Okay, well let's go ahead and get started. Let me pray for us. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have called us together as your people. We thank you that you have claimed us as your own, and we pray now that you would bless us as we study this issue of Scripture, that we might know that we have eternal life. We pray this in Christ's name, amen. Okay, so last week, Pastor Cliff started on the first two paragraphs of the Confession that deal with assurance of salvation. And he talked about the ones who have false assurance, hypocrites, who deceive themselves in the words of the Confession with false hopes and fleshly presumptions. And then we also saw that assurance of salvation isn't based on our thinking that we are perfectly following Christ. That's not where we find our assurance. Instead, we sincerely are following Christ, imperfectly but sincerely. and we strive sincerely, but imperfectly, to love Jesus and to live for him. So today we're gonna look a little bit more into this in the third paragraph. It deals with some issues dealing with struggles with assurance. And so here's the first sentence of paragraph three. This infallible assurance does not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long and contend with many difficulties before he partakes of it. So, again, continuing on from last week, assurance is not of the essence of faith. That is, having true, saving faith in Christ doesn't automatically involve assurance. True believers may or may not be assured that they are saved. And I think it's helpful in this line to distinguish between objective truth and subjective experience. A true believer is convinced of some objective truths, such as Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that Christ died to pay for the sins of his people, that he rose again, that all who believe in Him are forgiven of their sins. These things are objectively true, and I think you could say that all true Christians hold to these things. They believe these are truths. You know, we could come up with another list, a different list, but basically there are certain things that they say, these things are true. As a Christian, I am convinced of these. And these would fall under what the confession in this paragraph calls the essence of faith. It's like, okay, if you're really a Christian, these are things that you believe. But there's a subjective element that comes into assurance of salvation. Yes, I know that Christ is the son of God. I know that he died to pay for the sins of his people and other things. But the question becomes, Do I truly believe in Christ? Do I have that real faith? Do I really have saving faith, or am I just deceiving myself? Am I a hypocrite, such that at the judgment day Christ will say, depart from me, I never knew you? That's the question we're dealing with with assurance. Do I really have saving faith? I know these other things are true, and I'm committed to those, and I'm absolutely convinced of those things. But the question is, do I really have saving faith? So we doubt whether or not we actually belong to Him. And this is a valid question. It's not something that shows there's something wrong with us. or that it's just some people's psychological makeup. You know, some people just doubt everything or they're always questioning things. They're fearful, they're filled with self-doubt. That's just their nature about everything. They're just always on edge about things like that. Lacking assurance of salvation is not just a psychological disposition. Okay, so it's something that true Christians deal with. And we need to think here, there's Psalm 88. Psalm 88 written by a man named Haman the Ezraite. And we read elsewhere in scripture, Haman was so wise, only Solomon was considered wiser than he was. So here's a few verses from Psalm 88. O Lord God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you, for my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. I'm a man who has no strength, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves. Oh Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me? Now, here's an inspired writer of scripture, and he felt that God had cast him away and forgotten him. That's what he's writing about. Lord, why am I experiencing this? Why do I feel this way? He wasn't assured that he belonged to Yahweh. He knew God was the true God. He knew these things. It's like, Lord, I just, I have this feeling. I don't even know if I belong to you. Or you get to the New Testament. In the case, I believe we referred to it last week. The father of the child with an unclean spirit. He brought the boy to Jesus for healing. And Jesus told him all things are possible for him who believes. And the father cries out, I believe. Help my unbelief. okay, yes, Jesus, I know you can do this, but I don't know if I have enough faith. I don't know if my faith is strong enough for you to do this. I don't know if I have that kind of faith. So having doubts, lacking assurance of salvation is not an isolated or strange experience for true believers. And we've heard about great men of the faith of the past who have struggled with that and have gone in deep depression, even as they have been used by the Lord with writings and so on that blessed the church, that they go into depression, struggling with this issue. And this lack of assurance is not an evidence that we're not true believers. The confession says true believers may wait long before enjoying it. You really are a Christian, but you don't have this assurance. Now, I think you could say that having those types of doubts, having these sincere doubts may itself be an evidence that we're saved. Because unbelievers, they don't care if they're in Christ or not. That's not an issue for them. An unbeliever isn't worried, well, I don't know if I really believe in Christ or not. They don't care about that. The fact that you struggle with it may be an evidence, yes, that the Lord, the Holy Spirit is really working in you. So you may feel that working of the Holy Spirit in you as you