Do you struggle over assurance of your salvation? The truth is, many people go through periods where they doubt their standing with Christ. They ask, “Am I good enough to be a child of God? What if my desire, at times, to read the Bible is weak?” In this podcast, Scott Brown explains that our salvation is not based on our inner-therapist. It is based on the objective work of Christ, accomplished through His death, burial, and resurrection. If we’ve repented of our sins, we must not obsess over our feelings, but rest in faith on His work of redemption, and “reckon [our]selves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:11). 

So how are you feeling about your life? Do you have a sense of assurance, of salvation? What's your assurance based on? Is it based on your feelings? Many people go through periods of doubt about their salvation.

Do you have absolute assurance? Romans 6, 1-11 makes it very clear that salvation is based on something that happened. It's something that done. Let me read the text, Romans 6, 1. What shall we say then?

Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not. How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it. And the Apostle Paul, he just keeps talking about this fact that something has died, that something has happened to you, something has changed. And this presents difficulties for us for understanding salvation.

Why? We live in a hypertherapeutic culture and it teaches us to monitor every feeling, to obsess about everything that we are feeling. And if you go to a therapist, they're going to ask you, how do you feel today? Are you happy? Are you sad?

Do you feel secure? Do you feel that people like you? You know, are you, do you feel lonely? And so we live in this therapeutic culture, but if you're a Christian and you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you have repented of your sins and your life has changed, you might, you might, you know, push your assurance of salvation back into your feelings rather than back into the finished work of Jesus Christ. And you might think, am I good enough to be a child of God?

Am I passionate enough to qualify to have a relationship with God? Am I obedient enough? What if I have doubts? What if I don't feel like reading my Bible all the time? That's one way of establishing your assurance of salvation on the way you feel about things.

But in this passage, like in verse one, you know, you have died to sin. This is something that has happened. You were baptized, And that has nothing to do with water. It has to do, you know, actually with God rescuing you. It's a metaphor in verse five.

There's a death and a resurrection in verse six. There's an old man that was crucified in verse seven. You were freed from sin in verses nine and ten. You died with Christ. These are things that happened in the past and the Apostle wants his readers to understand what their salvation is based on and it's not upon their inner therapist because your inner therapist is always going to be talking to you and what God has done in his word is given us something more substantial than our feelings to base our salvation on.

And so you have this reality in Romans chapter six. Now, one thing about the book of Romans, From chapter one all the way to chapter six verse ten, there are zero commands. There are just indicators, just things that are true, just things that you can rely on regarding the gospel, regarding the world. These are declarative statements. These are indicatives.

And then you don't get to the imperatives until verse 11 in chapter six. The apostle spends all this time, And then in verse 11, he says, and reckon yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God. That's the action. He's saying to reckon is to think. To reckon is, it's like an accounting term.

You know, like do the math. Look at the number on the page. You know, change your heart about the way that you look about, look at sin. Reckon yourself dead to sin, but alive to God. Reckon, don't feel.

Now of course God does work with our feelings. He does enliven our emotions. I'm not saying that he doesn't do that. I'm just saying that that's not the basis of one's salvation. And what the apostle is saying is that your salvation is based on the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. For more resources.