Contemporary Need for Consider­ing Assurance⤒🔗

The centrality of saving faith, the need for personal trust in God, the Reformers' questions, and biblical tensions relative to faith and assur­ance — all of this and more guaran­tees that assurance of faith will ever remain a contemporary subject. It is paramount that we ask ourselves: How can I experience ever greater measures of personal assurance of faith?

Nevertheless, you may ask: What does all this have to do with our needs today? Do we still need to wrestle with scriptural tensions and faith/as­surance questions in our secular age? I believe assurance is a more critical doctrine than ever before for at least five reasons.

First, the fruits of genuine assur­ance are, for the most part, sorely lacking in the contemporary church. The church is crippled with a com­parative absence of strong and full assurance and, perhaps worst of all, most of us are scarcely aware of it. We live in a day of minimal, not maximal, assurance. How do we know this? As­surance is known by its fruits: a close life of fellowship with God; a tender, filial relationship with God; a thirsting after God and spiritual exercises that extol Him. Assurance is not a self-given, but a Spirit-applied certainty which moves the believer Godward through Christ. Assurance is the op­posite of self-satisfaction and seculari­zation. Assurance is God-centered; it evidences godliness, while not relying on personal righteousness or service for justification. Wherever assurance is vibrant, a concern for God's honor is present. Mission-mindedness prevails. Assured believers view heaven as their home and long for the second advent of Christ and their translation to glory (2 Tim. 4:6-8).

Compared to the Reformers and post-Reformers, the church is seri­ously impoverished in her spiritual exercises. The desire to fellowship with God, the sense of the reality of heaven, and the relish for God's glory, appear to fall short of a former day. Whenever the church's emphasis on earthly good dominates the conviction that she is traveling through this world on her way to God and glory, assurance is at a low ebb (Heb. 11).

Second, assurance of faith is sorely needed today for it is inseparable from genuine revival and conviction of sin. Revival is sorely needed in our day and we ought not forget that every true re­vival has been connected with the recovery of assuring faith. How true this was, for example, of Martin Luther! Read Luther on Galatians. Did he not burn with indignation for the way the church left people in uncertainty about salvation? Luther teemed with the as­surance that flows out of the gospel. Search his writings 475 years later and you still feel the power of what he is saying. In Luther's day there was a great recovery of assurance.

There is, of course, another reason why assurance revives in times of awakening. The first precursor and forerunner of every revival is convic­tion of sin; sinners become bowed down with the burden of need and guilt. When guilt is a conscious expe­rience, the most precious thing in the world is to be persuaded of forgiveness in Christ. That is why assurance is always brought back to the foreground in the face of real soul-need.

Third, strong assurance is necessary for you as college or university stu­dents if you are to be God-honoring students in days like these — days of great secularization and controversy. The gospel has always been difficult to live out in the world. But there are times and seasons when gospel-oppo­sition is especially intense. We are surely living in such a time. We are living in a bruising time. We are called to be lights on the hill in the thick of spiritual battle, while the devil is spearheading apostasy on all sides and especially from within higher education. Through satanic impulse, the world has not only taken over colleges and universities, but is also invading the church. If revival is to dawn, it will almost certainly involve young people — particularly college and university students, as the history of revivals affirms. Let us pray earnestly for revival through the power of Spirit-worked assurance in our hearts.

Fourth, we live in a day when the doctrine of assurance is sorely needed because doctrine itself is largely de­spised. Few understand Martin Luther's assertion: "Doctrine is heaven." Assurance is the nerve center of doc­trine put in "use," as the Puritans would say. Assurance affiliates with the work of the Spirit in relation to the doctrines of faith, repentance, justification, sanctification, conver­sion, adoption, sealing, perseverance, anointing, witnessing, obedience, sin, grace, atonement, and union with Christ. Assurance is inseparable from the marks and steps of grace. It touches on the issue of divine sover­eignty and human responsibility, is intimately connected with Holy Scripture, and flows out of election, the promises of God, and the cove­nant of grace. It is fortified by preach­ing, the sacraments, and prayer. Assurance is broadsweeping in scope, profound in depth, and glori­ous in height. As Dr. Clair Davis has said, "You could almost write a sys­tematic theology under the theme and framework of assurance."

The contemporary church is un­dergoing a crisis of confidence and authority, and therefore of assurance. A renewal of assurance is sorely needed. If such assurance were more widely experienced, the church's vital­ity would be renewed, and she would live more zealously for the kingdom of Christ in all spheres of life.

Finally, our difficulties are com­pounded in our culture by the powerful emphasis on "feeling." "How we feel" takes predominance over "how we be­lieve." This spirit has infiltrated the church also, which for the most part is bowing before the shrine of human feel­ing rather than before the living God. This spirit is most notable in what we call "the charismatic or pentecostal movement," which appeals to emotion in protest against a formal, lifeless Christi­anity. We profit little by reacting against the charismatic movement without un­derstanding why it has such a worldwide appeal. Its appeal is related to the lack of genuine assurance of faith which mani­fests itself in godly living.

We have a special responsibility in this regard to show a better way. Happily, we do not have to start from scratch. Our scriptural, Reformed, experimental faith properly marries "head" and "heart" knowledge, faith and feeling. It is well-known that numerous post-Reformation orthodox theologians and Puritan pas­tors wrestled in their preaching and writ­ing with ascertaining the precise relationship of the Christian's personal as­surance of salvation and his saving faith. Their labor for theological precision in this area gave rise to a fine-tuned technical vocabulary which included such distinc­tions as assurance of faith and assurance of sense; the direct (actus directus) and reflexive (actus reflectus) acts of faith; the practical (syllogismus practices) and mysti­cal (syllogismus mysticus) syllogisms; the principle (habitus) and acts (actus) of faith; and the being and well-being of faith. Such terminology was used to elaborate upon addressing assurance with regard to its possibilities, kinds, degrees, foundations, experiences, means, obstacles, and fruits.

The Puritan doctrine of assurance was formally codified by the Westminster As­sembly in chapter 18 of the WCF. This chapter contains four sections: 18.1 ad­dresses the possibility of assurance; 18.2, the foundation of assurance; 18.3, the cul­tivation of assurance; 18.4, the renewal of assurance. For our purposes, we will limit ourselves to a consideration of 18.2.