The Autumn of Life VI: Intentionality Before the Edge of the Grave

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and we're walking through the last letter in a series of five letters by Archibald Alexander, a pastor and theologian and the president of Princeton Theological Seminary in the first half of the 19th century.

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This comes from a book called Thoughts on Religious Experience which was published by Banner of Truth. It comes from an appendix in this book where he writes five letters to aging

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Christians or we could say to believers in the autumn of their life. In the fifth letter, he has finally come to this issue of death as he did in the fourth letter.

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But in the fifth letter, he gives some things we could do and he asked the question, is there anything that we can do to prepare for death so that it might be more comfortable for us so that we might find greater safety as we pass through that last aspect of human existence here on earth?

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And he says that there are things we can do and he says we want to set about the work in good earnest.

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So we want to be in earnest, very intentional, very active now before we come to the edge of the grave.

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And he warns that many believers that he has known who throughout their entire life enjoyed the joy of walking with God, they enjoyed a sense of assurance that they were his and he was theirs, but as they approached death in those final days or weeks or months, as the body began to fail and the mind began to fail, he said not all of them but many of them suffered from a lack of assurance.

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They began to doubt whether they were really the Lord's. And so he felt that there were things that you could do in leading up to that time when the body is not racked with pain, when the mind is still clear, what can you do so that that's not your experience?

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Or what can you do that, you know, as much as lies within your ability, that would not be your experience?

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Because it's not essential to the Christian that the final days are filled with this doubt.

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I do remember reading John Newton speaking of his wife that he just thought the world of.

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She had a very painful disease, and she was dying slowly, and the medicine, the opiate that they gave her didn't help, and so she had to face the pain without any real painkiller.

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And she would, even the slightest noise in the house, if Newton was home walking through the house, it would agitate her, and she was sharp with him as she was in constant pain.

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And he understood that, and he would try at times to read the Scripture to her quietly, and she couldn't bear it because of the pain in her head.

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And then if he would try to talk to her about the hope that there is in Christ, she would despair, and she would tell him that she didn't know if she had any hope in Christ.

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And that, for him, was above and beyond any of the other sorrows. There was the sorrow of losing her, there was the sorrow of her constant pain, which he could not interrupt or cure, and then there was the sorrow of this spiritual doubt.

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And he cried out to the Lord. He felt that that was the lowest point for him. And God heard his prayer, and she did regain real assurance that she was

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Christ's, and Christ was hers. So, Newton was thankful for that, that she received that before she died.

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But, what can we do now? Well, he doesn't explain, Archibald Alexander doesn't explain why this seems to be the case in many believers, that toward the end they might struggle with assurance.

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He does kind of hint that it may be related to the physical issues and not always a spiritual problem.

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A true believer who has enjoyed strong assurance and a walk that's joyful with the

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Lord throughout their adult life might, because of the physical ailments and the physiological impact that that has on us, they might struggle with assurance at the end.

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So, better to give diligence, he says. Now, give diligence. To make your calling and election sure.

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Give diligence to search out what is the foundation of your hope. Do you have a biblical foundation, or have you accepted the cardboard foundation of cultural religion?

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Have you deceived yourself, or are you resting in the truth? And he'll give us some good questions to help guide us through that, and some warnings about how not to abuse that question.

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Well, he says, search it out now while you still have a clear mind and a body that's not plagued by illness.

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With the issue of assurance, he warns us not to overstate what assurance is, as well as not to undervalue it.

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Some, he said, consider assurance to be some type of perfect, uninterrupted joy with God, that there is no sorrow, no doubt whatsoever.

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And he feels, rightly so, that that's not the biblical picture of assurance. There will be the ups and downs.

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Assurance is a work that God does within us, and because it's something that occurs within us, like sanctification, it is imperfect.

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It's not the objective work that God does outside of us, though that is the focus for our assurance.

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It is an experiential thing. Do I feel? Am I living in the grip of this solid assurance?

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Well, he says, because it occurs within you, it's going to be imperfect. So, if you're looking for perfect, uninterrupted heights of joy, then you are probably looking for the wrong thing.

