Calvary Road Baptist Church
“AN OBSERVATION RELATED TO ABRAHAM’S CONVERSION”
Genesis 15.6
My wife and I depart for Ukraine on July 31, traveling to Munich, Germany, and then to Poland before a long train ride to Dnipro. We will be traveling with another couple, a preacher married to a Ukrainian woman. I anticipate a delightful trip and a fruitful time preaching while in the country, though the three days to get there will be grueling. Preachers have told me that they like to travel with me because I tell stories and relate past experiences. And some people like hearing those things.
I don’t know how some people got their penchant for telling stories and relating incidents, but I’ve always been this way, and I think it’s because my people are from the Southern states, and people from the South, being mostly crackers, are storytellers.[1] Being a storyteller can be an advantage to a preacher because a storyteller is often a fellow who likes to bring people in on his thought processes. A storyteller wants to walk people down the corridors of his mind, so they will see how he arrived at his conclusions and why he believes what he believes.
But there’s also a drawback to being a storyteller. People who are not storytellers, impatient people, and usually people from the North and big cities get tired of what they imagine to be beating around the bush after a while and want you to get to the point. If you’re like me, the quickest way to get to the point is by meandering with me and telling me how I got to where I am taking you. So, please be patient with me tonight.
Once, when I was speaking to someone about the condition of his soul, God (I firmly believe) illuminated my understanding of something important. I was hoping you could listen to me tonight, who are unconverted, because some of you are struggling with the same issues that the person I was speaking to was wrestling with. Just like a Jewish person who wants some confirming sign, you want some proof, above and beyond the explicit declaration of the Bible, that if you believe in Jesus, He will justify you, that when you believe in Jesus, He has justified you.
When carefully considered, you want some instantaneous assurance of salvation. And the error you are making when you think like that, the mistake you are making that would never be exposed as an error in a decisionist Church, where sinners are not carefully and cautiously listened to by experienced and seasoned personal workers, is to confuse justification with assurance of salvation.[2]
Let’s get something very straight in your thinking. Justification is something Jesus does for the sinner. And when Jesus justifies a sinner, it’s a done deal, once and for all, finished. It’s an irreversible fact that cannot be undone. It just is. But assurance of salvation is different than justification. Whereas justification is a fact, is something Jesus does once and for all, assurance of salvation is very much a feeling, and feelings can change back and forth.
To illustrate: I might ask a girl named Anna, “How old are you?” Let’s say Anna is 11 years old. That’s a fact. But what if Anna feels like a big girl? What if she suddenly feels more mature, like girls her age are prone to? Or what if she feels, tomorrow, like daddy’s little girl, which is also okay and is something girls of all ages go through? The fact is that she is 11—the feeling, how old she feels, changes with her mood and with circumstances.
Some of you here are lost. That’s a fact. If you die, you will go to Hell and face the unending fury of God’s wrath. If you come to Christ, He will justify you. And if you are converted to Christ, your justification will be a never-changing fact. But that’s not good enough for some of you.
Some of you want a guarantee from God about how you will feel about being justified, and that, my friend, is not a guaranteed part of the package. Assurance of salvation is not a necessary consequence of being justified. Should you be a believer in Christ, how you feel about the fact of justification is not something you need to concern yourself with at this time.
