Assurance | How do I know I'm Saved?

Assurance and the Question of How We Know We Are Saved

Hey, this is Jimmy. Today on the podcast, we talk about a question that we receive a lot, and that is, how do I know that I am saved? In other words, we are tackling the topic of assurance. So the guys talk about some personal experiences of battles with assurance that we've all had.

And then we look at some of the ways contemporary Christianity actually robs assurance. And then we seek to point you to how assurance was found during the Reformation era, as well as what we believe scripture and the Reformed Confessions teach about assurance.

We hope this conversation is beneficial for you. See you on the other side.

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Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Our hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and myself, Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota. Gentlemen, good to see your lovely faces.

John, I think you've got some announcements for us, so take it away.

Transcripts, Support, and the New Ask Theocast Podcast

Yeah, a couple of announcements just before we get started, and it's really a thank you. We've been raising money just to help us expand Theocast. And one way we've been able to do that is through transcripts.

So we have, over the last few weeks and months, been transcribing all of our podcasts. And the reason we do that is we have in America over 35 million people who are hearing impaired. And there's also a lot of people who just don't listen to podcasts.

They would rather read. When it comes to theology, they would rather read. And we want to be able to impact and help those people as well. So because of your monthly support and some of your donations, we've been able to afford to get those transcribed.

And another big announcement that the three of us are very excited about is a new podcast that's coming your way. And this came out of a recent Q &A that we did, and we had so many great questions. The three of us, I think, simultaneously by ourselves thought we should do a podcast called Ask Theocast.

So it'll be a short podcast. It'll be three to five minutes long. It'll come out every week. And we're hoping that by this time or the next few weeks, it'll be available. But these will be the common questions that we receive from you.

And it'll be a completely separate podcast, not conversational. It'll just be one of us answering your questions that you get to call in and ask. So I'll be looking for that. You can find the transcripts just by going to our website and clicking on the episode.

And right there at the bottom, it'll say Read Podcast Transcripts. And you can go back and interact with those or share them with people who aren't podcast listeners, but might want to read, especially the topic that we're covering today.

So Justin, why don't you tell us what it is? It's an important topic for our ministry. So tell us what we're covering today.

Justin Perdue. John, you just mentioned the fact that we get questions from listeners. We hear from our listeners on a regular basis, and often the questions that we receive and the correspondence that we receive, if you read through it and boil it down, I would say 80 to 90 of what we get comes down to the issue of assurance and peace before God and eternal security.

And so what we're going to talk about today are those things. This is a podcast on assurance. And we want this conversation to be helpful to our regular listeners, but we also want this to be helpful to people that maybe aren't familiar with theocast or aren't familiar with Reformed theology.

And so our hope for the conversation today is to talk a little bit personally from our own experiences and how we have or haven't wrestled with this issue of assurance. And then we want to make some observations of things that we've seen in the broader evangelical church, or even in the Calvinistic evangelical church, where assurance is eroded and removed from people.

And then what we want to do in the last half of the podcast is point people to Christ and His sufficiency using Scripture from a Reformed perspective. So that's the plan for today. I think most people, if they are honest, they wrestle with this question and this reality of how can I know that I know that I know, that I am safe?

How can I know that I'm secure and that I have peace with God? Not just now, but I am guaranteed peace with God forever. And there's nothing more relevant for our day-to-day. Like this matters for your Tuesday and for your Thursday.

It matters every day of your life. And so we're hopeful that this is going to be a helpful conversation. And so let's start guys with just some personal experiences and some anecdotes maybe, talk about where we've been and some of the struggles that we've experienced.

Personal Struggles with Assurance in Performance, Sincerity, and Feelings

Yeah, I'd be glad to take a swing at that. So I know for myself, I became pretty interested in the things of Christianity when I was a teenager, around 15 years old or so, but it really wasn't until college when I began to question my assurance and begin to really wrestle with my sinful nature and just kind of the day-to-day Christian life.

And so where I found a lot of assurance or where I realized I was finding a lot of assurances in my performance and how well I could live the Christian life. And let's just be honest and frank. I think for a lot of people, when they say how well they are living the Christian life, or when they think about how well they are living the Christian life, I would make a bet that they tie it to their spiritual disciplines, aka their personal Bible reading and their personal prayer life.