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If you have true faith, if you are truly a repenter, if you see the evidences of the life of God working in your soul of regeneration, then even if it's a small and imperfect evidence, if it's there, it's evidence that you are the

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Lord's. When we look at assurance, we shouldn't think of the issue of degree, not when we're trying to answer the question,

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Am I His? Is He mine? So, how much fruit, how much evidence, how much faith, how much repentance, how much grief over sin, how much joy in Christ?

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It's not a matter of degree. The question is not degree, but existence, because in the unregenerate, unbelieving, unrepentant, unconverted life, there is no real joy in Christ.

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There's no real love for God's Word, no real hunger for God Himself, no real love for the

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Christian because they bear the image of your Savior, no real obedience, no real fruit of the

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Spirit. So, it's not how much of these things do we have, but do we have them at all?

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Well, when we read Archibald Alexander, we might find some of his statements a bit alarming because he really does press home the issue of assurance, and he doesn't kind of just whitewash it and say,

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Well, if you agree with the doctrines of grace and you went to church all your life, well, of course you're a Christian, and you should never look at yourself.

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He does encourage people in this letter to search their own souls, to see what is the foundation of their hope.

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Now, he's not saying that what goes on in your own soul is to be the great foundation, but be honest, what is the foundation of your hope?

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Now, Alexander was influenced by the Puritans as well as by Scripture, and the

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Puritans dealt a lot with this issue of, How do I know that I'm Christ's? I think that we can trace that to a couple of issues in the context that they were pastoring in, and I think that the

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Puritans had the right answers. The issues they were pastoring within, the context is this, that they were dealing with people who were

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Anglicans. Ninety -four percent of the people in England and Wales would have been officially members of the state church.

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They're citizens, and they're baptized into the state church, and those were, in a sense, wed.

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So, you're dealing with people whose hope, they've been told, is that they have been baptized into the church, and that the

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Spirit of God has worked in those waters to make them alive. Kind of, in a sense, if you look at the liturgy of the

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Anglican church, the ancient liturgy, and not the Thirty -Nine Articles, the official doctrinal statement, the

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Thirty -Nine Articles are much better, but the liturgy shows some weaknesses, and one of the weaknesses is it presents baptism as if it might be regenerative.

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Thank you, God, the priest is supposed to say, for working through these waters. The Spirit of God has changed this child.

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So, if you're in the Anglican church, the foundation of your hope is, I was baptized as an infant, and maybe

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I need to do a little better, and maybe I'll barely get in, but I'm one of those Christians, so I'm secure.

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And so, the Puritan is preaching to the people and saying, that's no reason for you to rest your hope in, you know, you cannot hope in being baptized as an infant.

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That's not what the Scripture gives you is your hope, so what does the Scripture give? And the

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Puritans have to deal with that. The other aspect is the spiritual context of their preaching.

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When they preached biblical views of God, well, as a person's view of God increases, then they feel that the gap between themselves and God increases, and as the gap increases, you need an ever equally increasing view of the mediatorial work of Christ.

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I remember, I believe it was Mr. Richard Owen Roberts, preaching here in New Albany, said, as your view of God increases, and the gap between you and God increases, you're going to have to fill that with something.

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I mean, you can fill it with self -righteousness, you can attempt to fill it with religion, or words, or Puritan books, or theological phrases.

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He said, but the only thing that will fill it is an ever increasing view of Christ, who bridges the gap, the

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God -man and his labors, bridges the gap between us and God. So, if you don't have an increasingly clear view of the majesty and sufficiency, and the infinite worth, and the incomprehensible depths, and breadth, and height, and length of the love of God reaching you through Christ, then as you learn more about God, you will despair, and you will doubt, even if you're a

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Christian. So, labor to get equally clear views of the labor of God through his

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Son for our salvation, as you're getting clear views of the majesty of the

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Triune God Himself. One question we can ask ourselves is, where do you go when the

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Scripture, or a sermon, or a book shakes you, and you wonder, am

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I even a Christian at all? I think many Christians ask that question, and feeling the need to ask that question should not by itself make you think you're not a

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Christian. Where do you go? When the unbeliever is shaken by the statements of Scripture, they often, like Adam and Eve, will run and hide behind a spiritual tree, because they feel that they're naked before God, and they're ashamed.

