SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/24/2024 1:32 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-3 “The
Certainty of Christian Assurance”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 1 John 2:3-6
Message of the verses: “3 By this we know that
we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. 4 The one who says,
"I have come to know Him," and does not keep His commandments, is a
liar, and the truth is not in him; 5 but
whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By
this we know that we are in Him: 6 the one who says he abides in Him ought
himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.”
We continue writing about Christian Assurance in
this SD, and yet in spite of such biblical mandates, many in contemporary
Christianity simply ignore the biblical understanding of assurance. At this time let me quote 1 John 5:13 “These things I have written to you who believe in the name
of the Son of God, so that
you may know that you have eternal life.” Notice the highlighted portion of this
verse. MacArthur writes “Teachers
frequently assure them that if they have repeated a certain prayer, gone
forward at an evangelistic rally, made a profession of faith, given mental
assent to the gospel, or even been baptized, they are definitely saved and
should never question their salvation. Such
people do not want to examine themselves as the Bible teaches (2 Cor. 13:5),
because to do so, they reason, might damage their fragile self-esteem or make
them guilty of doubting God. As a
result, the entire subject of assurance is often de-emphasized or ignored altogether.” Just so you know the reason I quoted 1 John
5:13 is because I want to make it clear that people can certainly be assured of
their salvation, but as MacArthur writes there are people who go forward to
accept Jesus Christ and then just go out and live the same kind of life that
they lived before they went forward.
There must be spiritual growth to show that you are saved. I knew a lady who was helping to take care of
my mom before she passed away and inside her car she had things from different
faiths including Jewish and Christian things.
She was trying to make sure that when she died that she would go to
heaven, but it seems that she had missed the mark of really knowing what it
takes to be a true believer. I felt
sorry for her.
John MacArthur has a book that he
wrote to help out with this issue entitled “The
Gospel According to the Apostles that he wrote in 1993 and was republished
in 2000. He writes “But that has not
always been the case. Throughout church
history, the personal assurance of salvation has been a major issue. On the one hand, Roman Catholicism has always
adamantly denied the possibility of assurance.
This perspective stems from the Catholic heresy that salvation is a
joint effort between God and sinners.
God will always do His part, but the sinner might not continue to do his
or her part; thus no one can be assured of salvation in this life. In the words of the Council of Trent
(1545-63), any ‘believer’s assurance of the pardon of his sins is a vain and
ungodly confidence” (cited in J. C. Ryle, Holiness
[1877-1879; reprint, Moscow, Idaho: Charles Nolan, 20023], 123). Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine, a Jesuit
theologian of that era, once stated that assurance is ‘a prime error of
heretics’ (ibid., n. 1). In other words,
according to Roman Catholicism, no one can truly know whether or not he or she
has received salvation until the afterlife—and to think one can is
heretical. Well anyone who has read many
of my Spiritual Diaries know that I do not believe this statement from the
Roman Catholic Church about not knowing that you are saved and have the
assurance of knowing it, because that is what the Bible teaches.
In the next SD on this subject I
want to look first at the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers talked and
wrote about as this was a very important time in history.
9/24/2024 11:55
PM
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