And just to be clear, those are not bad things. Like we around the mic would say, we live in such a blessed time to be able to read the Bible in our own language and accessible translations. It is a blessing to be able to talk to the God of the universe.

But at the same time, where I was really beginning to struggle is when I would miss days of prayer, when I would miss days of personal Bible reading, I would just be completely emotionally wrecked over that.

I would feel stressed. And even when I would wake up early and make myself a nice pot of coffee and sit down to read and pray, I would have all of these thoughts and feelings rushing through my mind and my body of, well, the only reason I'm doing this is so that I will feel better about my Christian life and really kind of have the good day, bad day mentality of, this morning I read my Bible and I prayed, so therefore I am going to have a good day.

Therefore, I'm going to feel good about my spiritual life. And this really carried on for me throughout much of my life. And to be honest, I still battle against this mindset. I would say almost daily that I will find so much comfort in the way I perform the Christian life, and so my assurance was so intrinsically tied to my feelings and my emotions and my, quote unquote, the buzzword was my affections for God and how well I was living the Christian life.

And so I know that for you guys, the things that I'm saying is not strange. And I'm sure for some of the listeners, you perhaps have been feeling these ways, but I want to throw it to you guys and give you guys a chance to speak as well.

Assurance in Revivalistic Arminianism, Conversionism, and Repeated Rededications

Yeah, I grew up in a revivalistic Arminian background. We went to tent revivals. We heard a lot of fiery preaching. The hotter the preaching, the better. The harsher the preaching, the better. I can remember walking out of services and hearing people thank the preacher for basically beating them that day because they really needed to hear it.

And that was my world for 20 something years.

You might want to define Arminian for some people just so that they understand what you mean.

Yeah, revivalistic and Arminian actually tend to go together often. And Arminian meaning that they don't believe that God is sovereign in saving those to whom He has elected, that it is man's decision to accept the offer that God is giving them.

And it basically is, if you buy a life insurance policy from God, you're good to go, but it's up to you to buy it or not. And I would even hear that language of life insurance or getting your fire insurance, basically, is how they would describe it.

So God is, of course, God, but then He has made it possible for man to be saved. And then it's up to us to make the good decision.

Yeah, that's right. And the logic behind it is, how can God truly be loved if He's forcing people to love Him? So it must be our choice to love Him. And the way in which that you find your assurance is based on that moment in time that's called conversionism.

It's this moment in time where I knew that I went forward during an invitation. I can remember my brother and I both went forward at the same time. We didn't know what each other was doing. And I went to the back with Mr. Thompson and he shared the gospel with me and asked me if I wanted to say their sinner's prayer, so I got down on my knees and I don't know what I said, whatever he told me to say, and it was there that I held on to for years and years that I know I'm a Christian because I went into the back room and I knelt down with Mr. Thompson and I said what I learned to phrase it as the sinner's prayer.

And that's how I know because it was written in my Bible. I still have that Bible around here somewhere. It was written in my Bible that that was, and people will ask you, do you have a time, do you have a moment that you know for sure that you gave your life to Jesus, to which I, you know, of course, a couple of years later I rededicated my life to God because I had lost my way.

But there was never a moment in my life, I never, I wasn't a really bad kid. I mean, I did the things that most kids, you know, I tried smoking and, you know, I can remember having my cussing phase, but I never did, I never got into like massive trouble to where I had to have that reconversion moment where I need to convince my parents not to discipline me because I'm going to get saved again.

And I was baptized twice, I think once when I was seven and then again when I was 12, but it's, it's assurance is based on my either remembering a moment or my decision. And the question that I know the, when I grew up with people around me, when I was in college, the question always was, did I really mean it?

When I said that prayer back whenever, did I really?

Right.

That I really, and I can't tell you, including my wife, I can't tell you how many times people were like, well, just in case they're laying in bed, just in case I didn't mean it, I'm going to mean it now.

And then they say the words prayer again.

Yeah.

Now's the time.

Right.

It's almost like we're saved by our sincerity, you know, in a, in a scheme like that. And like, to be really clear, we will talk maybe more about some of this later. We here at Theocast, of course, understand that people make decisions to trust Christ and to follow Jesus.

We just understand that long before we make a decision for Christ, He made a decision for us. And so that's the, that's the rock under our feet. And, and that, that is a piece of this assurance conversation that we're having.

