The Lord Jesus taught that the key to a fruitful, God-glorifying life is abiding in His Word (John 8:31–32; 15:7–8). If this is true for disciples of Christ in general, how much more is it necessary for pastors and preachers! This talk will explore the benefits of a life of meditating on the Word day and night (Ps. 1:2), with insights from the Puritans on how to most effectively feed ourselves and our flocks with the Holy Scriptures.

The National Center for Family Integrated Churches presents Assurance, a message given by Joel Beekie at the Power of the Gospel Conference. Assurance of Faith. Turn with me please to Romans 8. Romans 8. We have a library in the Puritan Reform Seminary of 65, 000 books and every sermon in the library is recorded.

And there are more sermons by our Reformed and Puritan divines on this chapter than any other chapter in the Bible. And I suppose one good reason is because it is the chapter of assurance, as well as many others, but this is particularly sweet. I just want to read to you verses 12 through 17, and 38 and 39. Hear the word of God, Romans 8, 12 through 17, 38 and 39. Therefore, brethren, we are debtors not to the flesh to live after the flesh, for if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die, but if ye live through The Spirit, if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the Spirit of bondage again to fear but you've received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. And if children, then heirs, heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ, if so be that we suffer with Him that we may also be glorified together." And then verses 38 and 39, "...for I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Let's pray together. Great God of heaven, we pray that in the last address of this day, this long, beautiful day, thou wouldst visit us and sweeten our cup that we have been drinking with the sweetness of thy hand of assurance upon us, that we may not settle for false assurance or for high levels of assurance while we persist in low levels of obedience, but that we may aim for that solid assurance in Jesus Christ that is ratified by thy Holy Spirit's work in our lives.

Help us to expound this doctrine with accuracy, with biblical fidelity, and with truthfulness in the experience of our lives. Bless us now, we pray, and help us to grow, to continually grow in this wonderful doctrine we call assurance. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen. Well, what is assurance of faith? Assurance of faith is the conviction that I belong to Christ through faith, enjoy everlasting salvation, and am on my way to glory to spend eternity with this wonderful and glorious Savior to be married to Him forever and ever.

A person who has assurance that only believes in Christ's righteousness as His salvation, but he knows that he believes and he knows that he's graciously loved by God. Such assurance is broad in scope. It includes freedom from the guilt of sin, joy in relationship with the triune God, a sense of belonging to the family of God. When I, 32 years ago now, came to my doctoral dissertation advisory at Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia, and said I want to do my dissertation on assurance of faith, he said to me, that's a whole systematic theology. Because every doctrine of systematic theology is somehow tied back to the doctrine of assurance.

Assurance is something far bigger, far broader, far deeper, far higher than most Christians in America today realize. James W. Alexander said assurance carries with it the idea of fullness, hence our forefathers called it full assurance of faith, such as of a tree laden with fruit, or of a vessel sails stretched by a favoring gale. You see, it's my argument that today assurance is at a low ebb among Christians in America. Even as most Christians think they have it, they don't.

Assurance is known, you see, by its fruits. Fruits of a close fellowship with God, childlike obedience, thirsting after God, longing to glorify Him by carrying out His great commission. If you're an assured believer, you prayerfully anticipate revival, you view Heaven as your home, You long for the second advent of Christ, your translation to glory. And you can say with John Calvin, a Christian has made little progress in the Christian life who does not hanker to be with Christ forever. Assurance is a fulsome subject.

Assurance is a time of great, pregnant hope, expectation, and joy. And its importance today is much more critical because we live in a day of minimal assurance. The desire to fellowship with God, the yearning for God's glory and heaven, the intercession for revival are not increasing but waning today. And that's exactly what happens when the church's emphasis on earthly happiness overshadows her conviction that she's traveling through this world on her way to God and glory. So we need assurance desperately.

We need assurance because today how we feel often takes precedence over what we know or believe. We need assurance to develop a soundness of faith, a robust faith that avoids the rocks of easy believism on the one hand, and the rocks of hard believism on the other. We need assurance to have great peace with God, to have what Thomas Brooks the Puritan said is heaven on earth. Because we are exhibits of the gospel when we are assured Christians. We are salt in the earth and light on the hill.

We need assurance today to be active in Christian service. One of the old Puritans said, a man who has full assurance of faith, Thomas Goodwin, has 10 times more activity for Christ than he who doesn't. J.C. Ryle said, a believer who lacks assurance will spend much of his time in inward searchings of heart about his own state. Like a nervous person, He'll be full of his own ailments, his doubtings, his questionings, his conflicts and corruptions.

He'll be so taken up with his own eternal welfare that he has little leisure for other things and little time to do the work of God. We need assurance desperately today in order to grow in our communion with God, assurance enriches our relationship. You can't have close communion with God when you're afraid always that God is angry with you. There's communion, there's fellowship, There's a warm, trusting relationship where there's assurance. There's a confession, my beloved is mine, and I am his.

There's a relationship of love. There's a father-child relationship, a husband-wife relationship, a bride-groom-bride relationship, a head-body relationship, an intimate relationship where there's assurance. And assurance is critical in order to live holiness to the Lord, as we just heard. Assurance makes a person much more holy. Assurance that does not lead to holiness is false assurance.

