Word of Salvation – Vol. 44 No.20 – May 1999

 

What We Need to Know to Have Assurance of Salvation

 

Sermon by Rev M.P. Geluk on Lord’s Day 1b (Heid.Cat. Q&A 2)

Scripture Reading: Hosea 4:1-9; Luke 18:18-30

Suggested Hymns: BoW 374; 393; 419; 27:1, 2, 10

 

Beloved Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism makes it clear that the only true comfort a Christian believer has in life and death is to totally belong to Jesus Christ.  But to say that a believer can have such an assurance is one thing, how to get it and how to keep it is quite another thing.  So they added a second question:
            “What must you know to live and die in the joy of this comfort?”
The answer:
            “Three things:
                        first, how great my sin and misery are;
                        second, now I am set free from all my sins and misery;
                        third, how I am to thank God for such a deliverance.”

1.  How does anyone get to belong to Christ?

How does anyone come to that point where they can say: “Yes, by the grace of God, I am now a Christian”?  Christian parents are very keen that their children come to that point.  In witnessing we try and bring others to that point.  When a person is a Christian believer and has come to this point, this comfort of belonging to Christ, then how does the believer keep this assurance and not lose it?

Yes, how do you keep your car in good working order?  How do you keep your garden clean?  How do you stay a happy person?  How do you keep your marriage going?  Life is all about things like that.  How do you get it?  How do you keep it?  The people who claim to know the answer give us their manuals.  These manuals tell you what to do.  How to get the thing going.  How to keep it going.  There’s even a joke about manuals: “If all else fails, check the manual.”

In one sense the Word of God is like a manual.  The Catechism is like a manual.  We are asking the question: what do we need to know to have assurance of salvation?  The remainder of the Catechism will tell us.  But note what the question is asking: what must you know?  The question is not: what do you have to do?  But: what must you know?

There is a popular saying that goes like this: the Christian faith is not so much taught as caught.  Is that true?  I think that we have to say that there is some truth in such a statement.  A non-Christian can become attracted to the Christian faith when he observes the Christian’s high moral standards, a caring love for other people and a trusting attitude that God has all things under His control.  But the saying is not altogether true, because there are Christians who, through weakness and disobedience, reveal an un-Christian behaviour that may well turn the unsaved away from the Christian faith.  There are, in fact, no Christians who always do everything just right.  It was not so with the disciples who were daily with Christ, and it is not so with us.

There are other things that detract from the statement: the Christian faith is not so much taught as caught.  There are many people who live exemplary lives and are humanists or follow Buddhism or some other non-Christian faith.  Besides, there are many teachings in the Bible that you cannot practice.  We cannot practice the doctrine of the Trinity.  We cannot practice the doctrine of election.  We cannot practice the teaching about the second coming of Christ and the new heaven and earth.  Yet we need to know about these biblical teachings if we are to have assurance of salvation.  Therefore it would be better to say that the Christian faith is to be taught as well as practised.

Our earlier statement about the Bible being a manual is also not quite correct.  With a manual you look up the problem in the index and that directs you to the pages where you can find out how to fix it.  But God’s Word is not really like that.

In the Bible God tells us who He is, He tells us how He created a perfect world and how He created man and what place man had in the world.  Then He tells us what sin did to man and what consequences this had for that perfect world.  Then God tells us of what He did in Christ to save man and that He will make our imperfect world perfect again.  In other words, God’s Word tells us many things.  Why?  Why do we have a Bible?  It’s because God wants us to know about Him, about Christ, about salvation, yes, know about everything that helps us have this comfort of eternally belonging to Christ.  So, whilst the Christian faith needs to be lived and practised, it is also a knowledge that very much needs to be taught.

2.  What is this knowledge?

It is not a knowledge that requires years and years of learning and training at school and university.  The knowledge about how to be at peace with a holy and just God through Jesus Christ may be held by the simplest of Christians.  You don’t have to be a specialist.  You don’t even need to call in a specialist to unlock the mystery.  In fact, believers who are just ordinary folk, may have more of this knowledge than the highly trained theologian.  Jesus’ disciples, after receiving the Spirit at Pentecost, understood a great deal more about God and the salvation He offered in Christ than the learned Pharisees.  This knowledge enables the children of God, at whatever age, to live and die with the assurance that they belong forever to Christ.

