternal life. Eternal life is in the Son, Jesus Christ. Those who have Christ as their Savior have eternal life. To make it clear that only those who have Christ as their Savior have eternal life, John writes, “he who does not have the Son of God does not have [eternal] life.”
Writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, John then explains to whom he wrote and why. He wrote these words to believers, and he wrote them so that believers would “know” that we have eternal life. God wants us to know this!
During and after the Reformation in the 1500s, one of the many conflicts between Protestants and the Roman Catholic church was over the doctrine of assurance. Protestants, armed with these verses and others, championed the doctrine of assurance. The Roman church—built largely on keeping her people away from scripture and imprisoned in fear—condemned the doctrine of assurance, declaring it to be arrogance, since they believed and taught “no one can ever know for sure in this life.”
So which is it? Is the doctrine of assurance clearly defined in scripture, or is it arrogance?