You can't persist in high levels of assurance while you persist in low levels of holiness. Assurance gives power to live a holy life. It's possible to be saved without much assurance, but it's scarcely possible to be a healthy Christian without much assurance. And you see, the problem with so many today is they want to settle to be a mediocre Christian. People even ask sometimes, what's the minimal amount I need to know in order to be a Christian?

Just imagine that if you were going to get married to a young woman, you young man, and you asked a young woman, what's the minimal amount I need to love you, to be a decent husband to you? What kind of a husband do you want to be? On a scale of one to ten, you say I want to be a ten. One man said to me when I was going to officiate his marriage, he said I want to be a twelve. A Christian wants to be a solid, robust Christian of full assurance to live holy and solely for his Lord and Savior.

And you see, when you lack that assurance, so much is missing. Now, there are many reasons for lacking assurance. You can have false conceptions of the character of God. I wish I had time to go into these things, but we don't. You can have a lack of clarity on what justification by faith means, but that was cleared up for us today.

You can also have a lack of understanding the consequences of persistent disobedience and backsliding, which destroys assurance. Hereby we do know that we know Him if we love and keep His commandments. You can have an ignorance about the satisfying evidences of grace the Holy Spirit has worked in your soul, expecting something maybe extraordinary rather than the ordinary marks of grace. Or you can despise the day of small things and lack acknowledging what God has done for you. And there are many other reasons as well.

So what I want to do with you this evening is simply this. I want to look with you, expound with you briefly, the most famous chapter ever written in any confessional reform standard on the subject of assurance. Really, assurance has been codified in Evangelical Christendom by chapter 18 of the Westminster Confession of Faith. That's why I handed it out to you. We'll walk through it.

We're going to focus mostly on paragraph two. That's where the rubber hits the road, but I wanna just briefly touch on one, three, and four as well. So if you turn over your sheet, you notice chapter 18, paragraph 1. And we'll look at four things. First, the importance and possibilities of assurance, paragraph 1.

Second, the foundations of assurance, paragraph 2. Three, the cultivation of assurance, and paragraph 4, the losing and renewal of assurance. Possibilities, foundations, cultivation, and losing and renewal. Paragraph one. Although hypocrites and other unregenerate men may vainly deceive themselves with false hopes and carnal presumptions of being in the favor of God and the state of salvation, which hope of theirs shall perish Yet such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus and love Him in sincerity, endeavoring to walk in all good conscience before Him, may in this life be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace and may rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, which hope shall never make them ashamed." I just want to say something very brief about this paragraph.

The Puritans who expounded this Westminster confession, and there were many of them. And by the way, 23 of 100 of the Westminster Puritan divines wrote books on faith and assurance, 23 of them. And they're basically all agreed together on what faith and assurance is, except in one particular area I'll get to later. And what they do when they expound paragraph one is they say something like this. There are actually three possibilities with regard to assurance.

Number one, you can be a Christian and have faith, but have very little awareness of any degree of assurance at all. That's sad, but that's possible. Number two, you can be a Christian and have large measures of assurance and various degrees, but to have large measures of assurance, that's desirable. That's your duty to seek after, and That's God's amazing grace in your life. And number three, you can think you have assurance when you don't and be deceiving your soul, either altogether for your state for eternity or else you can be overrating yourself as a Christian and think you have all these good things and have much assurance when you're really still a stranger, pretty much, of the joy of your salvation.

And so they looked at all three of these. And then they said, it's normative in the New Testament that a Christian grows in assurance, and therefore we must grow in assurance as well, and we must strive after assurance of faith in its proper place in this order of salvation, seeking to grow and grow and grow so that Jesus Christ becomes more precious, he increases and we decrease in our own estimation. And so they ask the question, what then are the foundations, not the foundations of our faith, but what are the foundations of our assurance? How do we get it? How do we use it?

And that leads them to paragraph two. Let's look at paragraph two. This certainty is not a bare, conjectural and probable persuasion grounded upon infallible hope, but an infallible assurance of faith founded upon, and here it comes, number one, this is the primary ground of assurance, the divine truth of the promises of salvation. Number two, and here comes secondary ground number one, the inward evidences of those graces unto which these promises are made. And then number three, secondary ground number two, the testimony of the spirit of adoption, witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God, which spirit is the earnest of our inheritance whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.

So what 18.2 does is it presents us with a complex ground of assurance, which includes a primary objective ground, a ground outside of ourself, the promises of God, all of which are ye and amen in Christ Jesus, and then two secondary subjective grounds, inward evidences, and the direct testimony of the Holy Spirit, witnessing with our spirit that we are the children of God. So let's look at these three grounds a moment. The first we can be brief on, the divine promises in Christ. Not brief because they're not important. In fact, they are the primary ground.

But brief because they are really quite simple to expound. It goes like this. Thomas Brooks wrote this. The promises of God are a Christian's Magna Carta, his chiefest evidences for heaven. Anthony Burgess.

It cannot be denied, but that it is a more noble and excellent way to believe in the promise than to believe upon the sense and the evidences of grace within us. So the Puritans are saying our primary ground of assurance of faith is when our soul rests on the promises of God in Jesus Christ so that we get our assurance not ultimately by looking at ourselves or anything we've produced apart from the promises of God, But we get our assurance the same way we get our faith by resting only in the promises of the Gospel. All those promises are yea and amen in Jesus Christ. So Jesus Christ And the promises are synonymous as a ground for our salvation. Edward Reynolds the Puritan said, Jesus Christ is the sum, the fountain, the seal, the treasury of all the promises of God.