So, the issues before us tonight are two. There is justification, and there is assurance of salvation. There is justification, and there is how you feel about your justification, to phrase it in a slightly different way. Let’s look at these two issues in two ways:
First, LET’S CONSIDER PEOPLE WHO HAVE ASSURANCE WITHOUT SALVATION
Please turn in your Bible to Matthew 7.22-23, where Jesus said,
22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
This passage clearly shows that come “that day,” come Judgment Day, there will be a whole host of individuals who strongly feel they are saved. That is, there will be many people with assurance of their salvation. Their only problem will be that they have an assurance of salvation without ever being justified. Don’t get me wrong. Assurance of salvation is incredible, so long as you are justified. But there is false assurance of salvation and proper assurance of salvation. Let’s briefly consider the two kinds:
False assurance is the assurance of salvation that many unsaved people have. It is the feeling people have that everything is just fine between them and God, the feeling that they are truly converted, even though they’re not converted, just like those Jesus mentioned in Matthew 7.22-23. How in the world does an unsaved person come to have this false assurance? There are three ways:
First, it is possible that a reckless and irresponsible pastor gave him this assurance. It is not uncommon for decisionist pastors to feel that it is their duty for them or a staff member to assure someone who claims to have trusted Christ. I don’t know how the decisionist pastor or staff member is supposed to know the sinner is actually converted, since they never listen to anyone’s testimony of how they were supposedly converted. They just assume that someone who says he’s converted really is converted, someone who prayed the prayer is now saved, and they take him to First John 5.13, or some other passage, to give him a completely unfounded assurance. This is very common among decisionists to be an almost universal practice.
A second way an unsaved person acquires false assurance that he has been justified can occur here in this Church and in just about any Church. A pastor works very hard and is very cautious to warn people that just because their testimony is listened to by others does not mean they are actually converted! What it means is that others think it is likely that you are converted. But who knows for sure that you came to Christ? When we pass someone and baptize them at this Church, we think they might be converted, not because we know they are. But there will always be someone who gets the assurance of salvation because his pastor or someone else has ‘passed’ him. He will think, “I must be a Christian, or my pastor would never have ‘passed’ me.” Such thinking is wrong.
And do not forget the naysayers who always feel no one is truly born again, so they can congratulate themselves when someone’s testimony is a false hope. They usually forget when they were mistaken about someone’s testimony and glory on the occasions they were right.
Many people also come to a false assurance of salvation from looking way into the past, at some experience they had long ago. He hasn’t attended Church in several years, and he fornicated for a decade before joining his previous Church sometime back. Still, he’s been a Christian because he remembers asking Jesus into his heart. Right. Such an assurance is entirely unfounded. These are three ways people obtain false assurances of salvation that aren’t real.
A proper assurance of salvation comes to a genuinely converted person in an entirely different manner than false assurances are acquired. Let me briefly mention some of the characteristics of a real assurance of genuine salvation:
First, Biblical assurance of salvation is a feeling that comes after a person is genuinely saved. In other words, assurance and feelings about salvation should not even be considered by an unsaved person since assurance of salvation is not salvation and is not a part of salvation.
Second, any mortal person cannot give you assurance of salvation. Verses dealing with assurance show that assurance comes about as a result of the Holy Spirit bearing witness with the Christian’s spirit that he is a child of God, Romans 8.16, as well as from confidence that results from a Christian conscientiously obeying and serving God, First John 2.3. And there are others. But assurance is something a Christian should seek only from God.
Thirdly, assurance of salvation is rightly a feeling about salvation, an enjoyment of a Christian’s relationship with Christ that always has to do with what is presently in your life. Assurance that is based on some event in the distant past is not Biblical assurance.
“But you ask people about their conversion experience from a long time ago.” Yes, I do. But my purpose in doing that has nothing to do with assurance of salvation for that person. It has to do with my responsibilities as a pastor seeking to clarify their current understanding of Biblical conversion.
The point that I want to leave you with before moving on is this: Assurance of salvation is different than being justified. And no one has any business insisting on assurance of salvation before he is justified. Assurance of salvation should be left to those who have already come to Christ or think they have. After all, you don’t want to end up like those who had assurance but were lost, do you? The ones Jesus told us about in Matthew 7.22-23?
Now, LET’S CONSIDER A PERSON WHO HAD SALVATION WITHOUT ASSURANCE
I speak, of course, of Abraham. As I was ministering God’s Word to someone, it suddenly came to me, while I was dealing with the lost, that Abraham is never shown in God’s Word to have had assurance that he was justified before God. Jesus told us of those who had assurance but were not saved. Abraham is a man who was justified, but might have had no assurance. Who is better off?
