Assurance of Salvation? (w/ Room for Nuance) | Theocast

All right, we are back with not just another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast, but also an episode of the TheoCasts podcast. I am Sean DeMars, and you guys are?

Justin Perdue.

Yeah, so we always like to get started with prayer, if that's okay with you guys. All right, and I'll have the guests open us, whichever rock, paper, scissors to see who opens us up in prayer. Just one, one for the win.

Let's see who's got it. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.

All right.

You're up, man.

How'd you figure that out?

I did paper.

Because I won.

So I get to pray.

That's how we're doing it.

I see how the game works. Let's pray.

Let's do it.

Our Father in heaven, we're grateful that you have shown mercy to sinners like us. We're grateful to know that you are always with us. We pray that by your spirit, you would guide us in this conversation.

We pray that the things that we talk about would encourage the saints and that they would honor you. And we pray that in Christ's name.

Amen.

Amen.

Now, this is going to be a joint episode.

A mashup, if you will.

A mashup, if you will. But who's leading this thing? I feel like, Justin, you're a take charge kind of guy.

Well, Sean, I mean, you were the one who initiated this.

That's true. I got the ball rolling. You keep it rolling.

Yeah.

I mean, we are in our office, but your equipment. So it's kind of a tie.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Hey.

I mean, we can play rock, paper, scissors.

All right. Well, let's start this. Tell us about Theocast. Tell me what your name means. I think I can guess. And then tell me kind of what the heartbeat of your ministry is.

John, you should go first on this.

Yeah.

Well, we were a real short story. We were trying to figure out just a name for a podcast, and they were all really bad. And one night I was sitting. I'm like, listen, we talk about theology. It's a podcast.

Why don't we just keep it simple and literally just call it Theocast? And no one else had had the name. And that's what it came to.

That in and of itself is shocking.

Yeah.

I thought I was thinking, like, Theos, God, cast. I'm casting a vision out into.

It literally was. We're a theology podcast. We talk about all kinds of theology, and it's a podcast. So it was literally that simple, and no one had had it. So we're like, let's just do it. But the podcast really has always been about helping people kind of pull back the pietistic, legalistic, like, self-help view of the gospel and putting people back into the Reformation of the Sola Fide, the confessions.

And the tagline of our podcast is, Helping Worry Pilgrims Find Rest in Christ.

Say that one more time.

Helping Worry Pilgrims Find Rest in Christ. I kind of mumbled there.

So sorry.

One more time. Are you saying worried or wearied?

Wearied.

Weary.

Encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

There you go. See, maybe if I move the microphone down, you'll be able to see my lips. So that's been the heartbeat of it. We'll take on theological problems once in a while. If we feel like it's causing some confusion and rest, but we're really trying to help people find the sufficiency in Christ in all of life.

And then from there, they learn how to be a part of the kingdom. And so instead of most Christianity feels like you're obeying God so that hopefully you'll make it into the kingdom. And we think that's reverse.

So that's kind of what the heartbeat of the podcast is.

Yeah.

To add to that and maybe restate some of what you said in my own ways.

Yeah.

We're trying to help people understand the utter sufficiency of Christ as their savior and what it means to be united to Jesus, not just for justification, but for all of the Christian life and for what that means for their eternity.

And I agree with John a lot of times the way that even amongst serious minded, well-intentioned brothers and sisters in the Lord, even like Calvinistic brothers and sisters in the Lord, if I can say that word, there is a sense in which you're kind of chasing after something to prove your legitimacy.

It's like, yes, it's all of grace. It's by faith alone in Christ alone. But now there's a sense in which if you're not careful, you might just mess this up and prove yourself to be an unbeliever.

Do you think that's a non-valid category?

No, I'm not saying that there aren't false professions. Of course there are. But I think the emphasis sometimes in, again, I think because of, and we can talk about all of this, because of the bad fruit of revivalism amongst other things, legitimate responses to easy believism and legitimate antinomian theology, there sometimes is a posture, again, amongst well-intentioned pastors where it's almost like we need to smoke out the fakers.