I know for myself, just to start, it might be helpful to say I, I have, I've struggled with anxiety my whole life. I don't know that I would have been able to frame it that way until recent years. And by that, I mean, a couple of things.

Some of it is perfectionism and, and related to fear of man as well. But then some of it is these kind of unsolicited thoughts of horrible things happening to me or my family. And, and I tend to be very pessimistic and assume that, that bad will happen rather than good.

And so my constitution is one that I think lends itself to a real struggle with, with peace and assurance. And so in my young life, I was, I think, converted as young as maybe 10. I'm confident that I was meaning to trust Christ by 12 or 13.

I was baptized at 14. And in my adolescent years, in my teenage years, I probably rededicated my life 150 times, you know, because I was wrecked, constantly wrecked by the fact I knew, I can remember my experience so vividly.

I would read Matthew chapter seven, verses 21 to 23, where people would come before Jesus and, and say, you know, that like, Lord, Lord, look, look at the things that we did. And he would, he would say to them, depart from me, I never knew you.

And I would be haunted by that reality constantly. Like I know that that's going to be me, that I'm going to stand before Christ at the end of history, having meant with all my heart to trust him and follow him and honor him with my life.

And he's going to say, I never knew you, depart from me. And I was, like Jimmy said, I was always very aware of my, my obedience. Like, how well am I obeying? How well am I doing the things that I should be doing?

And I grew up in a very moralistic context, though it was liberal theologically, it was a very moralistic, legalistic kind of church environment where, you know, there's a hyper focus on our performance and what we're doing.

And so I was always kind of like Martin Luther. It's like, I could never do this well enough. I can never do enough and, and I know I'm failing. And then the other thing was I was always very aware of my feelings.

So both of you brothers have touched on feelings or sincerity, and I was always haunted by that reality too. I know I'm not sincere enough. I'm not feeling it enough. And when I did have any semblance of assurance was when I was like hyper emotional about, about Jesus or about the things of the faith.

Like if I was, if I was moved to tears by what Christ has done for me, it's like, okay, maybe I'm saved. And if I wasn't, if I was feeling apathetic or, or whatever, I just was, was constantly wrestling and, and was haunted by, by the fact that, yeah, that I'm not going to be accepted by God and I will have wasted my life in, in trying to follow Christ and it will all be for nothing.

So that's just some of my experience as a teenager. And then through college, it wasn't much different and it wasn't until I encountered reformed theology, honestly, that this has begun to shift, even though I still battle it all the time.

Romans 7, Galatians 5, and the Ongoing War Between Flesh and Spirit

Yeah.

Yeah.

Justin, you, you brought up Matthew seven and I'm just mindful of, of other scriptures, particularly when, you know, Jesus says, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and, and there would be moments in my Christian life and walk where I would just be feeling like I'm, I'm nailing this, like I am the only one that is taking up my cross and then there would be moments where I'm like, I don't even know what that, what that means or what that, what that looks like.

And I think you said it really well, that often when somebody is struggling with assurance, when they're struggling to know kind of in the deepest recesses of their heart of whether or not they are a Christian, what they really mean, if I could put some words into the, the listener's mouths, so to speak, what you probably mean by that is you tie your assurance so keenly and so intrinsically to your feelings and your emotions and the way that you live and your thought life.

And honestly, that is a deep black hole that once you start going down, you will never be able to get out of because I don't, I mean, places like Romans seven have, as we've talked about assurance around these microphones, places like, yeah, we will today, places like Romans seven really have actually served to bring me a lot of comfort where you see the Apostle Paul wrestling with his own frame, wrestling with his own flesh, wrestling with his own sinful nature, and so maybe to now kind of shift the conversation a little bit from kind of our personal anecdotes, what are some of the things that you guys observe just in contemporary Christian culture?

What are the things that you would say kind of rob the average believer of their assurance?

Discipleship, Pietism, and Looking Outside Ourselves to Christ

Yeah, I would say one of the themes that come, that will come up over and over and over as you listen to Theocast and read our material is the struggle between this new, new nature we have, which loves God, wants righteousness, is now very, like the light has shown on in the filthy room and we can see the clutter and then still living in the clutter and still lying down in the bed of sin, so we use the very famous Paul struggle that you even mentioned in Romans seven of the things I don't want to do, the things I do, wretched men I am who will save me from this body of death, and I would say most struggles with assurance have to do with the reality of sin that remains in our life.

