Understanding Assurance: True vs. False Salvation

I remember once sharing the Gospel to a man in Cincinnati, and I asked him the evangelistic – Evangelism Explosion diagnostic questions, and I began with the first question. “Have you come to the place in your spiritual life where you know for sure that when you die you’re going to go to heaven?” And this man didn’t flinch. He looked me straight in the eye, and he says, “Oh no,” he says, “I’m sure I’m not.” He said, “I’m sure I’m going to hell.” [00:01:37]

And what Paul is saying there is that in God’s natural revelation, not only in the Bible – one doesn’t have to be exposed to biblical preaching to be aware of this – but as God writes His law on the hearts of people, implants into the human mind His Word by way of conscience, people deep down know that they are culpable for their behavior, and they know that they are out of fellowship with their Creator. [00:03:13]

But then you have the second person and that is the person who is saved and knows that he is saved. That is, this person has full assurance of being in a state of grace and in a state of salvation, and we’re going to be talking further as we proceed here in this series on how it is possible to gain from Scripture and in our relationship with God a full assurance of our being in a state of grace. [00:05:42]

Then you have other people who can’t tell you the year or within five years when they became Christians. Ruth Graham, for example, Billy’s wife, doesn’t know when she became a Christian. And we have a problem in the church where we have a tendency to project our own personal experiences and try to make them normative for everybody else, so that people who have had a sudden dramatic Damascus road conversion, where you can name the day and the hour sometimes become suspicious of people who haven’t had that kind of experience. [00:08:48]

Now, here’s where the plot thickens and becomes a little bit problematic. Nobody is half regenerate or semi-regenerate; you’re either born of the Spirit of God or you’re not, and regeneration, which is that work of God by which we are transformed from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light, is a real conversion, and regeneration happens immediately by the power of God, by the work of the Holy Spirit. It happens instantly, and you’re either in that state or you’re not in that state. [00:09:46]

And that’s why it’s very dangerous when we create categories by which we suspect people who don’t meet our experience. In fact, as much as I talk about my conversion experience – I can tell you with certainty the day and the hour of my conversion experience – but that experience may not actually correspond to the work of God in my soul. God, the Holy Spirit may have regenerated me a week before that, a month before that, five years before that, before I experienced the reality of what had happened internally. [00:11:02]

One of the most dangerous things you can do as a Christian is to determine your theology by your experience, because your experience and my experience, neither of those is normative for the Christian life. We have to determine our theology from the Word of God, not from what we feel. And not only that, we are open to misunderstanding and misinterpreting the meaning and significance of the experiences that we go through. [00:12:08]

And so that’s a caveat that we need to be aware of as we work through this whole business of the assurance of salvation, because if we rest our assurance on an experience and not on the Word of God, we’re asking for all kinds of doubts and problems to assail us in our pilgrimage. Again, people have experience of feeling warm fuzzies in their spirit, in their soul, and say, well, I felt something that night and therefore I’m converted. It might have been indigestion, and we don’t know that. [00:13:05]

There are those who are unsaved who know they are saved. The fourth category, people who are not in a state of grace but who think they’re in a state of grace. They’re not saved, but they are assured that they are saved. Now, we’re going to spend some time on trying to unwrap that particular group and see why it is that people can have a false sense of assurance because it’s just as important for us to be able to understand the counterfeit if we’re going to be able to recognize the authentic. [00:15:18]

And in that sense, the church has been aided historically by false doctrine, by heresies, not because heresies are good or false doctrine is good, but what happens in the history of the church is that every time a serious heresy arises and the church has to address it, it forces the church to examine the truth much more carefully. We wouldn’t have a Bible today to read from, presumably, if it weren’t for the heretic Marcion. [00:16:29]

So maybe that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about these people who exude confidence that they’re on their way to heaven, that they are Christians, they’re sure of their salvation, they don’t worry about their salvations – or their salvation. They have assurance, but it’s false. So this is what creates the tension and the anxiety that we’re trying to deal with in this series, particularly as we compare number two and number four – this group comprises the people who are saved and have the assurance of salvation; this group comprises the people who are not saved but have the assurance of salvation. [00:20:19]

And the tendency for human beings when it comes to assurances of truth claims is that there is a broad continuum on which our assurance operates. For example, somebody could say to you, “Do you believe that God exists?” Now how – there are many ways you can answer that question. You could say, “No, I don’t.” Or you could say, “I don’t think so.” Or you could say, “I don’t know. I hope so.” Or you could say, “Maybe.” Or you could say, “Yes, I believe in God.” Or you could say, “Of course I believe in God.” Each of those answers describes a different level of intensity of confidence that attends a proposition or an assertion. [00:21:53]