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So, religion is fine, and sermons are fine, and going through the motions, that's fine, and giving, and teaching, and even leading a church as a pastor is fine, as long as God doesn't draw near and strip away their false righteousness.

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But as soon as God does that, then they run from God. And the tendency of the unbeliever, who's religious, is to run away from the

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God that has just exposed their sin, and to kind of shout out from behind some wall, some tree that they think hides their shame from God, and to shout out to God and say,

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God, don't worry, let me take care of this embarrassing thing that I've just seen.

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And then I'll come back to you. But the believer does the opposite.

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You may feel like running away from a holy God, but your heart will cry out to you and say, where else can we go?

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He's the one with words of life. And the Spirit of God will stir your heart to hope against hope, and to run back toward the

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God you have sinned against, back to the King, who is your King, your

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Savior. But you have sinned against Him. You have grieved Him, and yet you run toward the grieved

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Judge, the grieved King, the grieved Father, because of what

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He has done for sinners, because of what He has promised, and you cast yourself on His mercy again.

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So what do you do when sin and the sight of your sin shakes your conscience?

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There are a number of things that I think we can stop and say about assurance, and some of these are in his letter, and some of these

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I just want to throw in. And then we're going to come, finally, to his questions, where he probes the person who is facing the grave.

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So let me give you a number of things, five things that we can consider to have a balanced view of biblical assurance, that we are

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His. First, the primary act of faith is not to look at yourself and to see if you're a Christian or not.

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The primary act of faith is to look away from self. Faith is kind of not a boomerang.

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Faith is not a mirror. Faith is a window that looks out. It's not like the boomerang that always comes back to me, and it's not like a mirror that always looks at me.

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There are times to investigate our own souls with the Scripture. The Scripture is a mirror of our soul, but we want to turn the mirror into a window.

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We see ourselves in Scripture, and then we look through that Scripture to the work of Christ, and we get the facts clear again from beginning to end.

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What is the work of redemption that is so perfect that it could satisfy a holy

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God when He sees even this? What hope do I have? So the primary act of faith is to look away from self and look to Christ.

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And though you must at times see, what is the foundation of my hope? What am I really hoping in?

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We could say ten looks to Christ for every one look at self. It is easy to embrace a new version of self -righteousness.

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Not the kind that we had before we cried out to the Lord, before we heard the gospel, but maybe a gospelized self -righteousness.

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And here's what I mean. You can start to think that Jesus plus feeling really, really, really bad for your sins together will pay for your sin and will make you right with God.

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Valuing your sorrow and shame for the sin you've committed more than you value the cross and obedience of Christ is a sure sign of self -righteousness that has decided to wear a new set of Christian clothes.

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So beware of that. Second, the secondary act of faith is what we call the reflexive look.

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And that is, it is, it looks back. But again, we're not looking to see how strong is my faith, how deep is my repentance, how consistent or how large is my love and my obedience.

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But do I see that at all in my life? Not degree, but the existence of the kinds of things that God works in the soul in the new birth.

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John talks about them. There's a new belief system. There's a new love, love to God, love to the people that belong to God because they belong to God.

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And a new obedience, a new allegiance. Next, assurance that you possess this life in Christ is a beautiful thing, but it is not equal to possessing the life in Christ.

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Here's what I mean. In the Scriptures, there are reasons, and in Christian history we see examples, there are reasons for us to understand that possessing something spiritually is not always synonymous or equal to understanding that we possess it.

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In other words, you may have genuinely cried out to the Lord, and you do not presently feel a sense of assurance in that, and yet you are the

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Lord's. Now, you don't want to live an entire life without assurance and say, well, I don't live on my emotions.

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Well, I would be really concerned if I lived a life professing to love and follow

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Christ, and I felt nothing ever for Christ. And I would be very concerned if I said,

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I don't remember ever not being a Christian. I have had friends who have said that, and I was so convinced they were believers.

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I thought, well, perhaps they're just not aware of the season in which God dealt with them and brought them from death to life, but I have never yet met someone who said that to me who did not eventually walk away from a profession of faith and become an apostate.

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You don't have to know the day or the hour on your watch that you first turned to Christ in hope and turned away from the emptiness of self -righteousness and the world.

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You don't have to be able to say, I know I was converted or born again or saved at this moment, because the awareness of the event is not the same thing as the event.