People, people don't struggle with how much they have changed. I think that is true, but most of the time is I still sin or I still struggle with sin or I still want to sin and there have been movements that have come out and these movements I think have created more question of assurance, not assuring it up, movements like the confusion of the Lordship of Jesus Christ, radical, being a radical Christian, or even the whole discipleship movement, which I know all three of these are ones that we're going to speak to here in a moment, but I would say all of them are a confusion of what Luther was clarifying.

This isn't new to Luther, it's part of scripture, but the saint, sinner, Rialto, you are a sinner and a saint at the same time and just because you are justified does not mean that God has removed your nature.

He's given you a new nature, but the old nature still remains. He's given you a new life, but the old life is still, this is why Paul says we, our flesh battles against our spirit. So it is, I think in this conversation where we're going to go, what you're going to see is a contrast between putting your faith in realities that are outside of you and outside of your circumstances and outside of your efforts in a person, which is Christ.

Assurance has to be, and I'll just, I'll, I'll just be my last comment. I'll throw it over to you guys. Assurance has to be that Jesus saved me, not that I walked towards salvation in Jesus. This is the reformed faith that by God's sovereign grace, he came to this earth and he saved me.

That's where assurance has to be found. If you do not hold that, you can always question, did I truly walk enough towards Jesus? Did I truly accept him? Am I holding on to him tightly? Whereas we are told in John 10, Jesus holds on to us and no one takes us out of his hand.

We're excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our website called Faith vs. Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. And we, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

And you can get this at theocast .org slash Primer. And if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us. You can do that by joining our Total Access membership.

That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry. And you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org.

We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

The Problem with Discipleship-Centered Evangelicalism

I know there's a number of ways we could go here. I want to talk a little bit about just the emphasis that exists in the broader church, and this is true in just evangelicalism in general, and it's true amongst the Calvin-gelical, the Calvinistic evangelical crowd too.

A hyper-focus on discipleship and underneath that heading, that banner of discipleship would be things like spiritual disciplines, how well are you doing in applying those and being consistent with those, but then also our affections, and by affections, we mean our feelings, our emotions toward God and the things of God, and then also our obedience.

Underneath discipleship, all of those things kind of exist because amongst the crowd where discipleship is really just championed, and just to be very clear, we understand that every Christian is a disciple.

To be a Christian is to be a disciple, or to be a disciple is to be a Christian. There's not this kind of subset underneath, like some people are Christians and then there are the real serious types who are disciples, it's not a biblical category.

So in this kind of culture where discipleship is just kind of being pounded all the time, disciplines and affections and obedience are talked about constantly, and so inevitably what happens when you begin to talk about those things is you are pointing Christians back in on themselves.

If you want to know that you are safe and you want to know that you're God's and you want to know that you'll be with the Lord forever, then here are the things that you need to be doing, and then here are the things that you need to be doing with respect to assessing yourself.

Assess your spiritual disciplines. How consistent have you been in reading and praying and maybe fasting and family worship, and we could go on down the list. How are your affections? How are your feelings toward God?

Is there a trajectory of improvement in your life in terms of how you feel about God and the things of God? Are you more geeked up about the things of God now than you were? Because if you're not, then you should be concerned.

Then how is your obedience? Are you obeying God's word better now than you were a month ago or a year ago or a decade ago, or are you more excited about obedience? Does obedience come more naturally to you now as you're being transformed?

If you're listening to me talk, none of that has anything to do with the work of Christ outside of you for you. All of that has everything to do with you as the Christian. How am I doing? We'll use this term navel-gazing a lot, and what we mean by that is that you're looking at your own navel all the time.

You're looking at yourself all the time rather than having your gaze fixed upon Christ and upon the work of Christ that stands rock-solid objectively outside of you, and so we'll say this a lot on Theocast.

I'm about to throw it over to you, Jimmy. On Theocast a lot, we'll say that we are always looking outside of ourselves to save what's wrong in us, and so if you're pointing people in any way inside themselves to their own obedience, their own affections, their disciplines, their performance, there is nowhere to stand, and that's at the heart of the issue here for us is point the center.

John, you said it so well. We are at the same time justified and center. Point that struggling center to something that is solid rock, not sinking sand, and the only solid rock is Christ and His righteousness for you.

