If I Am Living in Sin, Then Do I Have the Right to Assurance?

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Christ Alone, Sin, and the Coming Judgment

People are tired of hearing nothing but doom and despair on the radio.

The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of almighty God is hanging over our heads.

They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed and they will perish.

God wrapped himself in flesh, condescended and became a man, died on the cross for sin, was resurrected on the third day, has ascended to the right hand of the Father, where he sits now to make intercession for us.

Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear his words, they will act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

Whether a Person Living in Sin Has a Right to Assurance

Alright Tim, the question for today's episode is, if I'm living in sin, do I have the right to assurance?

Yeah, we made a statement along these lines on Twitter, and a lot of people really struggled with the answer that was given at this point, and in some ways this is a very simple concept to grasp, but then a lot of people were treating it as if it was just an incomprehensible mystery, what was being discussed, but the answer to the question is no.

If you're living in sin, you don't have a right to assurance. You don't have a right in that moment to assurance of salvation, but then unfortunately a lot of people simply just weren't able to grasp the point that was being made there.

So then are you saying if we don't have a right to the assurance of our salvation, that we can lose our salvation? Is that what you're saying?

See, that's what basically everyone heard, or not everyone, but a lot of people heard essentially that if you're saying a person doesn't have a right to assurance of salvation in a particular moment, then that must be saying that somehow when they sin, they lose their salvation or something along those lines, and that's just not the way assurance works.

So like in the Bible, assurance of salvation doesn't map perfectly onto the reality of salvation. These two things are two different things. So sometimes assurance is mapping directly onto the presence of salvation.

Sometimes it's not. So if you think about it this way, just take a step back from this discussion for a moment and think about the relationship between assurance and salvation. There's going to be plenty of people on the last day who will look at Jesus.

They'll call him Lord, Lord. They'll think that they did all these mighty works in his name, and he's going to say, depart from me, you workers of lawlessness. I never knew you. So for those people, they have assurance of salvation, and they're self-deceived, if that makes sense.

What that means is that assurance of salvation is no sure sign of the presence of salvation. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So those people, they're assured, but they're wrongly assured. Now on the other end, 1 John tells us that if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, and he knows all things. So there are people who don't have assurance of salvation that should.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So there are people who have assurance of salvation and shouldn't, and there are people who don't have assurance of salvation and should. And so what that tells you is that assurance of salvation is no sure sign of the presence of salvation.

But what assurance of salvation is meant to do is it generally goes with salvation. Does that make sense?

Mm-hmm.

So if you're trusting in the finished work of Christ on your behalf by faith, that act of trusting is an act of resting in the righteousness of Christ attributed to you as a free gift. That's what faith is.

And the natural corollary of that is confident. It's a confident trust that God will do what he says he's going to do, which is to declare you to be not guilty. So the natural corollary of that is that you're going to have assurance.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Okay.

Objective and Subjective Assurance

But there are times when you are living in sin in a way that in those moments when you're living in sin, you're engaging in actions, particularly if they're more high-handed. In that way, you're engaging in the kind of actions that are meant to subjectively take away your assurance.

So the Bible will tell us over and over again that the one who loves God will keep his commandments. There will be many in the last day who say, Lord, Lord, that we do all these mighty things. He'll say, depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.

So you have two kinds of assurance in the Bible. You have what's called objective assurance and you have subjective assurance. Objective assurance is based on Christ's objective work. You're trusting in what he did.

But then you also know that if Christ saves you, you're going to be different. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So if he saves you, you're going to be different. You're going to be transformed. You're going to be made new. Now, if you're looking at life and your life is showing no evidence of transformation, you're just as much of a scoundrel as you were before you became a Christian, that should give everyone pause, yourself included, to think, hey, maybe something's wrong here, right?

Something's wrong with this equation. This person says he's a Christian, but then he's not living like a Christian. And that may make everyone involved in the equation wonder, is this person really a Christian at that point?

The idea of assurance is that assurance is based on reality. When you're trusting in God and trusting in what he's done, that should be a confident-producing exercise. When you're living in sin, that should take away some of that confidence as well.

So basically, it's a work out your salvation with fear and trembling type of thing like Paul talks about, right?

Right. So there's a lot of passages in the Bible that speak this language. You're supposed to examine yourself to see whether you're in the faith, right? You're to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

2 Peter talks about adding to your faith virtue and virtue self-control and self-control knowledge, right? Then those things are meant to give you assurance. So the more that you're growing in the Christian life, what you're not growing in is like you're going to be growing in godliness.

You're going to be growing in obedience. What you're meant to do is look at the whole totality of your life and say, do I see progress, right? So a lot of people are overly sensitive and what they'll do is every time they sin, then they're just fixated on the fact that, well, I'm a Christian.

Christians shouldn't be sinning. I just sinned once, so maybe I'm lost. But what you're meant to do is you're meant to observe the whole pattern of your life from start to finish. As you're observing the whole pattern of your life start to finish, assurance is going to go up and down with moments, right?