But to have this assurance you do need to know three things.  And you need to go back to them all the time.  Let go of them and you will find doubts and uncertainties creeping back in your minds.  These are the three things:

• One: knowledge of the depth and extent of sin, in yourself and others, and the misery that this sin brings;
• Two: knowledge of how to be set free from one’s sin and its consequences; and
• Three: knowledge of how to thank God for such deliverance.

In short: knowledge of sin, deliverance and thankfulness.  Or to put it differently but keeping the same meaning:- knowledge about sin, salvation and service.  The three ‘S’ words.  What do you, your children and the unsaved need to know about the comfort of belonging to Christ?  Think of the three ‘S’s – sin, salvation and service.

What happens when you don’t know about these things?  Well, the prophet Hosea lamented that his fellow Israelites were being destroyed from lack of knowledge (6:4).  There was no faithfulness, no love, and no acknowledgment of God in the land.  Only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery.  People were breaking all bounds and bloodshed followed bloodshed.  It rather sounds like a description of today’s world and our own society.  Our news coverage is full of this stuff.  Partly to blame were the prophets and priests in Hosea’s day because they failed to teach and practise the law of God.  The prophets stumbled along with the people and the priests were enjoying their wickedness.

Has it not always been like this?  All the terrible things that everybody complains about are happening more because people are no longer taught the rules of God for man.  There is less Christianity in Australia now than a couple of generations ago.  But with less Christianity there came an increase in crime, adultery, divorce, unnatural sex practices, and so on.  Society no longer goes by what God says is right and wrong but by what man decides.  Today is like it was in the days of Hosea.  People are being destroyed from lack of knowledge.  Oh, they think they know a lot about people and how they ought to behave but it’s all based of what man thinks is right and wrong.  The knowledge from God about how people should behave is rejected.

The knowledge that enables people to know God and to have peace with Him and to prosper under His commandments, is knowledge about sin and its misery, about freedom from sin and its misery, and about being thankful to God for being delivered from sin and misery.  This knowledge is the ‘abc’ of the Christian faith.  But not only of the Christian faith; it is the ‘abc’ of life.

Why is God’s Word still a mystery to so many people?  Why is there a general reluctance to take the Bible seriously?  Why do those who seem to know what is in the Bible ridicule it and completely misunderstand it.

It’s because they haven’t got the key to unlock its overall message.  People get bogged down in some seemingly obscure passage and conclude that the Bible is impossible to understand.  But if they only knew the three basic concepts of sin, salvation and service, then the Word of God as a whole is not so difficult anymore.

How can we truly enjoy the Christian faith?  How can we really appreciate what Christ came to do?  How can we begin to understand how wonderful God really is?  By beginning to learn very humbly the ‘abc’ of the Christian faith.  The Christian finds his assurance of belonging to Christ deepening when he begins to see from the Bible the depth of human sinfulness.  When he marvels about God saving him from sin’s power and hell itself through Christ suffering and dying in his place.  When he is made to see the privilege of serving the Lord with thankfulness for all God has done for him.

I would like you to realise that it is God’s desire that we fully experience the well-being of salvation in Christ.  Yes, to enjoy God.  Enjoying God does not take away the fear of God.  We fear God because He is almighty, majestic, holy and awesome.  We fear God because He gives life and takes it away.  We fear God because we all have to appear before His judgment seat and give account of all that we have done, whether good or bad.  But we also enjoy belonging to God when He in Christ has made us His very own children and loves us with an everlasting love.  God would have us go all the way in enjoying the riches and benefits of Christ.  Thrift and economy need not be practised with regard to living with God.  Moderation and restraint are not necessary in experiencing the treasures of the Saviour.  Claim them all, so that you can enjoy peace with God and to live and die knowing that nothing can separate you from His love to you in Christ Jesus.

But in order to enjoy these blessings we have to grow in the knowledge of sin, deliverance and thankfulness.  This growing is a process that always goes on as long as you live.  It is a course of study from which you never graduate because you never complete it.  The Christian is always discovering more about the subtleties of sin, more about the depth of Christ’s suffering in order to save us, more about glorifying God with thankful service.