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But I think all of us who would say, I am Christ, you do need to be able to look back and see a season.

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During this time in my life, the Lord began a great work, and I know that it resulted in faith and repentance, a faith and repentance that continues until today.

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So, ask the Lord if you lack assurance to give you that. It is a gift that I think we have as a birthright, but it does fluctuate, and do not despair if in the moment you lack that.

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Since assurance can fluctuate, and since sometimes we may have actually done the thing without a clear awareness that we have done the thing at that very moment,

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I think that we also have to say that assurance is not essential to faith, and this has been debated through the years.

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But generally, careful theologians come down on the side that assurance is the fruit of faith, but it's not of the essence of faith.

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George Whitefield and John Wesley both, when they were converted, were converted in such an extraordinary way, they could not imagine a person saying,

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I have gone from death to life, without possessing a perfect and full assurance that that is exactly what has happened.

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But that was the way God dealt with them. And again, I don't think we should be satisfied to be able to look back on our life and say, well,

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I must always have been a Christian. But to say that if you don't have a full, robust, almost perfect assurance right now, then you cannot have faith right now, because assurance is essentially what faith is.

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Then I think that that's a theological danger, and certainly in the practice of the

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Christian life, it can lead to unnecessary paralysis. Assurance is the fruit of faith.

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Assurance dries up when we walk far from God as Christians, if we begin to drift. Part of,

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I believe, of the disciplinary actions of God is we lose that sweet sense of belonging to Him, but that does not mean that we have lost

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Him. And it is meant to drive us back to God, but God never designed for us to have a full and sweet assurance of our belonging to Him, and our soul is right with our

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God while purposefully choosing to live against Him. A fifth thing about assurance.

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If assurance is what you are seeking, I think that's dangerous, because what tends to happen is the enemy will offer you some form of assurance, but perhaps not the biblical reason for assurance.

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And if assurance is all you are wanting, as soon as you get some type of assurance, okay,

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I'm right with God, fine. If that's all you wanted, then that's the end of your spiritual journey.

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It's like walking a path, and the destination is a life lived with Christ, by Christ, for love of Christ.

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But if you're only wanting to know, am I going to heaven or hell, then it's like the enemy sets up these little stands along the road, these little spiritual quick stops that you can come and you can get assurance.

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And if you get that assurance, and that's all you wanted, then that's the end of loving Christ. It's the end of knowing

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Christ, of hungering for Christ, of yearning to please

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Christ, and that being the ambition of your life, that all evaporates because you got what you wanted. Whereas if assurance is desired, but it's not your great goal, your treasure is

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Christ Himself, to know Him, to love Him, to walk with Him by His grace more and more each day.

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If that's your goal, then He will give you the assurance you need, but you won't stop when you get it, because that was never the great treasure.

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The treasure was the person, to know and to live for the person. I think that's important.

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I've seen it happen many times, and particularly in the first church I pastored, there was a young man who showed no interest in Jesus.

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His mother was very earnest, but the son was not. He was a 17 -year -old, and he had no interest in giving up his life for God.

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But he came to me after a while, and he was bothered about his soul, and he was worried about his ultimate end, and he wanted to know that he could have peace with God.

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So I talked with him about his soul, and I met with him a number of times. A friend of mine came and visited during that time, a very godly friend, and the young man was there meeting with me, and my friend met with him.

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He was an older Christian, and my friend, I think mistakenly, led this young man to a sinner's prayer.

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You can use the sinner's prayer to cry out to the Lord. Many have. It's not because you prayed the prayer that you saved yourself, but it is through the prayer that you really expressed a repenting, believing soul, and the hope in Christ.

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So you came to Christ through that prayer, and God was merciful. But it seemed to me that that did not occur with this young man.

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All he wanted to know was that he was right. So he prayed the sinner's prayer, he professed that in front of the church, and I unwisely baptized him immediately.

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And what happened following that was a bitter lesson for me, but I hope I have learned.

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And that is, it seems that that was all he wanted to know. Tell me I'm going to heaven, tell me I'm okay with God, and that will be it.

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And so assurance was his goal, not Christ. And so being baptized, having professed faith, he felt that the whole church, and me as a pastor, that we had told him, you are right with God.