Consider Moses’ record of Abraham. Remember, Moses was a descendant of Abraham. Moses lived some four hundred years after Abraham. So, Moses knew some things about Abraham that even Abraham didn’t see while he was still alive. Turn to Genesis 15.6:
“And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.”
This verse describes the moment when Abraham got right with God when he was justified by faith, when he believed and it was counted to him for righteousness. Notice something, if you will. The first half of the verse tells us what Abraham did. “He believed in the LORD.” But the second half of the verse tells us what the LORD did, without any indication that Abraham ever knew that the LORD did it. God “counted it to him for righteousness,” but insofar as we can tell from anything Moses writes about Abraham, Abraham never knew that God counted his faith for righteousness. Read the entire book of Genesis very carefully. There were several things God did communicate to Abraham, but you will find that the fact that Abraham’s faith was counted for righteousness is not one of those things spelled out. So, from Moses’ record, it seems Abraham did not have the assurance of his salvation, at least as we understand the concept today.
Now let’s consider Paul’s explanation of Moses’ record. In Romans, chapter 4 and Galatians, chapter 3, the Apostle Paul explained the implications and ramifications of what Abraham did when he believed in the LORD. In those two chapters, Paul pointed out that Abraham’s faith was an example for others. From those two chapters, we understand that if you want to be justified by faith and have Christ’s righteousness imputed, given, and transferred to you. You must come to Christ with the same faith that Abraham displayed. But you will notice, also, in those chapters, that there is no mention of anything related to what you and I would call assurance of salvation. Abraham did not seem to have obtained from God any information that his faith had been counted for righteousness. It appears that God did what He did without ever informing Abraham that He had done it, and it is left to Moses and then to Paul to inform God’s people and the unsaved centuries later.
Let me now make some concluding remarks, since I always have an opinion about everything. It seems very strange to the modern mind that Abraham would have faith that was counted for righteousness without ever knowing it or being told. But it wasn’t at all strange to Abraham, and it wouldn’t have seemed at all strange to the Puritans. You see, the modern mind has such a low view of God and such an exalted view of self that even justification is thought of in a very man-centered way. But Abraham’s religion was a God-centered religion. And the religion of the Puritans, old Baptists, and men like Charles Spurgeon was God-centered.
Do you want to be saved? Do you want salvation that is truly Christ-centered and God-honoring? Then your focus should not be on you but on Christ. And your concern should not be your own feelings but God’s will. God wants you to come to Christ.[3] God has commanded you to repent and be saved.[4] And He has said nothing about any feelings you may have that are associated with your faith. You are a human being. Being a human being, you will have feelings. You will always have feelings about various things. But what God wants is for those feelings not to govern you, for those feelings to not dictate what you do, for those feelings to not stand in the way of you being converted. Set aside your insistence on knowing that something will happen when you place your faith in Christ. Abraham had no such insistence. He simply, and in obedience to God, exercised faith.
We’ve considered two kinds of people tonight in a very simple sermon, those who have assurance without salvation and a man who had salvation without assurance.
I want you to be like Abraham. The Apostle Paul said you had to be like Abraham in this respect. And God wants you to follow the example of Abraham.
Come to Christ tonight. And come without any expectation or consideration beside the certain knowledge that this is what God wants you to do. He wants you to trust His Son.
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[1] Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The university of Alabama Press, 1988), pages 112, 118, 142, 206.
[2] Decisionism is the belief that a person is saved by coming forward, raising the hand, saying a prayer, believing a doctrine, making a Lordship commitment, or some other external, human act, which is taken as the equivalent to, and proof of, the miracle of inward conversion; it is the belief that a person is saved through the agency of a merely external decision; the belief that performing one of these human actions shows that a person is saved.
Conversion is the result of that work of the Holy Spirit which draws a lost sinner to Jesus Christ for justification and regeneration, and changes the sinner’s standing before God from lost to saved, imparting divine life to the depraved soul, thus producing a new direction in the life of the convert. The objective side of salvation is justification. The subjective side of salvation is regeneration. The result is conversion.
[3] 2 Peter 3.9
[4] Acts 17.30
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