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

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.

Assurance and Self-Deception in the Christian Life

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. 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 of what was being discussed.

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 that 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. 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.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, 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 that it generally goes with salvation.

Does that make sense? 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, like 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, yeah.

Okay.

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, like 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'll 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 salvation, 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. 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? And so the idea of assurance is that assurance is based on reality. So 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.

So you, like 2 Peter talks about adding to your faith, virtue and virtue, self-control and self-control, knowledge, right?

Right.

And 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.

And 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, like and they're just like 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 like, you're meant to observe the whole pattern of your life from start to finish. And as you're observing the whole pattern of your life, start to finish, like assurance is not, 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 know, you're not as committed to God as you should be.

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

But then, you know, like if you, you know, 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, you know, everyone should look at them and say, hey, you know, 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 should, and then if you're making plans to actually carry it out, then, you know, at that point you should say, hey, you know, you, you don't have a right in that moment to assurance until you stop this nefarious plan, put it, you know, nip it in the bud.

And like the, you know, 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.

Levels of Certainty and the Purpose of Warning Passages

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

Yeah.

So salvation is meant to be a confident trust that God is for you. And some of this is just related to, you know, a philosophical discussion about levels of certainty.

Okay.

So like you have, what's called absolute certainty and like as a philosophical idea, absolute certainty would be like the a hundred percent confidence.

Right.

Yeah.

And there's very few things that you can actually have absolute confidence in.

Okay.

Like meeting, like you can, you can have absolute confidence in like law of non-contradiction and like, you know, the, that one plus one equals two and that kind of stuff, like things that are true by definition.

So but then, you know, most of the things in life, like, like the idea of absolute standard of proof, that's a very high philosophical threshold for confidence.

All right.

So like, meaning like, like you have, you have like, if you think about just the way certainty works in general in life, you know, you have like coin toss, like certainty, right? So that would be like a 50, 50 kind of scenario where it's like, it's equally probable as not right.

And then you have like a more probable than not. So if you move it up a notch, you say it's more probable, more likely, and that would be kind of like, you know, it's, you know, 60 to 70 kind of range of certainty, more probable than not.

Like, and then, you know, the standard that we use to execute capital punishment is certain beyond a reasonable doubt.

Okay.

Okay.

So like, we're not demanding absolute certainty in order to put someone to death. We're demanding a level of certainty beyond a reasonable doubt, like, meaning there's no reason to doubt this, like, and 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, to put someone to death.

But most of us, like in the day to day decisions that we're making in life, we're not even operating at that level of certainty. Like we're just, we're operating at the more probable than not kind of level of certainty.

Like it's more probable 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.

Yeah.

And so, so what people are doing there is they're demanding, like, if you were to demand absolute certainty in order to go to work, no one would ever go to work.

Well, you couldn't.

Yeah.

You couldn't.

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

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

Yeah.

Like, meaning like 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.

Like, like meaning like, you know, 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, they're basically trying to work themselves up into this absolute confidence and they do it so much so that they're, you know, their son or their daughter could live in sin forever and live in a 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 like absolutely confident that they are in the faith. And that's just not the means that God uses to help us persevere.

He helps us persevere with the reality that there's objective means of assurance, there's subjective means of assurance, and he wants us to be, you know, certain beyond a reasonable doubt that we're saved and hold within ourself 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 conforming him.

To his image. If that makes sense.

Okay. Fair enough.

Closing Remarks and Podcast Sign-Off

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