Now, one of the Puritans put it this way, those subjective phenomena may sometimes feel more sure than faith in God's promises. Such experiences give less glory to God than divine promises apprehended directly by faith. Trusting in Christ and in God when we feel nothing but guilt and destruction in ourselves is the greatest honor we can give to God and therefore though living by signs and evidences is more comfortable to us, living by faith brings greater honor to God. So now that leads many people to say, well, if the Primary ground of our assurance is the promises of God in Jesus Christ. End of discussion.

We can say amen. We can all go to our rooms. The problem is this. And every reformer, every Puritan had to deal with this. It begins especially with Calvin.

Calvin put it this way, the problem is there are so many people who call themselves Christians, who take all the promises of the Bible to themselves, leave all the threatenings of the Bible to others, and say I believe in all the promises of God, thank God I'm saved by grace, and now I'm going to live the way I want to live. The problem is, you see, in what Kevin Swanson just said, the antinomian side of our corrupt nature wants the promises. We want the promises in one hand and the world in the other. We want to live our own life, not under the lordship of Christ, even as we embrace the promises and say, I know that I am saved and on my way to glory. In case you're questioning the accuracy of this statement, Do you know there was an interview done by some secular magazine a few years ago asking the question, do you believe in hell?

And do you know that more than 70% of Americans claim that they still believe in hell? And then there was a follow-up question, Do you believe there's any possibility that God would send you there? 96% of Americans. This is church, unchurched people said no. No possibility.

I'm sure I'm going to heaven. That's why when I asked to do this dissertation, one of the professors at Westminster said, why would you want to do a dissertation on the assurance of faith? Everybody has it anyway. I was astonished. You see, we got a problem.

We got a problem when everybody thinks, well the promises of God are for me, the threat means they're for someone else. The promises of God, you see, do not exist in a vacuum in the Bible, nor in the experience of the believer's soul. They're applied to the soul in assurance, and that application produces a holy life. 2 Corinthians 7 verse 1, Having therefore these promises dearly beloved, Let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting ourselves, perfecting holiness rather, in the fear of God." So we need some subjective evidence that we are children of God, not just the objective. And even though that is secondary, even though the promises of God are our meat and potatoes, our daily meat and potatoes, our main diet, whereby we get our assurance, we also need a supplementary confirmation, ratified in our own conscience, that we are indeed the children of God.

Now This is what the Puritans called inward evidences of grace. Fruits of grace, marks of grace, they had a great deal of terminology for it. And basically what they said was this. In the Bible, Those promises of God, which are the ground, the ultimate ground of our salvation, are ratified by inward evidences that we are indeed trusting those promises and living our lives out of the womb of those promises by the Holy Spirit working in us, assuring grace, that we belong to God and that God belongs to us. And So they used what they called syllogisms, which to us may sound complicated, but actually it's not.

And they said, we base these syllogisms on the word of God. Now what do they mean by it? Well they said this, a syllogism is a reflex act of faith. Sometimes they call it reflective or reflexive, but reflex act of faith. What it does is this.

You go to the Bible and you say, What are the marks of being a child of God? How may I know? Well, here are the Beatitudes. Here are seven or eight marks that clearly distinguish who are the people of God and who are not. Blessed are the spiritually poor.

Have you become spiritually poor before God? Now, don't examine that by yourself, they said. You need the Holy Spirit. You need the Holy Spirit to lay hold of the promises, you need the Holy Spirit to rightly examine yourself. So you go to God and you say Spirit of God give me self discernment, help me to search my own conscience.

Do I know what it means to become spiritually poor before God? To spiritually mourn over my sin before God? To become spiritually meek and submissive before God? Do I know what it means to hunger and thirst after righteousness? Now you should be able to say yes or no to that.

Do you know what it means in your life? Are you right now hungry and thirsty after the righteousness of Christ? You know that, Yes or no? And so you put that in the form of a syllogism and it goes like this. Only those who are true believers in Jesus Christ hunger and thirst after the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

Major syllogism. Minor syllogism. I, by the grace of God and by the saving work of the Holy Spirit, cannot deny that I do hunger and thirst after the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Maybe not to the degree I desire, but I cannot deny that that is in me. And I didn't put it there myself.

I never would have done that. I'm a corrupt sinner. Satan certainly wouldn't put it in me. The only person that could put it in me is the Holy Spirit, And I can't deny it's in me because I know that I hunger and thirst after the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Conclusion, I must therefore be a child of God.

Now what the Puritans said is this. There are direct acts of the soul carried immediately to its object. That's when we apprehend the promises of God. We directly go to Jesus Christ. We believe in the promises.

We believe He is our salvation. Those are direct acts of faith. That's our primary ground. But there are reflex acts of faith which validate in our own lives that our objective ground is true for us subjectively. And that Christ indeed dwells within us, and not only outside of us.

Now, they called these things syllogisms, I say, and they distinguished between the co-witnessing of the Holy Spirit and the witnessing of the Holy Spirit directly. What did they mean by that? Well, the co-witnessing, obviously co means two, means that the Spirit works together with my conscience and both witness the same thing. So the Spirit is witnessing with me, yes, I've worked within you that hunger and thirst after righteousness, and your own conscience says, Yes, it's true. Yes, it's true.

