How
do I know if I am saved? That is a
question of supreme importance and one that we probably take too lightly given
its eternal significance. Has God’s Holy
Spirit truly transformed me or am I just trying to reform myself? A person trying to reform himself will try to
stop doing all the bad things they love and then try to do all the righteous
things that they hate. That’s just
religion and it cannot save us. All of
that person’s “righteous” deeds would still be as filthy rags. Salvation is a
supernatural work in which God the Holy Spirit transforms us into a new
person. Men are born depraved
and sinful and cannot truly change their own lives and make themselves
good. Only God has the power to
transform.
Fruits
and Pruning
Jesus
says twice in Matthew 17:16 and 19 that “You will know them by their
fruits.” Our nature determines the
desires of our heart. If our nature is
evil, the desires of our heart will be evil.
When God transforms our nature, the desires of our heart will also be
transformed from evil to good and it will demonstrated by the fruit in our
lives.
John
15:5 says that believers are branches grafted onto the vine that is Jesus
Christ. A new branch may take some time before
it can bear fruit, so new believers should not be frustrated when they do not
see fruit right away. God may have to do
a lot of pruning in the form of discipline before the branch can grow and
before any fruit can show in a new believer’s life.
This
discipline is a test to see if we are truly a believer. Are you being disciplined by God? Is God pruning you and cutting you back as a
gardener does his plants? God loved
Jacob, but hated Esau. Esau became
wealthy and he became a leader of many tribes.
Jacob, on the other hand, was disciplined by God. He was corrected by God, just as a father
corrects his child so that he or she will learn to do what’s right.
Being
a Christian doesn’t mean that we won’t still struggle with sin and our sinful
flesh that is still a part of us. A Christian
will sin and can even fall into bad sin, but a Christian will not continue in
that sin as a lifestyle. Fruits are about
someone’s lifestyle, not one moment in time.
You might see a true Christian one day doing something stupid and sin,
but if you followed him around for a month, you would see his or her true
lifestyle. The Christian lifestyle is about
attempting to know God more and wanting to conform to what God wants us to
be. And over time, we will be more
conformed to His character and His will as God sanctifies us and makes us holy.
A Christian will sin and
even fall into bad sin, but a Christian will not continue in that sin as a
lifestyle.
A
Christian will have setbacks, but will grow over time. It is not just that on the day I was saved
that my life was changed; my life was
changed and still continues to
change. There must be an awareness that
you have changed, even in a new believer.
2
Corinthians 13:5 says we are to “Examine yourselves to see if you are in the
faith.” It is a healthy thing for a
Christian to do and we must continually do this. Those who are true Christians will examine
themselves and see how they don’t measure up to God’s Word. This will cause them to recognize their own
shortcomings and continually repent.
However, people who don’t see
their sin and think that they are good show that they are not Christians
because they were never converted in the first place.
A
Christian has a new relationship with sin.
Before, he loved sin. Now, he
hates it. Sin now convicts you to repent
of it and not continue in it. Repentance
is brokenness over sin and a desire for obedience. One of the greatest evidences of conversion
is not perfectionism, but brokenness.
One of the greatest
evidences of conversion is not perfectionism, but brokenness.
I highly recommend
prayerfully going through those verses from The Gospel – part 7 –
Salvation
on the tests to know if you’ve been saved.
It also includes much to read on the subject of repentance and
brokenness. There must be a change of purpose from
pleasing ourselves to pleasing God.
Paris Reidhead said that repentance is the key to assurance and that it
is a “180 degree change from ‘I am going to do what I want to do and please me’
to ‘I am going to do what God wants me to do and please him.’”
“Suppose that a person has 1,000 sins
and he purposes to abandon and flee from 999 of them, but he cherishes one that
he hides in some closet of his mind and makes provision to indulge that one
sin. Such a man who thinks himself to
have repented is either criminal or crazy because repentance to be real has to
be entire and not partial.”
Charles Spurgeon
“Am I broken enough over my sin?” is a
question I ask myself. When I mess up
and ask God’s forgiveness I sometimes wonder if I am broken over my sin or if I
am just paying lip service and praying the prayer so I can get
forgiveness. We must examine ourselves
and our motives. Being broken means that
you are most concerned with your relationship with God; paying lip service
means that I just want to get into heaven.
Christians will sin and struggle with
sin at times. Paul had the most dramatic
transformation of anyone in the Bible when Jesus came to him at the road to
Damascus, but even he was frustrated with the sinful nature of his flesh. “I do not understand the things I do. For what I hate to do, I do.” We can take comfort in that Paul struggled
like we do with sin.
Love
A love for other
believers and a desire to be with them is evidence of being a Christian. We are not to love this world. The world is everything that contradicts
Christ and His teaching and makes Christ’s teachings burdensome or oppressive
to us. We
must choose to keep away from all things and all people and any kind of
entertainment or activities that we know will make God’s Word seem burdensome
or oppressive to us.
Perseverance
Spurgeon said that for repentance to be
real, it has to be permanent and not temporary.
If it is just for a period of time—a few days or weeks or months or
years—it is clear evidence that the repentance was not real. Hebrews
3:14 shows that perseverance is a test of salvation: “For we have become
partakers of Christ, if
we hold fast the beginning of our assurance
firm until the end.”
The
Gospel of Jesus Christ
The message we heard can give us
assurance…or not. If all you heard was, “God’s
got a wonderful plan for your life,” or come “have your
best life now,” then you have cause for concern and self-examination. If you heard a series of questions skillfully
designed to lead you into a decision, then you have cause for concern and self-examination. It is impossible
for spiritually dead men to make a “decision” anyways. Jesus isn’t some little, weak person begging you
to make a decision so He can come into your heart. Know instead that the Creator of the universe
commands men to “repent and believe
in the gospel” (Mark 1:14-15) in order to be saved.
Mark
4:16-17 says, “In a similar way these are the ones on whom seed was sown on the rocky places, who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy; and they have no firm root in themselves, but are only temporary; then, when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately they fall away. If you receive
the message with joy and not brokenness, you will fall away and not persevere because
you were never saved in the first place.
Too many people, instead of salvation, have an emotional experience (read
about two examples—one one of them my own—here).
If you hear the message of the Gospel
and understand who God is, who you are, and how unworthy we are of all that God
did, then you can have assurance. Only
the true Gospel
message that leads to brokenness and repentance can save you.
“For, the more a soul
grows in grace, the more that the believing man rests in Christ and drinks into
His Spirit, just the more dissatisfied does he become with all his fruits; his
holiness does not please him; he finds defects in it; he finds it mixed and
impure; and the longer he lives the life of faith, he gets more and more
keen-sighted in detecting blemishes…”
Andrew Bonar
John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” We are accepted
by God the moment we believe—that is our assurance; that is our peace. Andrew Bonar said, “Will you not now
stand still, and once more examine Christ crucified, Christ’s finished work, to
see if that cannot yield you the present and eternal peace which alone can
satisfy the soul?” Bonar said we get our
assurance by “what we believe about Christ; not about what we know about our
act of faith.”
“Will you not now stand
still, and once more examine Christ crucified, Christ’s finished work, to see
if that cannot yield you the present and eternal peace which alone can satisfy
the soul?”
- Andrew Bonar
We can have assurance
in the fact that Jesus paid the full penalty for our sin and that God’s justice
was satisfied. Bonar said, “This is
faith rising into assurance while simply continuing to behold its glorious
object.” Our glorious object is Christ
and we have assurance that Jesus paid it all through the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.
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