The Sacraments as Objective Signs of Christ's Devotion

Jimmy Buehler Yeah, so the Christian church throughout history has used this word, the sacraments, and the sacraments historically understood is where we see visibly the word of God, we see visibly the gospel, the things that you are talking about, JP, where we are reminded of Christ's sufficient sacrifice on our behalf, and historically, the sacraments have been understood in a Protestant way as baptism in the Lord's Supper, but one of the things that we have pointed out is that really in modern contemporary evangelicalism, the sacraments, to be honest, really have become spiritual disciplines and the worship time, aka singing, in Sunday morning church, where the place where we feel God's grace or we receive God's grace is when we sing, when we worship, did you get the goose bumps or as Michael Horton likes to call them, the liver shivers, did you feel something during the singing time, and as you've woke up early and you're digging into the Bible and you're praying, did you, quote unquote, get something out of it, that is something teaching high school students I get all the time.

Well, I just don't get anything out of it when I read the Bible, and really, I think what they're trying to say and often what people feel and think and put forth when it comes to these evangelical sacraments of personal spiritual discipline and worship is that if we're not feeling something, then something is wrong with us, and an observation I'd like to point out is this, is that when God's grace becomes something you receive based off of something you do, it is no longer God's grace.

That's right, it's not grace because it's now conditioned. It's not unmerited anymore.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's merited favor, whereas what we see historically that Christians have understood in baptism in the Lord's Supper, those things are two things that happen to you, you know, someone places you under the water, somebody gives you the bread and the cup, that these are outside of you objective realities.

But even in a modern evangelical sense, you know, the Lord's Supper has become such a place of undue stress and anxiety that we take the examine yourself, and certainly there is room for that in biblical Christianity, but at the same time, what the Lord's Supper points us to is these objective realities that as surely as I eat this bread, so I can trust that Christ's body was broken for me, and as surely as I drink this wine, so I can trust that the blood of Christ was shed for me.

And so, Justin, I think you wanted to make a couple other brief comments about the sacraments here, so I'm going to toss it to you.

Christ's Objective Devotion to Us in Baptism and the Lord's Supper

Yeah, thanks, Mance. I think the way that evangelicals treat the sacraments is really just a symptom of the larger systemic problem, and I want to illustrate it this way. The way that evangelicals talk about baptism and the Lord's Supper, those sacraments are made to be more about our devotion to God than they are about God's devotion and commitment to us, and that's the kind of fundamental paradigm shift that we're talking about here.

Everything in the Christian life, and the sacraments included, has more to do with God's commitment and God's devotion to us to save us in spite of ourselves than it could ever be about our devotion to Him.

Because if you turn it into being about our devotion to God, we are all done. We got no shot, but if it's about God's devotion and commitment to us, okay, now we've got something that we can actually sing about and that we can actually rejoice.

Over.

I would say if you look at Paul's epistles, let's just take Ephesians and Philippians and Colossians as examples. What does he do? He points you to the objective realities of Jesus Christ. He's talking about what Christ has done, who He is, His nature, His faithfulness, His power, and then he talks about how all of that is ours by faith alone, that we receive it.

Then he goes after the Galatians harder than anyone. The moment that someone tries to add works back into—and what he means by this is if you think God accepts you as faithful or He accepts you as righteous before Him by Christ's death and your works, you are believing something that is akin to witchcraft, is what he's saying.

I mean, he uses some very harsh language. I would say there are movements out there that have good intentions, but they have caused more people to lose their assurance. I think they're trying to help them.

I mean, maybe not help them with their assurance, but they're going after what we call nominal or lazy Christians and calling into question these people. Because if you aren't making Jesus Lord of your life, and this is what it looks like to make Jesus Lord of your life, and our response to that is Jesus is Lord.

You can't make Him anything other than He is. You either accept Him for who He is, but you do not make Him that. I think it's a rebranding of rededicating your life. They just call it lordship now. I don't think there's two qualities of disciples.

This goes into discipleship as well or even radical. There isn't two levels, those who got in by prayer and then those who have really dedicated their life making Jesus Lord or becoming a disciple or radical Christianity.

I'm just going to throw that out there. I know you guys are probably going to blow up on that, but I think those movements have stripped people because they look at their life and go, that's not me, I don't fit in that category.

The Difference Between Faith in Christ and Faithfulness to Christ

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I would say within the radical Christianity mindset, there's just no room to live a normal Christian life. There's no room to be boring, so to speak, or ordinary. My goodness, yeah, just to be ordinary.