So it's not like a zero or nothing proposition. It's the kind of thing that objectively you should have on the basis of the fact that you're trusting in Jesus. But then subjectively, there'll be times where you wonder like you're not as committed to God as you should be.

And then your experience of assurance at that point does take little hits. It's not like as if it goes all the way to zero. It shouldn't be going all the way to zero. But if you could think about it just in terms of percentages, let's say that when you're walking with the Lord, you're reading your Bible, you're praying, whatever else, you're 99 confident that you're a Christian, because you have the objective means and the subjective means all coming together to give you strong confidence.

But then if you're an individual who had some strange thought in your head to say, Hey, you know what? I know it's wrong, but I'm going to go kidnap an African and make them a slave, right?

Uh-huh. Yeah.

That kind of person, everyone should look at them and say, Hey, that would be wildly inconsistent with the Christian faith that you're proclaiming. And everyone should wonder, should a Christian have that kind of thought, right?

And then if you're making plans to actually carry it out, then at that point, you should say, Hey, you don't have a right in that moment to assurance until you stop this nefarious plan, and nip it in the bud.

And this is what church discipline is essentially trying to do. When you have individuals living in high-handed, intentional rebellion against God, all their loved ones, all their friends, all their church members should come along and basically say, You don't have a right to confidence until you repent of this sin, okay?

So if you're not willing to repent of this sin, we're not going to have confidence for you, and you shouldn't have confidence for yourself. And that's essentially what the church discipline process is doing.

Certainty, Self-Deception, and Persevering in the Christian Life

So are you saying that no Christian can ever be fully convinced that they are actually saved? If we're talking about the percentages, even the 99 person can still say, Yeah, but if I die, there is that 1 still lingering there, right?

Salvation is meant to be a confident trust that God is for you. And some of this is just related to a philosophical discussion about levels of certainty, right? So you have what's called absolute certainty, and as a philosophical idea, absolute certainty would be like the 100 confidence, right?

And there's very few things that you can actually have absolute confidence in, okay? Meaning you can have absolute confidence in the law of non-contradiction and that 1 plus 1 equals 2 and that kind of stuff.

Things that are true by definition. But then most of the things in life, like the idea of absolute standard of proof, that's a very high philosophical threshold for confidence, all right? So meaning, if you think about just the way certainty works in general in life, you have like coin toss, like certainty, right?

So that would be like a 50 -50 kind of scenario where it's equally probable as not, right? And then you have more probable than not. So if you move it up a notch, you say it's more likely. And that would be kind of like a 60 to 70 kind of range of certainty, more probable than not.

The standard that we use to execute capital punishment is certain beyond a reasonable doubt, okay? So we're not demanding absolute certainty in order to put someone to death. We're demanding a level of certainty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Meaning there's no reason to doubt this. There's only unreasonable reasons to doubt this. And so most of what you're having in the Christian life, Christian life certainty should be that certain beyond a reasonable doubt kind of certainty.

Like the same standard that you use to put someone to death. But most of us in the day-to-day decisions that we're making in life, we're not even operating at that level of certainty. We're operating at the more probable than not kind of level of certainty.

It's more probable than not as I get up in the morning and I'm going to go to work that I won't get in a wreck, so I drive the car, okay? And so what people are doing there is they're demanding. If you were to demand absolute certainty in order to go to work, no one would ever go to work, okay?

Well, you couldn't, yeah.

Yeah, you couldn't. And so now, because there's warning passages in the scriptures that are telling you to examine yourself in the faith, because there's these kind of warning passages and there's many people who are going to be self-deceived, the Bible is not asking you to have absolute certainty that you're a Christian.

The Bible is actually asking you to have certainty beyond a reasonable doubt kind of level of certainty. Does that make sense?

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Meaning you should hold within your mind the possibility that you could be self-deceived, and holding that possibility within your mind is a means that God uses to help you to obey Him, okay?

Okay.

Meaning you don't want to be the self-deceived person. You want to examine yourself to see whether you're in the faith, so you have to hold within your mind the possibility that you could be self-deceived, and you're not just going to continue in sin that grace may abound.

And so there's a lot of people who basically confuse these kind of components, and what they're doing is they're basically trying to work themselves up into this absolute confidence. And they do it so much so that their son or their daughter could live in sin forever and live in rebellion forever and could formally declare themselves to be an atheist, but just because they prayed a prayer at some point and walked an aisle, then they're still absolutely confident that they are in the faith.

That's just not the means that God uses to help us persevere. He helps us persevere with the reality that there's subjective means of assurance. There's subjective means of assurance. He wants us to be certain beyond a reasonable doubt that we're saved and hold within ourselves that possibility that we could be self-deceived, because that'll motivate us to keep on going in the Christian life and continue to pursue sanctification and provide further evidence that God's at work within us and forming it into His image, if that makes sense.

Okay. Fair enough. This has been another episode of Bible Bashed. We hope you have been encouraged and blessed through our discussion. We thank you for all your support and ask you to continue to like and subscribe to Bible Bashed and share our podcast with your friends and on social media.

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Now, go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.