And you always take this co-witness from the word of God. Now the Puritans turn to 1 John for the power and the multiplication of these co-witnesses. You know, 11 times in the book of John, 1 John, John says something like this, we know we pass from death to life, or we know we are believers because. And then he gives a mark of grace. We know we pass from death to life because we love the brethren.

Okay, major premise, only those who truly are children of God truly love the brethren. Minor premise, I cannot deny that I have a special love for the people of God. Conclusion, I am therefore a child of God. So John is using these syllogisms over and over and over again. Now how does that co-witnessing work?

And how does the witnessing directly work? Well let me give you Six ways, briefly, how the co-witnessing works, and then three ways how the direct witnessing of the Holy Spirit works. And you'll be able to understand the doctrine of assurance. I trust much better in just a few moments after these nine thoughts. First then, the first way the Holy Spirit co-witnesses with our spirit that we are children of God is a spirit work sense of faith.

Faith is always foundational to salvation. Faith is tied into every part of the Ordo Salutis and every part of the work of Jesus Christ. William Perkins, the father of Puritanism, I mentioned him already, in his chart is his tabula of salvation. The center column are all the different aspects of Jesus Christ. And faith, in the order of salutis, which is another column, faith has an arrow going to every aspect of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So let me put it to you bluntly. If I were to wake you up at three o'clock tomorrow morning and arouse you out of your sleep and shake you and say, how do you know you're saved? And you don't think about it long, but you just, from the gut level, You say to me, I know I'm saved because Jesus Christ is for 100% my salvation and my righteousness before God. There's not 1% of me. My only hope is in Christ.

I believe in Him alone for salvation. You then have a certain awareness within yourself, don't you? And the Holy Spirit co-witnesses with you that what you're saying is not hypocritical. This is true. This is deep within you.

You can truly say, all my faith is in Him, despite who I remain in myself, you therefore of a spirit worked co-witness with your conscience that you have a sense of faith within you that is faith in Jesus Christ which is therefore saving. Now it doesn't matter at this point to see how strong that faith is. That matters in terms of how much comfort you have. But you see if there's a big rock sitting over there, and I've got one thin spider's thread to that rock, or I've got a strong rope to that rock anchored here. The rock is just as strong.

The important point is by faith, I'm connected with Jesus Christ and I'm aware of it. My conscience witnesses it and the Holy Spirit co-witnesses with me that it's true so I don't have to wonder, I don't have to say I'm a hypocrite, because I'm not sure I have. No, I say I know that my only hope is in the Lord Jesus Christ. I have, therefore, the sense of faith. Secondly, there is a thing that we call the spirit-worked sense of fruits.

I began to describe that already from the Beatitudes. Let me do it from another group of texts as well. Galatians 5, 22, 23. You've got seven or eight fruits there of the Holy Spirit, don't you, such as joy, and peace, and temperance, and so on. When you take these fruits, which, by the way, in Galatians 5, it just says fruit in the singular.

It's a whole package. It is really a moral profile of the Lord Jesus Christ. And when God works these fruits in your life as one package of fruit, He's working in you the image of Christ. He's conforming you to the image of Christ. And so you look at these things one by one prayerfully asking for the light of the Holy Spirit and you stop at joy and you say, you know by the grace of God, I do know what it is to have true joy in Jesus Christ.

In fact, he's my only greatest joy, my ultimate joy. I love him and I get more joy out of him than anything else in the world no matter how much I love my wife Or my husband or my children my number one joy in life is salvation in Jesus Christ. I long to glorify him Conclusion you are a child of God and you may embrace it and you may believe it. Now sometimes where we come in difficulty is when our sense of faith is not very lively, our graces aren't very strong, and we begin to doubt and say, why do I have all these other sins, all this indwelling corruption, all this battle against sin, if I was really a child of God? And so sometimes this is a struggle.

But the Puritans would say, hold fast to the promises. If you wake up some morning and you can't see these evidences of grace, flee to the promises and cling to them. Don't let go. Sometimes the Puritan preachers would give their people 10, 20 fruits of grace or marks of grace, inward evidences of grace, and say, do you have these? And then they'd say something like this.

Maybe I've given you all these fruits and marks of grace and you still don't know. You still don't know, because you're so inconsistent. You have to cry out, oh wretched man that I am, like Paul. Well, I'll give you one mark, said William Perkins, after he gave 15. I'll give you one mark by which every Christian will know for certainty whether he's a Christian or not, whether you're a babe in grace, whether you're a mature saint in grace.

And the mark is simply this. Do you earnestly desire to know God better? Every true Christian can say that. This is life eternal, John 17, three, to know God in Jesus Christ whom to know is life eternal. So Everyone wants to know God better if he's a Christian, to know God more intimately, to be able to say I'm a child of God because I know him.

You can take the 10 commandments. You can take John's statement. If you be my Jesus' statement, if you be my disciple, you will love my commandments. Or you take John's statement, we know we pass from death to life because we love his commandments. And you ask yourself, do I love the commandments of God?

Do I see them as fences that fence in my life? And do I long to live by them, even though I'm often inconsistent? Well, if so, by the grace of God, I'm a child of God. Thirdly, there is a co-witnessing of the Spirit in a Spirit-worked sense, and for lack of better word, I'm going to say a Spirit-worked sense of feelings. Now, we've got to be careful here.