And that tone, I mean, we're just coming in hot here. I mean, that tone informs a lot. I mean, even when it comes to preaching in the way that we pastor people, rather than the emphasis being on Christ for us and union with Jesus, kind of like Paul's response in Romans 6, where the age-old objection, if where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more, should we just sin?

Right?

That's a legit question that the gospel raises in one sense. And his response is interesting because he doesn't say, by no means, here is what the law says, even. It's not how he starts. And he doesn't say, by no means, if you are a serious Christian and not a fake, here's how you live.

The way he begins to ground the saints and help them think about their obedience is by no means because we have been united to the Savior. And we've been baptized into Jesus. We've been set free from sin's guilt, and now we are free from its dominion.

Right?

And so that's effectively what we're trying to do is put the emphasis in that place and to help people see that the Christian life is not one where we're chasing after status. We've been given justification.

We're not chasing after an identity. We've been given one in that we've been adopted as children of the Father, and we're now in Christ, and we live from that, not for it. So that's really all we've been meaning to do for a while, and help people know that you're not a Christian because of what you do.

You're a Christian because of what you believe. And now that you've been united to Christ, that is who you are. And we even in the pages of the New Testament would see that's how the apostles often exhort the saints toward holiness.

Live like who you are now. We can talk about all this more.

Well, even in the illustration when Jesus says you want the wheat and the tares, it's like you start pulling out the tares, you're going to pull the wheat with it. So we leave that alone, which is different from if you have a false teacher in your congregation.

They have just exposed themselves to the point where they have to be removed, right? But it seems like a lot of preaching when we're dealing with our congregation, there's always this, I guess, this fear that we have a false convert, false convert,.

False professors, false conversions.

And that tenor, it becomes like it's been in our experience in the history that I come from, from like a fundamentalist Calvinistic background, that seems to kind of be the tenor of the preaching. We're always trying to find the person who's faking and make sure that we kind of bring them to repentance.

So the preaching becomes very exacting and very self-examination. And we're not giving people hope that's beyond their own capacities or their own obedience.

And to be clear, I mean, John and I are both pastor churches where we practice church discipline. And so nothing that we're saying right now is in any way calling any of that into question or evaluating our lives.

We're all about healthy examination and healthy introspection even. What we're pushing back against is the hyper introspection or a constant kind of examination and measuring of oneself that becomes actually very unhealthy and counterproductive because the emphasis now becomes and the focus becomes me somehow.

Like rather than being pointed to Christ always and then seeing my own Christian life through the lens of Jesus as my representative, Jesus as my substitute, Jesus as the one to whom I've been united, and then I see me through him.

I'm brought into the foreground and my life is the focus. And we feel like that is an inversion of the best ways to talk about Christian living.

So you look like you have a thousand questions.

Yeah.

You get to ask them.

Yeah.

You got to tell us about your podcast.

Ooh, okay.

Do we want to keep rolling down this train or do you want to... I'll leave that up to you.

Yeah, let's finish your train. And then if there's any time left, we'll talk about me.

Okay.

See, we're deferring to you. Save the worst for last.

I see that. Lead us.

You know what, you got the lead now.

Yeah.

Okay.

So what I want to try to do is imagine people who might be listening or watching who will have questions or perhaps disagreements with the way you've stated things. Because very often what will happen is people will view, and you used this word a couple of times in what you were saying, brother, they'll view your emphasis from their perspective, not necessarily understanding your perspective or your context, and they'll evaluate.

I've used this example multiple times. People pushing back against Platt's radical book. It's some of the critique very valid. Also not understanding that David Platt was pastoring one of the wealthiest churches in America where people were not in any way trying to sacrifice radically.

And it was in that context that I think the book made a little more sense now. It did get published to the whole wide world. So that's another question entirely. So let me think about my context in line of what you just said, okay?

My context is I'm a pastor of a church in one of the most church cities in the Bible Belt. Okay, a city of 55 ,000 people. All of the bad juju you just mentioned, revival and revivalism, false converts, go down the water slide and get baptized this Sunday.

