Can I Have Assurance of Faith?

Faith and Its Fruit Versus Easy Believism

So Chuck, how can we steer a course between the ease of believism, where we just give a person a list of the most basic facts, and they agree to them, but on the other end, maybe kind of a legalism, where we say, if your faith doesn't have, and we give this long list of fruits of faith, and say, well, if those aren't all there at the beginning, then you don't have real faith at all.

How can we steer a course between those two deadly, slippery slopes?

One way that we would try to balance those two things, or to steer that course, would be to understand the difference between faith and its product, the fruit that it produces. So if faith is genuine, it must necessarily produce some fruit, but the fruit itself is not faith.

So that would be one thing to keep in mind.

Assurance of Faith as a Fruit, Not the Essence

Yeah, I think that really is a critical one. One example of young preachers that didn't do that would be the earliest days of Whitefield.

And Wesley.

They taught that assurance of faith, which is definitely a fruit, they taught that it was actually part of the essence of faith, that being assured that you are a Christian is essentially the same as trusting God, and therefore, anyone who lacked assurance, who had a shaky assurance, whose assurance might ebb and flow, they said, well, then you must not be a Christian.

How could you be brought into God's family? How could you be born again, and not know it? Now to be fair to them, they were in the Anglican system, which offered no real assurance today. It was based more on a bit of a Roman Catholic view, perhaps back then, of working out your salvation, and assurance would come at the end.

So they're reacting against that error, but their reaction was equally erroneous. Years later, they said that they understood that they were wrong, and partly through reading the Puritans, they realized that assurance was a fruit, not part of the root, and it could, like all fruit, it could be, you know, in season, out of season, so to speak, you know, it could be there more or less, and doubting yourself at times was not evidence that you were not a Christian.

So they went back and corrected it.

There are some who still take that kind of view, though maybe for different reasons, but the answer to lack of assurances would just, you know, get saved.

Yeah.

Regeneration and the Full Response of Faith

Another way we could steer a course between those two dangers of kind of an easy-believism versus kind of a legalistic lumping everything together into faith, and saying you have to have all of this, and it's almost as if it does become a work, is understanding, again, the nature of regeneration.

In regeneration, if the whole of our soul is awakened, is made alive to God, made responsive, then faith naturally would include all the faculties of the soul, though not perfectly, you know, we're not talking about a perfect faith, we're not even really talking about strong faith versus weak faith, we're really just talking about the existence of real faith.

But what is real faith? It is the response of the mind, but also the heart and the will, to the great truths of Christ. And so, we would say, like he says, there is the ascent of the mind, I believe what God has said to be true, I agree with that.

But then, you can't imagine a person really agreeing with that, and not also delighting.

In it.

Now, I love the Christ that God has shown me, the Savior that is so perfectly suited to me, and so wonderfully willing. And so, it's not just an ascent, there's a change of heart toward Christ. And then the will, I cast all my hopes upon Him.

So I think if we understand those things, we can have a fully developed biblical view of faith, avoiding kind of the easy believism of our day, without sliding over into, like you mentioned, expecting someone to have all the fruit of faith, and saying, well, that all has to be there in order for you to be declared right with God.

So the nature of faith, mental ascent, but also involves the free conduct of the will.