Assured By Greg GilbertSample

Identifying Lost Confidence

As a pastor, the work I do contains both extraordinary beauty and immeasurable pain. The beauty is found in the moments and events that make you want to sing in praise to God—babies being born, wedding vows being exchanged, a dear brother or sister seeing God’s hand move in a surprising way and their faith being strengthened because of it. In witnessing hope restored. 

There are also times of deep sadness that make my heart cry out to God in an entirely different way—sitting with a couple who have just suffered their fourth miscarriage in three years, counseling someone through a cancer diagnosis, a job loss, the death of a loved one, or reading the Bible quietly for the last time to a dear saint who’s finally going home. 

However, in all my years of being a pastor, I haven’t experienced anything more heartbreaking than watching the deterioration of faith in the life of a professing Christian. The loss of faith is a slow, sometimes even imperceptible dwindling until one day a person looks up and realizes there’s simply nothing left. “Am I a Christian, really?” is the question that many, if not every Christian, wrestle with at one point or another in their life. 

If we’re honest, the question of assurance is on our minds because of sin. We look at our lives and see the sin that still exists, and we wonder if a true Christian’s life and heart can really look like that. For some, the issue is that we don’t see the growth in holiness that we’d like to see, even over time. For others, it’s that we don’t experience the victory we’d like to have over a particular sin. And for still others, the fruit of joy, praise, patience, and love that we think ought to mark a Christian doesn’t seem to mark us. We then fear and sometimes even despair. 

My hope is that by the time our week concludes, a new spark of confidence and assurance will burn in your heart. “I write these things,” John says, “that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). With all of my heart, and all that I have seen God do in the lives of His children, I believe this assurance is possible! 

Ask God to bring you peace where there is doubt; hope where there is uncertainty, and truth where there is disbelief.