struggle with that. So then, how do we obtain assurance of salvation? How do we get to that? And the paragraph says, among other things, that a believer may receive assurance but without extraordinary revelation. God doesn't do something like giving a sign in heavens. Okay. Don't expect that. And God's not going to speak audibly from heaven. You're not going to hear a voice saying, you know, John Brumell, you are a believer. Okay. You're not going to hear that. Instead, God has given us his written word and the Holy Spirit who works through the word. So here's how the confession puts it in the next part of paragraph three. It says, yet because he, that is the believer, is enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given to him by God, he may, without any extraordinary revelation, attain this assurance by a proper use of the ordinary means. So it's saying the Holy Spirit enables us to know the grace that God has given to us. The Holy Spirit works in us. Note what Paul says, 1 Corinthians 2.12. Now, we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. We've received the Holy Spirit, and one of the things the Holy Spirit does is to help us to understand, what has God actually given me? God has given me salvation. He has given me Christ. He has given me eternal life. The Holy Spirit helps me to understand those things, and not just understand intellectually, but helps me to see, yes, Christ has done this for me. I do belong to Him. Now, last week, Pastor Cliff mentioned a three-legged stool of assurance. He mentioned three things. And the confession elsewhere deals with these. First, we look at the divine promises of God in Christ. Those who come to Him, He will in no wise cast out, were held fast in the grip of the Father. These are things we read in scripture and we see. If I believe in Christ, if I believe in Christ, He's not gonna let me go. I'm not gonna fall. He's not gonna let me go. He will not cast me out. I have these promises in Scripture. God has said these things. I can hold on to these promises. Second, there's the fact that the Holy Spirit is producing good works in us. Now, again, not perfection, this side of glory. But we should see how the Holy Spirit enables us to more and more die unto sin and live unto righteousness. And I'm gonna come back to this in a minute and expand on it. And then third, the third leg of that stool, the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are the children of God. Romans 8, 15, and 16, Paul says, 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 the children of God. So the Holy Spirit bearing witness inside of us, yes, you are a child of God. You do belong to him. You do have eternal life. You are part of Christ. It's subjective, but it's something that's real. The Holy Spirit in us produces that in us. So the Spirit works that assurance in us. So these are the three things that Pastor Cliff went over last week. Now, I wanna go back to that second point about how the Holy Spirit produces good works in us, and that that's a source of our assurance of salvation. We see good works, that's a source of our assurance, and I think a study of the book of 1 John is really helpful here. It outlines what those good works look like, and the reason I go to 1 John is John tells us that's why he wrote the book. It's the whole purpose of his book. First John 5 13, towards the end of the book, he says, let me tell you why I wrote this. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. So John says, look, I'm writing to you. You all believe in Christ. I want you to know, I want you to be assured that you have eternal life. Some of the books of the Bible, we look at them and say, you kind of have to deduce what is the purpose of this book. The Gospel of John, John says that he wrote it so that we would believe in Christ. tells us that towards the end of the book. Here he says, you already believe in Christ, I want you to have assurance of your salvation. And so the whole book deals with that. And in the book, John gives three tests to show whether we're not truly born again. And so we can have assurance. And as John writes, his writing style is that he'll make a point, then he'll go on, and then he might circle back to that point again, but then he'll go to a second point, and then a third point, then he'll circle back to the second one again. He kind of writes in this way. So these three things just kind of come back and forth throughout the book of 1 John. Now, these things that he's going to talk about are not the ground of our assurance, that is, we're not made Christians by these three tests. These are not the things that say, okay, yes, this is what makes you a Christian. Instead, I think they're kind of like, in our car, we have the gas gauge. Your car doesn't run on the gas gauge. It actually needs gas or battery charge if you're doing a Tesla. But the gas gauge is an indicator. It tells you do you actually have gas or not. Yeah, and some gauges are kind of weird. I mean, Martha's car, you know, a lot of cars are like this. You get down to a quarter of a tank, you better start finding a gas station real fast, because it's going to go from a quarter to empty real quick. You know, but, you know, the gas gauge, it's a, it's an indicator. That's what it is. It's not infallible, but it is a good indicator of whether you have gas or not. And these three tests in 1 John are kind of like that gas gauge. We can look at them and say, okay, this is evidence that God is working faith in me. So first test is we live a faithful life of righteousness. That's one of the tests. John says, in chapter 1 verse 6, if we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. So we say we have fellowship with Him, we say we belong to Christ, but we're walking in darkness, we're walking in sin. We're lying. We don't have Christ. And he says in chapter 2 verse 3, by this we know that we have come to know Him. Here's how you know you're a Christian. We keep his commandments. And I want to give you a little Greek lesson here, because when he