I know. We can deceive ourselves with feelings, of course. And yet, sometimes, Reformed people are so afraid of talking about feelings that they forget that true religion is better felt than tellt, as our forefathers used to say. And in true religion, you do feel things. You can't have assurance of faith and not feel things.

I can't have assurance I love my wife and feel no love for my wife. So how does the Holy Spirit do this when He co-witnesses with our spirit in terms of the sense of feelings? Well, first of all, He touches our hearts and our affections. They are stirred up by the Spirit. Spirit gives life.

He gives sense. He gives feelings. He is called after all, Isaiah 4, 4, the spirit of burning. And you remember in Luke 24 verse 32 when Jesus walked with the disciples on the way to Emmaus, they said later, did not our hearts burn within us while he talked with us by the way, while he opened to us the scripture. So you see, if your heart has never burned within you, if you've never been aroused by the word of God and by the preaching of the word of God and by the reading of the word of God and the meditating of the word of God, and the memorizing of the word of God.

Your truth has never been burned into your soul as it were, and you have no feeling for the word of God. If you feel stronger about who won the World Series than you do about Jesus Christ, you're not a Christian. If you asked me if my wife loved me, and I do love my wife greatly, I would say absolutely. I don't have a bit of doubt about it. Do I love her?

I don't have a bit of doubt about it. Why? Well, I feel it deep within. And my wife has a 25 year track record. She loves me, she's been faithful to me.

And I feel that track record. That track record is real every day in my life. Didn't I love her when I married her? Oh, of course I loved her when I married her 25 years ago. In fact, I didn't think I could love her any more then.

And now I always say to couples that I marry, I always ask them, I put them on the spot all the time, I say, do you love her more than yesterday and less than tomorrow? You see, because whenever you love someone, that love is a growing relationship, no matter how long that relationship is. And so you love your wife more tomorrow than you did yesterday and today. And that's what happens in a healthy Christian. When the Christian's not backsliding, he looks at God's track record to him, and he says, God's been faithful to me.

Well, in my case, what, 14, 47 years, God's been faithful to me. He's got a wonderful track record. He's given me every affliction I've ever needed. He's given me every joy I've ever needed. He's given me everything I ever needed.

How can I possibly doubt His love to me now? How many times has God moved you, moved your feelings, moved you to acquiesce with his glorious truth so that the world grew strangely dim and you embraced spiritual things and you loved his son supremely and you loved his truth with passion. You can't doubt those things. It's also true when the Holy Spirit reveals Christ to us through the Word, and we fall in love with Him, not just once, but as Wohamis our brocco said in his masterful work, the Christian's reasonable service, I've fallen in love with Jesus a thousand times. When he's revealed to us in the scripture in ever richer ways, and we see new insights into him and his glory and his states and his offices and his natures, We fall all the more in love with the Lord Jesus Christ.

And that gives us assurance. You know, when a Christian comes to December 31, he looks back over his year, what does he say? He says, how much better Did I get to know Jesus Christ this year? That's all that matters, ultimately. Did he become more precious to me?

Did he increase? Did I decrease? You see, to know Christ better is a foretaste of heaven. And when you know him better, and when you're brought into his personal fellowship through sermons, and through prayer, and through reading, and you have communion with him, and you pray, and you break through, and you lay hold of him, and you feel the reality of that religion. You grow in assurance.

And your spirit, The Holy Spirit bears witness with you that you're not an outsider. You belong to the family of God that loves the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. So every time God answers my prayer, I know that when I pray, God is listening and God hears and God supplies. And I look at the faithfulness of God, the track record of God through his son, and I understand that day by day by day, God is faithful to me and I can cry out and call him Abba, Father. Well, my assurance is solidified in a conscious co-witness of the Spirit with my spirit that I'm a child of God.

Especially when I'm down, cast down, and afflicted, when I'm weak and faint, when I'm in trouble and trial, and the Spirit comes and grants me a gracious reviving, grants me to be lifted up in the Spirit, when I'm deserted, feel deserted rather, and He comes and moves me to fervent prayer, and I have contact with him and my heart goes open and we pour out our souls in prayer to the Almighty and we find fresh visitation from on high, we may know at that moment that we are the children of God. Our feelings tell us that God is more real than the chairs we're sitting on right now. So the Spirit indwells the believer. And there are times when the believer in his own conscience may co-witness with the Spirit's witness that he actually feels that indwelling of the Holy Spirit, that He's alive. And everything is sweet about God at such moments.

One of the Puritans, John Preston put it this way, he said if a woman's pregnant and she's been feeling life for a long time and then suddenly she wakes up one morning, she feels no life, she goes throughout the day. There's no movement, there's no action, there's no feeling. She says to her husband, I'm afraid something's happened to the baby. I don't know if the baby's alive. You could talk to many Christians in America today and you ask them, when's the last time you had communion with God and they don't know what you're talking about?

Well, they believe them. Bible, Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, inspired word of God, believe the doctrines of grace, five point Calvinist. But they don't have an experiential, real, intimate relationship with God. The child is dead inside. It's outward historical knowledge, as the Puritans would say, not heart knowledge.