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We gave him assurance. Immediately following that, within weeks, he quit coming to the midweek meeting.

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He went from going to no meetings to every meeting in the church. He almost attended the elderly lady's

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Bible study, because he was so terrified. I need to know that I'm okay with God. And so after the baptism, he began to drop off the meetings.

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He began to miss the midweek meeting, and then he began to miss the Sunday night meetings occasionally, and then he didn't go to either of those, and only on Sunday morning would he show up.

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Then he began to miss those occasionally, and no matter what I said to him, eventually he quit going to anything at all.

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Why? I think it was clear. What he wanted was someone to tell him, to assure him he was right with God.

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That's what he wanted from church. That's what he wanted from God. Once he got that, he didn't need anything else.

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So be careful. What about dying grace? Well, Alexander talks about this.

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He says God does give grace equal to the need in the life of a believer.

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So as death does bring extraordinary needs, as facing death brings extraordinary fears, you should be confident that your

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God will provide extraordinary grace, what we call dying grace, greater levels of help and comfort and strength and greater enjoyment of Him because of the greater needs that you face.

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So rely on Him, he said, and you will not be disappointed. Now he gives a warning.

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Alexander says that many professors, many people who say they love

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Christ, have no comfort in their religion because they have no religion.

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So they look at themselves and they find no comfort because there is nothing of the work of God within them. So he says be careful not to unnecessarily or unbiblically comfort those who are facing death and they are religious people, perhaps they're church members, but they have no real foundation for hope.

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Do not give them a comfort that God would not give them. And yet, he says, he abhorred the kind of censorious spirit, the kind of harsh

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Christian spirit that would damn all believers who struggled for assurance in these last days before death.

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So he said, do not do that, do not be overly harsh, do not expect perfect fruit and do not give despair to those who are weak believers, but they are believers.

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He goes on to say that while he abhors that harsh attitude toward struggling believers, he says, quote, all my experience and observation lead me to believe that in our day the foolish virgins of the parable, those who felt that they were right with God but weren't right with God, the foolish virgins constitute a large portion of the visible church.

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So be careful. He even says it would be better to unknowingly, accidentally, we would say, add some sorrows to a true believer during this time rather than to remove the sorrows that would lead to faith and repentance in a false convert, in a hypocrite.

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So you don't want to make the true believer's life more difficult. You want them to find all the comfort that they are given in Christ.

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But, he said, if you had to err, it would be better to make the true Christian a bit miserable rather than to make the false

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Christian falsely hopeful. God will comfort his children even if we blow it, but God will not comfort the lost no matter what we say.

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You know the famous passage in Romans 8, if God is for us, who can be against us? But also if God is against that person, what does it matter if you are for them or if the whole world is for them?

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They must deal directly with God. So we don't want to give false comfort. We don't want to give false hope.

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Then he gives a series of questions and he says, ask yourself these things now before the mind is confused and the body is wracked with pain.

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Do not judge your spiritual condition. Now again, we're trying to find what is the foundation of my hope. He says, do not look at the strength of the emotions you felt when you look back at that moment of what you hope is true conversion.

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Just because you were very emotional doesn't mean it was true and just because you were less emotional doesn't mean it was an empty profession of faith.

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And don't look at your emotions right now. That's not a good guide. So what do we look for?

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Well, he says, look for a habitual change that God has been working in your life over the years or however long it's been since you cried out to Christ for mercy.

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So you've run to Christ, you've hoped in Christ. What changes have there been in your life?

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A, that gentle, habitual growth, those changes that are very imperfect, but they are there and they weren't there before.

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Again, changes in what you believe, changes in what you love, who you love, and changes in who you obey.

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But what about when you fall into sin? Well, Alexander says, Christians do fall into sin, but ask yourself, does sin break your heart now?

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We could say it this way. Is it unnatural, in a sense, for you to sin or to live for yourself, whereas it used to be the most natural thing in the world?

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Is it natural for you now to want to live for Christ, whereas it used to be the most unnatural thing?

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In other words, when you sin, do you feel like all the wheels of a watch or a clock with the little gears and the teeth and they mesh together perfectly, when you are living for yourself, do you feel like everything is going right?