Yeah, 100%.

All that stuff. Contextually, there's a very serious pastoral need to let people know that the way that they've been thinking about Christianity is wrong and that they may in fact not have any good reason to be confident in their salvation.

On top of that now, theologically and textually, I'm thinking about verses like examine yourself to see if you are truly in the faith or pick any one of the first, second, third Johns, love, obedience, faith, they have to go together.

Examine yourself to make sure that they are going together because if they're not, you don't actually love God and all that other stuff. What would your counsel be to a pastor like me who says, yes, I'm on board.

I want to do gospel ministry from a place of Christ's accomplished work for us on the cross, but at the same time, this is a real problem. How do I do this? Examine yourself. How do I do this in that way?

You believe in the sovereignty of God and salvation, correct?

Well, of course.

You consider yourself to be a Calvinist. For whatever reason, at times, there are portions of our Bibles that we are put into a context and we forget about them. So no matter what context someone is in, the jungles of Africa, a transgender, or someone who was raised in the big evangelical church with the water slide, they all need the same thing.

Their need doesn't change. Is that fair?

Yeah.

Their need doesn't change, but we see different emphases in different parts of the scripture, depending on the audience.

Well, let me reword it this way. If you're dead, you're dead. It doesn't matter how—.

You resurrected.

Exactly.

And then what resurrects them, right? It's the same gospel that resurrects all three, right? It does not change. So if I'm wondering if someone is not in the faith, the solution doesn't change. It's always, we present them with the law.

Have you met the standards by God's requirement, perfection to the law? Well, all three are going to have to say no, right? Then you ask the second question. Then by what means do you consider yourself to be accepted by God?

Well, the two over here are going to be like, who's God, right? You got the person in the jungles. You're going to have to explain that to them. The transgender, depending on their background, and then you're talking about this person in the south who's been raised in the church.

If they say, well, and if their answer isn't faith in Christ and the gospel and trusting in his sufficiency on my behalf, if it's anything other than that, like a good person, my baptism, then you understand their experience at church isn't really a gospel.

They haven't heard the gospel yet. So salvation is always by one means and one means only. It's not taking your faith more serious, doing certain kinds of acts of obedience. You can never equate someone's salvation with their performance because if you do that at that moment, you're not saved by faith.

You're being saved by works. I also pass a very similar context to you do. I mean, Nashville, Bible Belt of the United States, and I very rarely meet anybody in my city that doesn't go to some kind of a church or associated with some kind of a church.

Or call themselves a Christian.

Exactly, right?

Although increasingly these days, it even feels like it's changed in the last like 10 years or so.

It has only in that.

Yeah, I think you're right about that.

Tennessee has gained a lot of outside of people from outside of the South.

Go back to California. Actually, that would mean you would have to go back.

Exactly. Yeah, so this is, for me, pastoring and encouraging other pastors, it's always what is it that leads people to salvation? And Paul says it's the gospel, right? The gospel is the power unto salvation.

So if I'm ever questioning if someone's truly not understood or they're not living according to how they're supposed to be living, it might be, one, they're anemic and they've not been discipled, because that definitely happens, because Paul said, rebuke anemic churches.

It's like, hey, Corinthians, stop sleeping with each other, right? Or they actually aren't saved and the only solution to salvation is the gospel. So those are what we're kind of trying to push back with.

If you come in with heavy-handed, harsh preaching, it won't convert them.

So here's how I would say it. If I think that the people I'm speaking to, that a number of them are false professors, by definition, a false professor would be someone who we suspect is unregenerate. The strategy there, and I know you're going to agree with me, the strategy there is not to tell dead people to try harder, right?

It's not to tell dead people to be holy or to obey more or to be more serious, etc. The solution in that environment, the strategy in that environment, is to preach the law in all of its holiness, in all of its perfection, the fact that it reflects God's own holy character, and that it is to be obeyed perfectly at a spiritual level.

You know, the Jesus and Matthew 5 kind of thing, right? You need a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees. You have heard it said, what a shocking, audacious statement, right?