Fourthly, there's a spirit work co-witnessing sense of fellowship, fellowship not only with God, which is what I've been talking about, but also fellowship with fellow believers. A Christian's not a lone ranger in this world. In church we have corporate worship for a reason. If you were the only person in this audience tonight, You'd feel very differently about this whole service, wouldn't you? But church is all about co-witnessing to each other, loving each other, fellowshipping with each other.

There's a love between believers that human nature just cannot grasp if you don't know that love. There's a love of the brethren that is undeniable for a child of God that marks him as a child of God. I know an old minister who had a very dark time on his death bed. And He lost all sight. He lost all sight of every awareness, of every mark of grace within him.

And he thought he was going to go to hell. And ministers came, traveled a long ways to visit him and encourage him. His wife tried to encourage him. The elders of the church tried to encourage him. Nothing would encourage him until one brother said to him, brother, do you love the brethren?

Oh, yes, I love the people of God. Well, he said, we know we've passed from death to light because we love the brother. And it broke his bonds. He said, I'm a child of God, I love the brethren. And he had freedom.

See, when I was a pastor, and I go visit a dear child of God, and a dear, our oldest member just passed away a couple weeks ago, 101 years old, I would go visit that man at times when I was down because he was one of the most mature saints I've ever met in my life. I would go to visit him, not to pastor him, but to have him pastor me. And as I pastored him and felt the reality of his religion, and he would pastor me, there would be a bond between us that is unspeakable, and I'd walk away from that visit with the reality of God in my soul, and I know I'm a child of God, I commune with a child of God, so I'm a child of God. There's a spirit we're co-witnessing in my conscience at those moments, and You know what it means, Pastor, when you walk away and you say, that dear saint of God, as he unveiled his experiences to me and I communed with him, there was a fellowship in this room, there was a worship in this visit that no man can give, no Satan could give, only the Holy Spirit could give, and as you walk away from that visit, the Spirit co-witnesses with you that this fellowship is of God, and therefore you are a child of God.

And you strengthen each other thereby in assurance. And then fifthly, the Spirit uses this co-witness in a spirit work sense of fatherhood. That's what verse 15 says of Romans 8. For we have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you've received the spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The word Father, as you know, is the endearment term in Greek for father.

Some people said it's like saying daddy, but it's more like saying dad. It's not so much a little child speaking here, but it's one who's speaking, who's in great need. Maybe not a baby as it were, but a younger child or teenager or an older one, speaking out of great need. The word is used in times of great strife and trial. Derek Thomas told me this wonderful story.

He was in Jerusalem and there was a dad, a Jewish Orthodox father with all the regalia of Jewish Orthodoxy, taking a child along to the Wailing Wall and he was walking faster than the child could run and the child was running, trying to keep up with him and crying and Finally the child just collapsed on the ground and said, Abba, Abba, Abba, Abba, Abba, Abba, Abba. And Derek Thomas said, it's the first time in my life I understood the depth of the word Abba because that father just reached down and scooped up his son in his arms and took him away. And the child just whimpered with joy. You see, that's it, the God of creation, the God of the heavens and the earth, the God who's holy, the God of the thunder of Sinai, the God who will condemn sinners to hell. That God becomes my Father in Christ Jesus through the spirit of adoption and receives me into his family so that when I cry out out of great need, Abba, Father, he picks me up and he carries me and he embraces me and he moves me forward and that is so real in my life that I look back and say I never could have gone through that trial without my Abba.

He's my Father. So Christ is my elder brother. The people of God are my brothers and sisters. I am a child of God. And then sixthly, there's the Spirit-worked, co-witnessing sense of the future.

Not only of faith, of fruits, of feelings, of fellowship and fatherhood, but of future. You see, Paul had this a great deal, didn't he? When he was writing, he would often have four tastes of heaven, four tastes that were so amazing. You could just feel with Paul when he talks about being lifted up into the third heavens. He was in the suburbs of heaven.

This was done by the Spirit who's the earnest, the down payment of better things to come, the best life to come in glory. When you have a foretaste of heaven and you long to be with Jesus Christ, there is an assurance in that longing that no one can rob from your breast. I'm going to just read to you one that I found in Edward Payson, an eminent 19th century American minister shortly before his death. This is what he wrote to one of his sisters. Were I to adopt the figurative language of Bunyan on my date this letter, dear sister, from the land of Beulah, of which I have now been a happy inhabitant for some weeks.

The celestial city of my deathbed is nearly fully in my view. Its glories beam down upon me, its breezes fan me, its orders are wafted to me, its sounds strike upon my ears, its spirit is breathed into my heart. Nothing separates me now from heaven but the river of death, which now appears as an insignificant little stream that may be crossed at a single step whenever God should give me permission to go home. The Son of Righteousness has gradually been drawing nearer and nearer, appearing larger and brighter as He approaches, and now He fills the whole hemisphere of my life, pouring forth a flood of glory in which I seem to float. A single heart and a single tongue seem altogether inadequate to my needs.

I want a whole heart for every separate emotion that flows through me, a whole tongue to express that emotion. Oh my sister, my sister, my sister, could you but know what awaits the Christian? Could you but know what I now know? You would not refrain from rejoicing and leaping for joy at my departure from this world. That's full assurance.