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Or do you feel like everything is clashing and going wrong? And when you live for Christ, do you feel like everything is going right or everything is going wrong?

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For the believer, because of the new birth, obedience feels right. And disobedience, while we can disobey

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God as believers, we can never be easy and okay with that lifestyle again.

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It sickens us. Samuel Rutherford, the Puritan, said that we can distinguish ourselves from a hypocrite if the sin that still occurs, that we still choose at times as Christians, that sin as a

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Christian, the sin you do is your great grief and not your cherished darling, like it used to be, where you loved that sin and protected it against God, but now it breaks your heart.

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Alexander asks, are you a King David or a King Saul? David broke his heart when

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God exposed him as a man who had brought great shame to his

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God. And King Saul, when he was exposed, he justified himself, blamed everyone else and dishonored

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God. And that's also a good test. When God shows you your sin, do you justify God or do you justify you?

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Do you say, God, you are right and you are clean and you are pure. And had you not provided for my salvation, it would be right for you to damn me forever.

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But because of what you have done and promised, I know you will not. My hope is that you don't change even though I have fluctuated.

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Another test, he says, do you hunger for God's word? Do you want to know him better?

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Another, do you love the character and perfections of God?

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Another, do you delight in the fact that the plan of salvation includes not just your salvation, not just your forgiveness and peace, but that God does that in a way that most glorifies him and he doesn't sacrifice his honor for our safety.

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He asks, do you love the people of God? Do you love

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Christians? And do you love them because they bear the image of Christ, not because they went to the same school or like the same team or work in the same job or have kids the same age.

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There may be many things that between you and these other Christians, you have nothing in common, but you have

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Christ and you love them because you love their Lord. And finally, he says, those of you that have professed to love and walk with Christ for many years, on what are you grounding your present hope of justification?

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Have you added to the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to the promises that he brought you through the gospel?

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Have you added to that any of the experiences that you've had with God over the years, any of the duties you've done, the sacrifices you've made, the service you've given?

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He said, if you are adding those to Christ, that's a very dangerous thing. But if after 50 years of walking with Christ, we could say, after a lifetime, at the end of that life, are you still clear that it is only the death and the obedience of my

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Lord that has been given to me through the gospel that is my hope for justification?

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Nothing has been added to it. He says, the whole evidence of a

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Christian character can be reduced to two particulars. First, an entire trust in Christ alone for your justification, for your peace.

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And second, a sincere and universal love for holiness.

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Not a perfect, but sincere. And not perfect, but universal.

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What does he mean by universal? It means that while every area of the life, there is still some taint of indwelling sin that we struggle against by grace, and we want to daily put it to death, yet our love for holiness, our pursuit of holiness, is universal.

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That is, we want to be holy in every single area of life. And though every area is imperfect in that, it is our desire to bring every area under that lovely rule of Jesus Christ.

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And the Christian is not willing to say, I will give Jesus these three areas, and I will keep these four or five areas, or I will give

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Jesus nine areas, and I will keep this one area, and I'm fine with that setup for the rest of my life.

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That's not the heart of the believer. The believer wishes for all to be Christ's. It is universal.

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That is, every area of the life, he wants them all under the rule of Christ, all holy, even though they are presently imperfectly that way.

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Well, these are the things he's given us in these letters. What are the particular privileges of old age?

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What are the particular dangers? What can we do right now to prepare for those days?

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What about death outside of Christ, inside of Christ? What does death look like?

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And are there ways to prepare now so that comfort and security might be more our experience in those last days of life on earth?

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And what are they? So make a well -beaten path to the mercy seat.

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Walk in the footprints of Christ more closely. Press on so that,

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I guess we could say, so that the last lap is faster than the first lap that you ran.

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Run all the way to the end, depending on God in each new need or circumstance or fearful situation, that he will give you what you need to live for him so that everyone who knows you and knows how imperfect you are will also be able to see through the reflection of your imperfect life a perfect Savior.

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And like Alexander says, you will not be disappointed. Well, I hope these have helped.

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You can look in the show notes to see information where you can find the pamphlet that's been printed. And if you look in the show notes, you'll notice that we will do a giveaway of these.

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I think we're giving away five copies of the pamphlet, just of the letters. So if you haven't signed up for that, you can.