The Doubting
There is no more common question in the church than, “How do I know I’m a Christian?” It is a question surrounded by much fear, asked with much longing, bursting from a heart starved for hope. If you have asked that question, I have written this series on assurance of salvation especially for you.
In part 1, I defined assurance of faith. In part 2, I spoke to the Dead and the Deceived. This post, part 3, is for the Doubting and the Delighted.
If this is you, there are ten-thousand wonderful things to say to you. But the first is this: the character of God is steadfast love.
God is a Father who Loves His Children
God is the Father of all believers, and He desires them to be assured of His love. Why does He do this? Because He is our heavenly Father. As a perfect Father, He desires for His children to be assured of their salvation. He is not holding out of us, keeping us at arm’s length, afraid to get too close. He knows literally everything about you—past, present, and future. And He is involved in literally everything in your life. He is loving you, dear child of God, all the day and night. He accomplishes this through many means, but I will cover just three.
His Word
First, He has given us His Word that we may know Him. To be specific, both the book of John and 1 John were written for the expressed purpose of bringing God’s people to assurance.
If you desire assurance, read the Word. Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Do you crave the Scriptures? Do you feast your soul upon it? Read, study, pray, memorize, meditate so much so that you can genuinely say with the psalmist, “O how I love Your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Psalm 119:97). Start with John, then 1 John, then read the gospels over and over to see the majesty of Jesus Christ. Whatever your Scriptural intake, I daresay you—I—need more.
His Spirit
Second, He has give us His Spirit so that would know that we know Him.
Every Christian, now matter how big or how small their faith, is indwelt by the Spirit of God. He is the Third Person of the Trinity, and He works in our lives to cause us to bear fruit, to put off sin and put on righteousness, and here in Romans 8, to convince us that we are truly children of God, heirs of salvation. God Himself testifies to you, dear Christian, that you are His.
His Love
Third, He has loved us with an eternal, magnanimous, overflowing, abounding love.
1 John 3:1-2 (ESV) 1 See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
An earthly father wants his children to be secure in his love. A foster dad once told me that when a kid he was fostering first moved in, the kid would secretly stash food away in his bedroom. Why? Because from experience at other homes, the kid had learned that he couldn’t be sure when his next meal was. He had to fend for himself. But this foster dad is a member of my church, a man of great love, and with tears in his eyes he expressed, “He doesn’t have to do that. All I have is his! I love him!”
If an earthly father has that sort of love towards his children, does not our Heavenly Father love us even more? He desires us to believe that the most solid, secure, immovable thing in our entire world is His steadfast love, to be assured that we are His and He is ours. God is a Father who loves His children.
The Delighted
God is a Savior who Loves to Save
In addition to being a Father to His own, God is also a Savior who loves to save. After all, God has only one “natural” son—Jesus, the Son of God. Everyone else is an adopted child. How did all these sinners get into the family? God Himself welcomes them, with arms wide open.
Now we know intuitively that God is holy, opposed to sin. He is the judge of all the earth, and He will judge rightly. We know this from Scripture but also from our conscience; even when no one on earth sees or hears our sin, the weight of guilt and shame crushes us.
But even as God is opposed to sin, He welcomes sinners to His family. That’s scandalous! How? Because He is, by nature a Savior, a Savior who loves to save.
The very first words out of Jesus’ mouth in the book of Mark are “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). Why does He say that? Because “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). God loves to save. He chose us—undeserving, wretched sinners—in Christ before the foundation of the world for salvation, that we would be holy and blameless before him” (cf. Eph 1:4). The adopting of undeserving sinners into the holy family of God was not a reaction, not an accident but an eternal plan designed in the mind of God for His fame and glory—and our good.
Even after becoming a Christian, you will still sin. Honestly, sometimes we will sin in worse ways than unbelievers. We have more light! We are more responsible! We know the love of the Father, the grace of Christ, the fellowship of the Spirit and yet we still sin! We’re terrible! But you, dear Christian, are broken, humble, contrite because of your sin—and you come to God. Our God is a happy God, a happy God who loves to save.
We were made to find rest, delight, satisfaction, hope, pleasure, joy supremely in God. When we turn to everything else, we always come up empty. God alone satisfies the ache for meaning and purpose. You were made to delight in Him. God alone is worth living for. Everything and everyone else leads to death. You were made to be happy in Him.
The question is, do we believe it?
If you are a Christian, you truly believe this truly, but not yet fully. We say with that father, “I believe! Help my unbelief.” Let me get really practical. If you struggle to find satisfaction and delight in God, think upon the rich blessings we have in God through Jesus Christ.
So if you want to see God as your supreme desire, God as your only satisfaction, meditate on who and what Christ is in the gospel. We love Him because He loved us first.
If you are a not a Christian, all this talk about loving God and finding delight in Him probably seems like the strangest thing in the world. But to you I say, what else really satisfies? What do you live for, and will it last? I plead with you: Christ, Jesus Christ, He is the only God who is worthy to live for; He will set you free!
To glorify God means to magnify Him, to treat Him as awesome, as worthy of praise, to worship Him.
When we delight in God, enjoy God, treasure God, are happy in God, find satisfaction in God, set our affections upon God, supremely, we glorify, exult, celebrate Him as He is: the wondrous God who is worthy of all praise, honor, and glory, as the all-sufficient, all-satisfying, all-captivating God over all.
When, by His grace, we do that, everything in our lives revolves around Him. We are transformed into God-worshipping, God-centered, God-saturated, God-entranced, God-obsessed Christians. And when He is supreme, the good gifts He gives to us find their proper place as love gifts that remind us of the Giver’s love. And even when, in love, our God takes some of those gifts away during this life, we rejoice, for we have Him who is our supreme delight.