You know, there's a blind man named William Montague who married a young lady and he was engaged and did a surgery on his eyes two weeks before he was married. He had his dad be his best man so that when the bride walked down the aisle, the bandages could come off. And when that happened and he could see, he cried out in that august aristocratic body, you are more beautiful my dear than I ever imagined. You see that kind of anticipation of wedding and of beauty and of glory with Christ, those hankerings after heaven are themselves, that sense of future, a cold witnessing of the Spirit with my spirit that I am a child of God. But what did our forefathers mean then by the immediate direct testimony of the Holy Spirit?

Well, they interpreted, many of them at least, not all of them, Romans 8, 15, 16, as both the cold witness and the direct witness. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. Now what do they mean by that? Well, They called this sometimes the extraordinary witness, but they were careful with their language because they said not all Christians experience a direct testimony of the word to their soul with power. But those that do are not therefore superior Christians, but they have a direct form of assurance, not a reflective form that flows out of these six things I was talking about, but a direct apprehension of the Word of God because of the direct application of the Holy Spirit to their heart.

I mentioned just three ways. First, there can be a profound experience of communion with God in a believer's life through the word of God that is direct upon his conscience. So that I don't reflect upon it, that I've had some experience or that I need to think about the feelings I've had, but I directly know because the Spirit, as Romans 5, 5 says, spreads abroad, sheds abroad the love of God in my soul. And when I am overwhelmed with the love of God, I have no problems with assurance whatsoever. I know I'm taken up into that love.

I can then say with Jonathan Edwards, The greatest moments of my life are not those moments that even concern my own salvation, but those moments when I've been lifted up as it were to sit with Christ in heavenly places and been filled with the love of God and with the glory of God and have seen the glory of God to be my greatest joy and my most profound, intimate joy. You see, when you taste something like that, you can say with Paul, I know in whom I have believed. Secondly, there are times when the Holy Spirit gives to a believer profound sight of the beauty and the glory of Jesus Christ. I can't direct you here to any man living on earth better than Samuel Rutherford. He was just a man filled with Christ.

I kept his letters on my bedside, by my nightstand for 25 years, because this man is so filled with Christ that when I would get discouraged, I just wanted to turn open his letters and just read about the glories and the beauty of Christ that filled his life. But that's what happens, you see, when the Holy Spirit reveals Christ to my soul and I see him as most beautiful and most glorious and most transcended and to be treasured more than anything in this world, and I'm taken up through the Word with the glory and the beauty of Christ, there could be such sweetness in that experience. I don't even have to reflect upon it. Am I a child of God? I just know in the direct testimony of the Spirit to my soul in that moment that I am a true believer.

And then thirdly, there can also be not only a profound sight of the beauty and glory of Christ or a profound experience of communion with God, there can also be a profound personal application of the Word of God directly to my particular providential circumstance. I'm not talking about sending out Gideon's Fleece or opening the Bible and looking at a text. I'm talking about the Holy Spirit looking at me in the most dire of straits, the most needy of circumstances when I'm overwhelmed, I'm at my wits end, I'm in great need, I'm facing great trial, and he brings to my memory with direct power a powerful application that what hindsight reveals as the most suitable text in all of scripture I could possibly have impressed upon my soul, and in that moment of direct application of the word of God, I know, I know that I'm a child of God. It's as if he says to me at that moment, I am thy salvation. And what a comfort this is.

You find yourself reading that text maybe a hundred, a thousand times in your life, and it never became so sweet to you as it does now when the Holy Spirit applies it with amazing power to your soul. Now, what the Reformers and Puritans said is this. All three of these kinds of assurance. We must seek as much as possible of each of them. If you miss that last one of the direct testimony, you need not be troubled.

Not every believer experiences that. But you do need the first two kinds. You do need to trust the promises of God. You do need to know the inward evidences of God's grace in your life. There needs to be some subjective verification of the Spirit's work in your soul through the marks and fruits and steps of grace, if you're going to steadily have assurance of faith.

And that's all the work of the Holy Spirit. So thank God for the work of the Spirit in the soul. Now in 18.3 and 4, and I'm going to be very brief here, here's what they do. They conclude by saying, this immediate assurance does not so belong to the essence of faith, but a true believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it. Yet, being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation, in the right use of ordinary means, attain thereto.

And therefore, it's a duty of every one to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure that thereby his heart may be enlarged in peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, in love and thankfulness to God, in strength and cheerfulness in the duties of obedience, the proper fruits of this assurance. So far is it from inclining men to looseness. So what paragraph 3 does, it says the way to cultivate assurance is to remember four things. Number one, concerning the issue of time, assurance grows by degrees over a period of time in the life of the believer. Most believers don't have a lot of assurance right away, but the Spirit works it through conflicts, through doubts, through trials, through the preaching of the Word, through the means of grace.

Second, you need to diligently pursue this assurance. So you've got the timing, and then you've got the means of attaining it. And the means of attaining are meditation, God's word, participation in God's sacraments, perseverance in prayer, and so on. Fellowship of believers. And then thirdly, this is your duty.

Seek to make your calling and election sure. And fourthly, assurance will bear fruit. It will bear the fruit of spiritual peace, joyful love, humble gratitude, and cheerful obedience, the Westminster Divines say. And then finally, in paragraph four, they say this, True believers may have the assurance of their salvation in different ways shaken, diminished, intermitted, as by negligence and preserving it, by falling into some special sin which wounds the conscience and grieves the spirit, by some sudden or vehement temptation, Or think, trial. And then this strange statement, by God's withdrawing the light of his countenance, suffering even such as fear him to walk in darkness and to have no light.