talks about it, we know that we've come to know him if we keep his commandments. That word keep in Greek is in the present tense, and in Greek, the present tense indicates something that is an ongoing, continual type of action. It's not something that just happens once, but it's an ongoing thing and it basically refers to something that is a pattern of life. So when he talks about not walking in darkness or here keeping the commandments, he's saying, what is your pattern of life? What is your, you know, just kind of look at the big picture, what your life is like. If your life is characterized by walking in darkness, As Christians, we fall into sin, we fall into darkness. But does that characterize our life? Hopefully not. Instead, we say we keep His commandments. That's the character, that's the direction of our life, is keeping His commandments. If we look at that, we say, yes, I'm seeking to follow the Lord. I fall, but I really want to follow Him. I sincerely want to obey Him. I sincerely want to do what He says. not sinless perfection, and we look at the history of our lives, and it's not like, okay, you got a straight line from when you were a Christian to glorification. It's, you know, this type of thing. You know, you have times when you are following Christ more, times when you slip, you know, but you say, yes, the general pattern of my life, I want to follow Christ. I'm seeking to obey him. That's one evidence that we belong to him. If you see that in your life, then you can say, yes, the Holy Spirit is working in me. He's doing that for me. So that's one test. Second test, John says, is love for the brethren. Chapter two, verse nine, whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. And in 3.14, We know that we have passed out of death into life, and here's your assurance, because we love the brothers. Now, we're not talking about perfection here, and we're going to rub each other the wrong way at times. You know, some of you are going to be Georgia Tech fans, and I'll have a hard time fellowshipping with you. But the thing is, we're not talking, again, perfection, but do we have a genuine love and delight in being with other believers? We love being with one another. We want to do good things for one another. There's an affinity that we have that we don't have with the unbelievers out in the world. And I know when we travel, Martha and I, when we would go to Roanoke, and we would go into a church up there, it's like, okay, here's other Christians. You immediately feel a kinship with them. You immediately feel a fellowship and a warmth. and a desire to be with them that you don't feel like when you're just going into a store, going to a concert or something like that. It's like, yeah, there's people around and go to a concert. Yeah, they like hearing the Atlanta Symphony, but instead you go to a church, it's like these people are on my wavelength. We have love for the brethren. That's an evidence that God is working in us. That's part of that gas gauge, okay, that indicates true faith. Now the third test that John gives us is adherence to right doctrine. 1 John 4, 15, whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God. Now in John's day, this was a contested point of doctrine. that Jesus, he wasn't really the son of God, he was just a super spiritual man, or he was a phantasm, he wasn't really human. There were debates about the nature of Jesus in John's day, but John says, okay, if you hold to the truth, the doctrine, you have to do that. In chapter 2, verses 22 and 23, who is the liar? But he who denies that Jesus is the Christ. This is the Antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. So, in John's day, this was the point of doctrine, the point of contention, where if you were denying these cardinal points of the faith, you were not a Christian. And so I think we can expand it today to mean that we hold, the true Christian holds to all that the Bible teaches, to proper doctrine. Now, it's not perfect, it's not complete. No one's going to have perfect and complete doctrine this side of glory. And we're going to hold to things that are in error, that we come to know, yes, that isn't right. believers are going, and other believers, people in other Christian churches, they're going to hold to beliefs that are different than ours. We've got our Baptist brethren, they're holding to beliefs different than ours, but the thing is, do we all seek to believe? What does the Bible teach? Does the Bible teach X, Y, and Z? That's what I want. Our Baptist brethren, they believe that the Bible teaches against infant baptism, but if they would be shown from the Bible that infant baptism is valid, they would hold to it because they're true believers. They would change their views. Well, it may not change their views until they get to heaven, and then they'll know they should be baptizing babies. The thing is that our desire is, what does the Bible say? I want to hold to that. That's got to govern my beliefs, not something else. And that's the evidence that the Holy Spirit is working in us, that we desire to know the truth and to believe the truth and to hold to the truth. So these are the three tests that John gives throughout the book. to have assurance of our salvation. We live a faithful life of righteousness. We have love for the brethren. We hold to proper doctrine. But remember, that's part of, that's one of the legs, those are three parts of one of the legs of that three-legged stool. The other are the promises of God in his word and the testimony of the spirit within us. So, back to this sentence from the confession. It says that we may attain this assurance by a proper use of ordinary means. How do we gain this assurance of salvation? How do we come to that? When the confession speaks of the ordinary means, it's referring to what we call the means of grace. These are the ways that God has ordained for us to partake of the grace he provides. This is how God has said, here's how I work grace in your life. And there's three of these. First is the word