You've heard it said in the 10 words that God gave on Sinai, you shall not murder, but I am going to apply that at a spiritual level to your heart, that if you have anger in your heart toward your brother, you're a lawbreaker.

He does the same thing with the seventh commandment, and he sums up Matthew 5, verse 48, you must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. That's the way that we would preach the law, and the law preached that way to a sinner.

All it can do is lay you bare. All it can do is condemn and crush and kill you. It cannot save you. And so that, to me, is where you begin if you think that you've got... So don't misunderstand what we're saying, not that you are, Sean, but even for the listener out there.

We are not saying that you don't preach the law. You do. You preach the law to expose. You know, the law used as a mirror, right? As we assess ourselves in light of it, we see I'm undone, I'm condemned, and I'm driven to Jesus Christ who died to fulfill the law's penalty and who lived to fulfill its requirements, right?

And he is the forgiveness of my sins. He is my righteousness. I've covered in his robes. I've washed my robes and made them white in his blood. And now through him alone, by faith in him alone, apart from anything that I could ever do, I have peace with God now and forever, right?

So that's that law and gospel reality. You know, Charles Spurgeon says... And Spurgeon's a guy that we all like, and it's hard to disagree with Charles.

Hard. Very hard.

Really hard to disagree with Charles.

Even the Armenians love him.

That's right. I know. I'm always shocked. So while we're... For our purposes today, it's really interesting too. Not only do Armenians love him, but folks that are not covenantal theologians love him, and he was covenantal.

Folks that might get a little nervous about the way that we would talk about the distinction between the law and the gospel love him, and he would say the same things. And he has a sermon in a little book that I think Michael Reeves edited it, Christ's Glorious Achievements.

And the first sermon in that book is called Christ, the End of the Law. It's worth a read because he does this very thing where he talks about the law to a sinner can only judge. It can only condemn. It can only kill.

And he says, yet strange irony, we cannot keep men away from it. Just like the gnat that is drawn to the candle, even though it burns its wings, we cannot keep men from seeking righteousness by the wall.

Right?

And then he goes on to say other things like, brethren, as we talk about the law, we're breaking it. You know, as we talk about its letter, we're violating its spirit, right? All of these things. And that his point in all of it is that when it comes to righteousness before God, there is only one way to receive it.

And it is not through the law. He says, if you ever think that you can ascend to God up the trembling sides of Mount Sinai, it is evidence that you have never seen that shaking mountain at all. Like you don't understand the law.

Let's just forget everything else we were going to talk about and just quote Spurgeon to each other.

It's beautiful, man.

And always so good.

It's really good.

Just so another question that you asked was, what about examine yourself to see if you're of the faith, right? Justin and I had a really long conversation one day on a podcast about this, because we just, we've heard this passage used so often.

In that context, Paul is dealing with people who are questioning his apostleship and his gospel. And so he tells them, okay, you don't accept my apostleship and you don't accept my gospel. Well, that's how you came to faith.

So you better examine yourself to see if you're truly of the faith because you got it from me. And in that context, it doesn't really work unless you are somehow questioning your pastor's faith, I guess, or questioning the apostle Paul's faith.

But does that mean that there isn't other portions of scripture that would cause us to think that a self-examination isn't warranted?

Yes.

The only time that you're going to see that there's a self-examination that is warranted is in passages where there's unrepentant sin, where you have been confronted and you've been told, hey, you're in sin, you need to repent, and you're unwilling to.

You're unwilling to repent. Well, Justin and I would agree, you really need to examine yourself at this moment, because if we have confronted you with the law, we've shown you you're condemned, you were unwilling to stop doing this, you really are

We confronted you with the law, and we've demonstrated that the way that you are living is out of step with what the Lord says is good.

And you disagree with that. Like, I don't need to stop doing this. Then at that point, you are actually demonstrating that your faith is not in Scripture and in Christ, and you really should think twice about calling yourself a Christian.

That's very clear in Scripture. 1 John talks about that. James talks about that. And so there is the unrepentant disagreement with the law. Now, there are people that I'm sure you've experienced this, we both have, where even our own lives, there are times where we can get trapped in sin.