So all those first reasons we understand, of course, because they're all our sin. The second God's withdrawing is from God's side in his sovereign, mysterious ways. And That can be very confusing. And then they conclude, yet are they never utterly destitute of that seat of God and life of faith, that love of Christ and the brethren, that sincerity of heart and conscience of duty, out of which, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit keeps coming back, you see, this assurance may in due time be revived, and by the which in the meantime they are supported from utter despair." So this closing paragraph deals with how assurance is lost and is renewed. It's lost when we sin it away.

It's lost when we fall into some special sin or greatly diminished when we neglect preserving it or when our conscience is wounded or when we grieve the Spirit. And it had better be lost then. You see if I'm unfaithful to my wife I shouldn't just go blissfully out and say, I've got a wonderful marriage and everything's well. I'm assured everything's OK. When you're divorced from God in your soul, you know something's wrong and had better trouble your assurance.

Anthony Burgess said, we chase away our assurance with our dull, lazy, negligent, sinful walking. But the confusing part here is God's involvement in the believer's lack of assurance. Now why would the Puritans say that? Well, Anthony Burgess says, God sovereignly sometimes withdraws on his part for holy reasons beyond the comprehension of the believer. We don't understand all those reasons.

But what they're doing here, you see, pastorally they're reaching out to people who are living in no known sin, who are struggling spiritually. So they're not cruel to these people and saying, oh well, you must have done some great sin because you're losing assurance. No, Burgess says this, sometimes God would draw us assurance, at least somewhat, so that we may taste and see how bitter sin is. So that God would keep us low and humble in ourselves. So that God would make us prize, assurance the more.

So that God would have us demonstrate our obedience to Him and give greater honor to him and awaken us from our lethargy and so that God would withhold the sense of pardon at times that you may be an experienced Christian able to comfort others who are also walking in darkness and have no light. These are just some of the reasons they thought of and God may have many more. But the good news is, there's always a way back. There's always a way of reviving. And when you revive it the same way you got it in the first time, you go back to the promises, you go back to the inward evidences of grace, you review your life, you confess your backsliding, you humbly confess yourself to be a lost, needy sinner, and you trust in the covenant-keeping God and his gracious promises in the Lord Jesus Christ.

You use the means diligently, You pursue holiness, you exercise tender watchfulness, you take heed of not grieving or quenching the Spirit. In other words, you seek grace to be converted, as it were, afresh. You come back from all your backsliding ways. By the Spirit's grace. My dad used to always say to me, when you backslide, remember every step you backslide, you've got to take a step back.

Somewhere in the remote areas of Ontario, there's a city that has only one road, a little village, has only one road to it. It's 60 miles long. You go all the way to that village to get back to the main highway, you've got to come 60 miles back. You see, the more we sin away, God's grace is in us, the more we have to repent and come back to, or to find our way back through faith and repentance, retracing our steps back into the heart of our Father and into assurance again. And so the believer is called to walk with as much assurance as possible in this life.

It will fluctuate at times. But he's always called to keep his eye upon Jesus, persevere in the Christian race, setting aside sin, looking to Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith, and anticipating the glorious day to come. I want to close with this illustration. Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I hail from, is proud of Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford grew up in Grand Rapids.

The museum of the president is there. And Gerald Ford wanted to die, when he died, he wanted to be buried in Grand Rapids. And the day that the hearse brought his body from the airport to the Ford Museum, thousands of Grand Rapidians were on both sides of the highway in anticipation. There was a little boy on the other side of the highway with a sign bigger than himself, and he waved it over his head like this, and he was very happy. And the sign said, welcome home, President Ford.

And I thought to myself, isn't that amazing? Here's a little boy happy to receive a dead body to Grand Rapids, Michigan. But what will it be like, dear believer, when you, through all your stumblings and bumblings, through all your ups and downs of assurance of faith. But one day, walk that route to the new Jerusalem, the heavenly, celestial city, the land of Beulah, and have rose and rose of cherubim and seraphim, And the saints made perfect on either side, crying out, welcome home, sinner, saved by grace. And Jesus Christ himself, as Samuel Rutherford would say, standing at the door of heaven with a soft cloth to wipe away every tear from your eye, and you will enter in with the joy of a full, unchanging assurance of marital bliss to him that will never fluctuate again, but only be augmented and augmented and augmented forever and ever and ever and ever as you get to know him more fully and better in cumulative glory to glorify him forever, the triune God.

Oh, may God help us to seek, to know, and to grow in true assurance of faith by His Holy Spirit. Amen. Let's pray. Great God of heaven, we thank thee so much for thy Holy Spirit, and for how he takes assurance, which is really the cream of faith, and makes it known to us and cold witnesses with our spirits that we are the children of God, and enables us to rest on the promises of God, and takes the word of God, and applies it directly to our soul. Oh, Spirit of God, thank you so much for this ministry.

And help us to know and to grow in that assurance all the days of our life. So have mercy upon us, keep us from backsliding, help us to hate sin with passion, to love Jesus with passion, and to pursue holiness with passion, and to know a growing assurance by thy grace. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen. For more messages, articles, and videos on the subject of conforming the Church and the family to the Word of God, and for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area, log on to our website, ncfic.org.