of God. God gives us grace through his word. In the time of the confession, when they would talk about the word, they would primarily mean the preaching of the word in public worship. because a lot of people didn't have personal copies of the Bible. The only time they would hear the word or they would study the word would be in the worship service, the preaching of worship. And preaching is still, I believe, the primary means God uses to build us up, preaching of the word. That's how he has worked throughout scripture. Now, we have our private Bible reading, and it's good. We need to do that. We have small group Bible studies, and that's good. But the public preaching of the Word from the pulpit in the worship service, that's the main way God is feeding us from His Word. And you know that, I mean, I can study Scripture on my own, but when Quiff is proclaiming it and expounding it and opening it up and applying to it, it reaches more into me. Other times it grips me more. Say, here's what God is calling me, here's what God is telling me, more than when I'm just studying it on my own, which I need to do, but God uses the preaching of the word. So that's one of the means of grace. And how does the Word give us assurance of salvation? Well, it tells us of those promises of God. Remember the three-legged stool? One of them was the promises of God in Scripture. So we hear, all who come to Christ, he will in no wise cast out. He will hold us in his grip and nobody can take us out of the Father's hand. If you believe in Christ, you have eternal life. We have these promises in the Word. As we come to know the word more and more, we see the promises God has given to us, and this gives us assurance. Second means of grace is the administration of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. So you think, well, how does this give us assurance of salvation? For one thing, they remind us of the covenant mercies of God to us, his commitment to us. We witness a baptism like we did last week. And we can be reminded when we see that baptism, God put his claim upon you. That's what he's doing in baptism. God is saying, I claim you, I claim this child to be part of my covenant. You are special to me because I'm coming to you and putting my mark in the Old Testament circumcision, in the New Testament baptism, I'm putting my mark of baptism on you and I'm claiming you to be mine. And so when we see a baptism, we can be reminded, yes, God did that for me too. God has called me to be in his covenant. And we can look back to our own baptism and the celebration of the Lord's Supper. Every week, God is saying, I want to have fellowship with you. I'm inviting you to my meal. I'm inviting you to sit down and have supper with me. I want you to come. You're my friends. You're my people. Come. That's the assurance we can have every week of the Lord's Supper, the promises of God and him reaching out and inviting us to himself. and that can give us great assurance. Okay, the third means of grace, word sacraments and prayer. This is essential for us to gain assurance of our salvation. We can pray that the Lord would confirm his word to us, that he would confirm his love to us. Lord, I'm struggling now. It's hard, like in Psalm 88. I feel like you've left me. Lord, make your presence known to me. Let me know that I belong to you. Let me know that you are with me and that you are for me. Teach me these things. Make this real to me. This is where prayer comes in. So we can pray to God and ask him that the Holy Spirit would work in us. And the thing is, God says he delights to answer the prayers of his children. He rejoices and he's overjoyed to say, I want to give you good things. I'll give you more than you asked, exceeding abundantly above all we can ask or imagine. God says, I'll give that to you. So when we pray to God, that's, again, as a basis of assurance, that he's going to give us good things, and he'll strengthen our assurance. Okay, so the next sentence in paragraph three says, it is therefore the duty of everyone to be very diligent in making certain that God has called and chosen him. So assurance is not an essential element of saving faith. We don't just automatically have assurance of our salvation. But we shouldn't just become complacent about it and just say, well, OK, some people are assured of their salvation. Some aren't. I'm not. C'est la vie. I'm just not one of those privileged people that can be assured of salvation. So what? Now the confession says here we have a duty to attain that assurance that God has called and chosen us. We need to use the means of grace he's given us. We should want to be assured of our salvation. Here's 2 Peter 1 10. Therefore brothers be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election. For if you practice these qualities, you will never fail." Peter has just given a list before this of different characters, different qualities, different spiritual obedience and qualities that should be in our lives. God is working sanctification in us in these areas. He says, therefore, because God is doing that, Be diligent to confirm that. Confirm your standing in Christ. Know that you are a Christian. If you doubt that you're a Christian, work at it. Work to see. Study. Pray. Do these things. That will bring confirmation of your standing in Christ. And then the reason we do this, or a motivation for doing it, is the next part of the paragraph. Because they say, by such diligence, as you work to confirm, as you work to have assurance of salvation, our heart will grow, and they list three things. First, in peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. When you have assurance that you truly belong to Christ, nothing can separate us from his love, That's going to bring great peace and joy to us. We should all want that. The more assurance we have, the more peace and joy. Second, the confession says our heart will grow in love and thankfulness to God. God's graciously called us to be his children. He's adopted us as his children. He's given us his own beloved