Take the knowledge of sin and misery.  There will never be a time in which you have gained full mastery over your sinful actions and desires.  It can happen, for instance, that while you are saying nice things to someone you can have the most awful thoughts about that person.  Or you can be listening to a sermon or singing a hymn and your mind can dwell on some wicked things.  And sometimes you are placed in a situation where you find yourselves imagining doing things that would make you blush with shame if others could read your mind.  But it is when we are near the purity of God that we see our sinful nature most clearly.  When we compare ourselves with others we may not seem to be so bad, especially when these others are really bad.  But compare yourself with God and you see the gap between holiness and unholiness very clearly.

Take the rich young ruler who came to Jesus asking what he had to do to inherit eternal life.  Jesus reminded him of the commandments.  He confessed that he had kept them all from an early age.  This man sincerely thought that he was a good man, like so many do.  But when the Lord exposed his inability to give his riches to the poor, then he realised that deep down he was greedy and materialistic.  He went away sad because he had discovered that he was not such a nice person after all,

Yes, we think we are good for as long as we keep on looking left and right at others whom we judge to be less good than we are.  But you wake up to your moral poverty when you put yourself alongside God’s purity.  His standards give you a true measuring line of what you are really like.

But then there is also the knowledge of being set free from all our sins and misery through Christ.  It’s a wonderful knowledge.  It’s quite different to the knowledge about sin.  That brings pain and anguish.  But knowledge about salvation lifts you up and cheers the heart.  So you would think that knowledge about salvation comes easier than the knowledge about sin.  But surprisingly that is not always the case.  There is a natural tendency in us to disagree with God’s analysis that we are as sinful as He says we are.  It can’t be all that bad, we think.  And it can take many years before a person is sufficiently convicted of his sin to drive him to his knees before God and beg for mercy.  One would think that the pardon offered by God through Christ is welcomed and experienced with deep joy.  But it is not always so because a superficial attitude about one’s sinful nature will result in a superficial attitude about Christ’s deliverance.

But the opposite can also be true.  There are those who find it difficult to believe in Christ saving them because they still see so much sin in their natures.  But if God has drawn you to Christ and has made you see that only He can rescue you, then you may believe that He is your Saviour.  You may believe that He has freed you from all your sins, past, present and future.  You may believe that He has put you into a right relationship with God, the almighty, powerful, holy, and awesome God.  You may believe that you and God are at peace.  The barrier of sin and guilt is gone.  Nailed to the cross, you have it no more.  You are God’s very own child.  You may believe that when you have repented and turned to Christ for your salvation.

Then comes the knowledge of how to be thankful to God for having saved you and having that thankfulness come out in serving Him.  What is there about thankfulness that can make our Christian living different?  Well, let’s say you’ve helped someone out.  Maybe you helped him shift his belongings to his new place; gave someone a hand with a garden job; or whatever.  The next thing that person you helped would like to do for you is to drive you to the airport or take you out to dinner.  Why?  Well, he is thankful to you and genuinely wants to show it.

Now God has pardoned your sins, saved you from hell, and put His Spirit in you to help you not to lose your temper and swear and curse.  He makes you want to be faithful to your marriage partner and to live a happy life under the rule of King Jesus.  Out of thankfulness for all that, and much more, you now ought to be serving God with all stops pulled out and no holding back.  But what do we sometimes hear: do we have to go to church?  Is it my turn to pray – didn’t I do it last time?  I’m too tired to read my Bible.

Knowing and practising how to be thankful to God is a life-long task.  We do it easy and willingly when all things go well.  But when things go well for a long time, then we get used to this and being thankful becomes harder.  Thankfulness to God is also more difficult when there are problems and trials.  We lose our perspective on things.  So we need to also know how to be thankful to God in all circumstances.  Yes, the knowledge of sin, salvation and service does not come to us automatically.  We need teaching and instruction from God’s Word.