I don't agree I should be doing this. I mean, I agree I shouldn't be doing this.

You shouldn't be blind to the sin that we're trapped in.

Exactly.

Oh, for sure.

Like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in it, and I need help getting out of it. That's very different being trapped in sin versus not agreeing with God on your sin, right? So at that point, I would say, hey, you really do need to think about your profession of faith because you're not agreeing with God on the gospel, and you're not agreeing with God on what is sin.

Yeah, and even what's the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian or a believer and an unbeliever? It's not that the believer doesn't sin and that the unbeliever does sin. It's that the believer agrees with God about his sin and sides with God against it, and then is trusting a righteousness that is alien to him to cover his sin.

Trusting in agreeing with God about my sin, siding with God against it, I'm casting myself into the arms of the Savior whose blood I'm covered by and whose righteousness has robed me. That's what makes a person a Christian.

It's that. It's not that we don't sin. Of course, we fight against it. We strive against it. You know, with the help of God's Spirit, as we live life in the fellowship of the saints, we lock arms together.

As we are pilgrims in this life, we pray for protection from the evil one. We pray that God would give us grace that we might not sin. All of those things are right, and those things are not contradictory in any way.

To be fully assured and to know that we have rest and peace with God in no way leads to licentiousness. We continue.

It shouldn't.

It should not. I would put it this way. The preaching of the utter sufficiency of Jesus Christ never caused anyone to sin because, let's be frank, none of us need help sinning. We have a corrupt flesh that still loves sin, and so we don't need help sinning.

I think this is partly what Paul's getting at, even in Romans 6. The idea that Jesus, who died for our sins and who is our righteousness, the idea that being united to Christ would somehow coddle or nourish corruption and sin in us is absurd.

To be united to Christ, it's like we've been united to the vine, like John 15 paradigm. Because there's life in him, there's no life in me. Being united to Christ, it's like the fountain of holiness begins to flow.

Jesus is the fountainhead of holiness, and those streams do not dry up. It only flows one direction. The only way that we would ever be holy is to be united to the Holy One. That's a lot of what we're trying to communicate as well, is that holiness is something that it only flows from Christ to us, and it is through our vital union with him by faith that we would ever be holy in the first place.

And so we would say that if you want to see holy people in your church, of course we preach the law, not only the way we were talking about earlier, like to the unbeliever, but we also preach the law as the guide of our lives, as the rule of life in Christ.

And we encourage each other. We're like, man, look how good this is. Look how wise God's law is. Man, we want to live like that, don't we? Because we've been given new hearts that now delight in God's law and love it.

And it's like, man, we want to live like this. We often fail. That's why we need repentance, why we need to continue to turn to Jesus.

Amen.

We preach the law like that, but we also understand that the power unto sanctification is only through the preaching of Christ. The law can guide sanctification, but it can't empower it. Only Christ and the power of God through our union with Christ is what actually produces the transformation.

So we got to keep preaching Jesus to the saints for that reason.

So first, John.

Well, just to be clear, I want to make sure I could articulate what you're saying back to you. Not that I, all of that, but let me try to put a little bit of, especially what you said, brother. John, you said, I think, that the only time a call for self-examination is warranted is if there's unrepentant sin.

A call for self, if you're going to look at it in scripture.

Well, yeah, that's what I'm looking at.

You know, I know.

Yeah, we agree about the book.

Yeah, yeah.

I guess what I mean is a call for self-examination in question of one's salvation.

Yeah, that's right.

Because Paul says, examine yourself, see if you have the faith, versus examine yourself to see if you're being effective. Because Peter does this.

Yeah, for sure.

Peter's like, hey, are these fruits in you? This is 2 Peter 1. Are these fruits in you? Because if they are, you're effective. And if they're not, you're ineffective. And you forgot, you've been cleansed.

So there's this difference between effective effectiveness. That is definitely being called a lot.

I think in 1. John, you know, you've been known by God, loved by God.