son. He'll never let us go. If we're persuaded of these things, That should work more and more love and thankfulness to God because He has done all this for us and we're convinced of that. Third, our heart will grow in strength and cheerfulness in the duties which obedience to God requires. So as we have assurance, it's going to give us more and more impetus to obey God. One analogy I used to use when I would teach Bible in school said I would imagine somebody came to you and gave you a million dollars, no strings attached, it's not a loan, they're never going to come and ask for it back, he just does it because he loves you, wants to bless you. Now don't you think you're going to do whatever you can to please him? Don't you think you're going to want to do things that make that donor happy, that please him? You'll be so grateful, you'll do whatever he asks. Not because he's demanding and saying, okay, well, I gave you a million dollars now, therefore, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, because you're grateful, you want to do things for him. That's how we respond to the grace of God in Christ. Because God has done such great things for us, we can cheerfully do all that he asks. And these three things, peace and joy, love and thankfulness, obedience, these, the confession says, are the proper fruits of assurance. They are the things that assurance actually does work out, true assurance does work out. And this is in contrast, the confession goes on, to an improper fruit of assurance. Thus it is far from inclining men to carelessness, You see, this is what some people would say about those who say, well, yeah, we should be assured of our salvation. We should know we're Christians. And in fact, it's what the Roman Catholic Church actually did charge about the Reformers. They would say, well, if you have assurance of salvation, you'll say, okay, well, I know I'm certainly saved. God will never cast me out. It doesn't matter how I live or what I do. Once saved, always saved. Nope, don't be presumptuous to think that you have assurance. That'll lead you to sin, so don't try to get assurance of salvation. You'll just end up being in sin if you do that. You should always be worried about whether you're saved or not, because that'll provoke you to obedience. The confession is saying, no, a true assurance provokes us to more obedience. John says in 1 John 2.1, my little children, I'm writing these things, these things. these things that give you assurance of salvation so that you may not sin. I want you to be assured of salvation so that you won't sin, so that you'll turn away from sin. Our being assured of salvation thus leads to no longer living in sin. And so then Paul says in Romans 6, 1 and 2, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means. How can we who died to sin still live in it? You know, Paul teaches about union with Christ, that that's the foundation of salvation. That's kind of the thing that was in Paul's teaching, that that kind of is the center of his teaching is our union with Christ. We're united to Christ. He took the punishment for our sins. He was punished. Our sins were laid on him. We're united to him. And so his punishment was ours. God punished our sins in Christ. Christ was raised from the dead to new life. We're united to him, so we have been raised to newness of life. We're not united just to part of Christ. We're not united to Christ as in dying for our sins, but his rising again to new life and new obedience. That's not, we're not part of that, no. We are united to Christ. We've died with him, we rise again. We have new life, we have obedience, we have a new life. If we've died to sin, we cannot continue to live in it. And so we need to do what Peter exhorted that we saw before, be all the more diligent to confirm our calling and election. And as we gain greater assurance of our salvation, we'll find that we grow in peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, We grow in love and thankfulness to God and we'll grow in faithfully obeying our loving Heavenly Father. So, any questions or comments? There are some passages I'm not sure about Luther. Calvin said some things that seem to indicate that, but then there are other passages in Calvin. I was reading about this this week, studying for this, that there are other passages in Calvin where he does end up saying that, well, assurance of salvation is something that we need to work to attain. But there are other places where he does seem to indicate that, well, yeah, a true Christian knows he's saved. little bit of a maybe contradiction or a little bit of inconsistency there but he didn't Calvin didn't definitively teach if you are a Christian if you're really a Christian you will have assurance of salvation it kind of was modified elsewhere in some of his writings It could be. It could be, mm-hmm. John? Ron, at the very beginning you were talking about sincere. Do you know the origin of the word sincere? It's from Latin, sine, sine, and sere, it means without wax. And years ago they made pottery, and sometimes with the flaws of the pottery they would put So people would look really good, and then when they heated up the pottery later, the pottery wouldn't look any good. So sincere means without wax. You see how hard shit is? Sincere. It's a true pot and not something that's half wax, yeah. Good point. All right, well let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we do thank you that you have given Christ to us. Lord, we ask that you would work assurance of salvation in us, that we might know that we belong to Christ, that we would have a love, joy, and peace from the Holy Spirit, that we would be thankful to you, and that we would express that in our faithful lives. Work this assurance in us and in others, Lord, that we might give all the glory to you. We pray now that you would meet with us in the worship service. Speak to us through your servant. We look forward to being welcomed to your table in the Lord's Supper. Please bless us now, in Christ's name, amen.