My goodness, if you have free time and you're not using it to evangelize to your neighbor or do this or do this or do this spiritual discipline, then are you actually even saved? There's a phrase that we use here on the podcast all the time.

It's called pietism and pietism is overly obsessed with what we call the interior of the Christian life. How good you feel about Jesus, your affections for Jesus, your actions for Jesus, and we contrast that with what we call confessionalism, where it's the exterior of the Christian life, it's pointing to the objective realities of Christ.

And where pietism likes to ask the question, are you even saved? What we like to ask in confessionalism is, is God gracious? Is God good? Is it either all Jesus or all nothing? That's what we want to point people to, is that assurance, rest, hope, peace, life, faith, trust, all of these things are outside of you.

The Reformation era term is extra nos, outside of yourself.

Justin Perdue. That's right, yes.

So I want to talk a little bit about scripture. I know that's not frowned upon on this podcast. And so let's turn people in the last 15 minutes or so here, let's talk to the listener about Christ and his sufficiency and in light of our experience, why that's such glorious news.

I'm going to begin with Romans 7, Galatians 5 realities that we touched on. I just want to be really clear. Our understanding biblically is that we are at the same time, saint and sinner, meaning that we are justified by faith in Christ.

We are declared righteous by God and we are safe and we still struggle against our corruption that we inherited from Adam. And so this means that we, like the Apostle Paul describes in Romans 7 and in Galatians 5, verse 17 in particular, our experience goes like this.

There are good things that we want to do because we're born again. We have God's spirit in us. There are good things that we want to do that we find ourselves not doing at least as much as we want. There are bad things that we don't want to do that we sadly find ourselves doing much more often than we want.

And so there's this internal war. You'll hear us talk about that and use that phrase. There is a war going on inside of us between our spirit and our flesh. And Paul says in Galatians 5, 17 that because of that war between the spirit and the flesh, it results in you not doing what you want to do.

And so this is the great struggle for every Christian that I want in my inner man to obey and honor God and glorify God and do righteousness. And yet I find that I am unable to pull it off. And God tells me that I'm His child, but I feel like I'm His enemy because I'm sinning.

I hate it and I know God hates sin. And so what do I do with this? And ultimately the answer has to be, as we've said, it's outside of us and it's found in Christ Jesus. So I immediately go to a passage like Hebrews 10 verses 11 to 14.

It's one of my favorite paragraphs in scripture where we hear about the fact that Christ has made a sacrifice once and for all that is sufficient. It's so sufficient that He sat down at the right hand of God.

Like it's so over that there's nothing left to be done because Jesus has accomplished redemption. And then verse 14 of Hebrews 10, He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. So your life is changing.

Like the sanctification is a process, right? Like it's ongoing. And while that process is happening and it's all over the map, sometimes it's going well, sometimes it's not going well at all, it doesn't matter because you are safe in Christ because He has perfected you for all time.

Amen.

I would also go to one of the, I think I can remember I was driving on my way to seminary talking to a good friend of mine and he mentions to me Galatians and it was here that the reformed faith finally, like the puzzle came all together, like the confessions, this constant pushing of us towards Christ.

So in Galatians, Paul says 3 .1, Oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, is it before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed and crucified? Let me ask you only this, did you receive the spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?

Are you so foolish, having begun by the spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? That is the crux of assurance that you think you get in by faith, but you maintain by your performance and Paul says, no, your justification, the right standing you have before God, Him declaring you righteous, and your sanctification being transformed into His image are both works of the spirit that come to us by faith.

Therefore, your progress, how you are being transformed, you must be dependent upon Christ by faith. You cannot measure yourself up against a ruler on the wall saying, well, I should be here by now because I've been a Christian for so many years.

Why am I still struggling with the same sin that I struggled with when I got saved? All these other Christian testimonies have it to where they no longer struggle. And may I point you back to the constant reminding of the New Testament that we have to be aware of Satan who is coming to deceive and tempt us, that our flesh is going to war against our spirit, that it is not, may I just read to you the end of Colossians chapter three, where he says all of these things, all of these works, they sound spiritual and wise, but they are of no value of stopping the flesh, and then what does Paul say in the beginning of chapter four, look to Christ, and he only tells you the finished work of Christ where he's seated at the right hand of the Father.