Assured By Greg GilbertSample

Assurance of Faith

Our confidence that we really are saved is grounded in and founded on an abiding trust that Jesus saves sinners and that the Father will honor his Son by keeping His promises. Meanwhile, our good works (or lack thereof) act to confirm that we really are saved or warn that something is not right so that we may react accordingly. And God, by his Holy Spirit, imparts a precious, deep, and sometimes profound sense to our souls of our redemption and adoption as His children. 

It probably won’t be surprising that this architecture of assurance reflects the theological architecture of salvation itself as it is laid out in the passage from Titus today. If you are tempted to profess that good works evidence you are a Christian, take a thoughtful look at Paul’s two statements here about good works. The first is that good works are not the basis of, or reason for, or grounds for, or cause of our salvation. “He saved us,” Paul writes, “not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy.” The second, though, is that once we have believed and thus become heirs of eternal life, we are “careful to devote [ourselves] to good works.” 

Now, most Christians recognize immediately the importance of those two statements to the question of salvation: we are not saved by works but rather works flow from salvation. In other words, the correct order is salvation, then works. In fact, if we get that order backward—if we conceive the order as “works, then salvation”—we’ve turned the entire gospel on its head. That theological architecture, so to speak, is key to rightly understanding salvation. 

This same architecture holds not only when it comes to getting saved but also when it comes to being assured of our salvation. If we want to increase or build our sense of confidence in our own salvation, the way to do that is to press into our faith and trust in the Triune God’s unbreakable promises in the gospel of Jesus Christ, not just to do more good deeds so we’ll be able to say, “Whew! Now I feel good about myself.” To do that would actually be to shift our faith, our confidence, and our reliance from Jesus to self. 

Is it hard for you to believe that Christ loves you on the basis of His choosing and not your own efforts?