Yeah, so there's a difference between, hey, you should examine the way you're acting right now, because it's not loving, it's not kind, and it's not for the sake of the body. And this is not effective for what we're doing.

Or even say, yeah, and it's not honoring the Lord. It's not helping your brother. It's not helping your neighbor.

Yeah, there's a lot of calls to that. And I would say every epistle has those. It's kind of the greeting, uplift, rebuke. That's in that rebuke section of like, I'm rebuking you because, well, you really should examine how you're acting right now.

It's not appropriate. Compared to, you need to examine yourself because I don't think you're in the faith. Now that is a very, very important accusation, right? Even in 1 John, 1 John's like, perfect love casts out all fear.

Well, who has perfect love? Jesus does, right, towards us. So we have no fear. There's no condemnation. There's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, right? When you think about Romans 8, what can separate you from the love of God that's in Christ Jesus?

So we're always comforted by God's love for us. We love, 1 John, we love because he first loved us, right? The only time that you should really have a concern about your salvation is when you are now messing with the underbelly of the gospel, right?

That's where I was saying, even in that, the discipline passages are the ones where we're like, look, we've walked you down the road. Now you're acting like an unbeliever completely versus you're acting sinful and not helpful.

Now you're acting like an unbeliever.

So I have like, I have a dozen different things that I could say right now and maybe we'll get to them. I'll say something that is also maybe provocative and I'm not trying to be a shock jock with this, but even maybe to dovetail a little bit, because I agree there are different kinds of self-examination.

I think that's a good distinction. Like examining, are you being effective? Examining, are you being helpful to your neighbor? Are you living in a way that honors God and blesses your brothers and sisters and is for the edification of the body or are you not?

Versus examining yourself as to whether you're even a Christian at all. Or maybe phrase it this way, when should a person question his or her salvation, right? And I think that the time when that is most plain in scripture is when you are being confronted with sin in your life and you are unrepentant.

Or I might even put it this way. Now this is going to presuppose a lot that you're in a healthy church that preaches the gospel, that is led by godly elders, and practices healthy discipline. It assumes all that.

So there's like six churches that this is applying to.

So for all, you know, like maybe 500 people, like I don't even know how big the audience is, but for all 12 of you that this applies to, I hope you're encouraged by what I'm about to say. I think in a church that's healthy, that practices discipline rightly, we should question our salvation when we are facing the discipline of the church.

And outside of that, we need, obviously we're still calling each other all the time. In our services, we read the law every week, we confess sin every week corporately, we're assured of our forgiveness in Christ, but what are we doing there?

I mean, we're calling one another to repentance perpetually all the time.

Amen.

Which is a form of examination.

Right, we do that, but we're doing that in a way where we know, man, like we sing all the time, our sins, there are many, as mercy is more. We're still doing that from a place of we're convicted, we lament, we grieve the fact that we're weak, we don't want to sin, so what do we do with our sin?

We confess it, we acknowledge it, we pull it into the light, but we're doing that from a place knowing that God is our father, not our judge, knowing that we're safe and secure in Christ, we're loved and known by God, and we confess our sins.

That's very different than, hey, I'm facing the discipline of the church, and I should look at my life and question sincerely whether or not I am in Christ or not. Those are different things. Yeah, so that was a thought that I had, one of the 12 thoughts.

Right, good. Hard to choose, I'm guessing, between them. Which one is your favorite?

Brother, I'm greatly perplexed over here.

You guys specialize, forgive me if that's not the right word, but I think if it is the right word, it's a good thing to specialize in, in helping believers find assurance. Why do you think that resonates so powerfully with your audience?

Because, I mean, you have a pretty decent audience, and people never get tired of it. People just need more of it. They love it. Why do you think that resonates so much?

Yeah, it affects their life, their daily life, right? So if you live in, if you live, have you guys ever passed a police officer speeding?

No.

And then, what do you do for the next 10 minutes? You're waiting, right? You're just like, you're waiting, you're waiting, you're waiting. Am I gonna get, did he catch me, did he catch me, did he catch me, did he catch me, right?