3.  Do we need to know about sin, salvation and service separately or simultaneously?

What does the Holy Spirit teach us here from God’s Word?  Do you first have to know about sin, and then go up a step and learn to know about salvation, and then take one more step and get to know about service?  Does it go like that or do you learn knowing about sin, salvation and service all at the same time?

The history of the church has shown that this question is not out of place.  Well-meaning but misguided Christians have taught fellow Christians that in order to experience assurance of eternally belonging to Christ you had to know a great deal about each.  So the broad subjects of sin, deliverance and thankfulness all had to be mastered before you could confess to be a child of God and experience the comfort of that.

Martin Luther was thinking this way at first.  He had learnt a great amount of theology.  He daily taught the Bible to his students.  Yet Luther did not experience the comfort of belonging to Christ.  He did not have assurance of salvation.  He doubted a great deal and was deeply troubled by thinking that God was punishing him for his sins.  Luther was not ignorant of what the Bible said about sin, salvation and serving God.  But it gave him no peace of mind.  Now maybe the environment and the attitudes of his time contributed to his struggles.  But we’re not completely free from these attitudes ourselves.

Even today people sometimes hold back from openly confessing that they belong to Christ because they feel that they don’t know enough.  They are not just troubled by ignorance but by a thinking that says: you ought to know much more about sin, salvation and service before you are a real Christian.  They blame themselves for not having enough assurance, not always feeling free to go to the Lord’s Supper, to not yet being ready to make a public profession of faith, to not yet be very open and positive about being Christian.  But they haven’t got the wherewithal to do something about it.  They smile a little, kind of shrug their shoulders, and agree with you that things ought to change.  But they don’t change.  They stay the same.  Spiritually they remain crippled because to know about sin, salvation and service, is like a big mountain and they feel they just can’t climb it.  They think they have to be on the top and feel bad that they are closer to the bottom.  The mistake here is the false idea that you’ve got to have a good grasp of the whole lot before you can enjoy any of it.

The other mistake is thinking that one must first know about sin.  When you know about sin sufficiently then you graduate to the next step – deliverance.  When you know all about that, you go on to the final step – serving God.  Only when you have reached the third step will you be able to say that you are a real Christian.  When one of their fellow believers falls into some bad sin which is rather open and public, then they say: there you are, here I was thinking that he was a real Christian but really he is still at the bottom.  One day they, themselves, might commit a grievous sin, and deep is their shame and embarrassment.  They feel like crawling under a rock, never to be seen again.

Or a fellow believer is thought to have arrived at step three a bit too quickly.  Why, only a short time ago he confessed to being a sinner before God and now he is already so full of praise and thanks to God.  It seems a bit superficial.  Does he really know what it means to be thankful?  Has he learnt enough yet about that middle step – salvation?

But these three things – sin, salvation and service – do not come one after the other.  We experience them all the same time and many times in our Christian lives.  In the morning you can be thankful to God for another day and for the salvation you have received in Christ.  You want to serve the Lord that day and every other day.  But by mid-morning you lost your temper over something.  Maybe it was the kids.  Maybe someone at work got on your back and you lost your cool.  By lunchtime you have calmed down a bit but you feel bad because your joyful service of God is gone.  The Holy Spirit does not leave you alone, however, and you find a quiet moment somewhere to ask for forgiveness.  As you pray about it you feel reassured that God forgives you because you know the Bible teaches that.  Feeling free from the sin of that morning and knowing Christ has taken your guilt away, you are glad God still loves you and that makes you want to serve Him again out of thankfulness.

So, all in one day you began with thankfulness to God, then committed a sin and felt awful, then confessed it and asked for deliverance which you received because God is merciful and Christ is the Saviour, and then ended up being thankful again.  Now there are many days like that.  That’s how the Christian life often is.  I am not saying that’s how it should be.  We ought always to live thankfully before God.

But God’s Word is sometimes more kind and understanding to us than our fellow Christians who expect too much from us.  God teaches us that having and growing in assurance about being the saved children of God, we must continually carry with us knowledge of sin, of deliverance and of thankfulness.  Then the only comfort of belonging to Christ with body and soul, in life and death, will stay with us whether we are on top of the mountain, or somewhere halfway, or even down the bottom.

Amen.