Comments on: ‘Getting saved’ and assurance of salvation

By: Josh Mann

Josh Mann — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 07:14:10 +0000

Biblical assurance depends on the manifestation of fruit, not on our professions. Good article.

Josh Mann

By: bible teaching churches in Oakville

bible teaching churches in Oakville — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 09:06:02 +0000

If you want people to believe that you are a christian you better act like one.

By: Pastor Spomer

Pastor Spomer — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 20:42:29 +0000

I helps to distinguish between the Law and the Gospel. The Law is what we should do and whatever it may be that one is trying to do to be what one should be. The Gospel is what God has done, and. Still does for me. The Law always condemns me. It is only in the Gospel that I find salvation, certainty, and peace.

Look not to your feelings or your actions (everything with “your” is going to fall short). Look to Christ, in His Word, in His Baptism of you, in His body and blood in the Lord’s Supper “given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.”

By: pentamom

pentamom — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:25:14 +0000

Olaf, the way I often think of it is that people worry too much about “becoming” a Christian and not enough about “being” one. It is still all by faith, but for crying out loud stop worrying so much about whether you crossed the the starting line right, and just get out there and run the race! If your faith is genuine, you’ll do it!

By: Olaf

Olaf — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 05:26:04 +0000

I can relate to this experience. I think the cause of it originates in a narrowed vision of what salvation is. For an Evangelical, it’s an event; I prayed the prayer sincerely and now I’m going to Heaven no matter what I do. And yet, if I honestly reckon up my life I know how much needs to be changed. But, if I set out to reclaim my life from the spiritual wasteland I’ve made it, I then run up against the accusation – you’re trying to work your way to Heaven. It’s a trap which keeps people in a state of anxiety. The cure is to realize that the Christian life is a way, not just an event. The escape for me started with George MacDonald’s sermons. “Tell me it is faith He requires:do I not know it? And is not faith the highest act of which the human mind is capable? But faith in what? Faith in what He is, in what He says – a faith which can have no existence except in obedience – a faith which is obedience.” Or this: ” Tell me something that you have done, are doing, or are trying to do because He told you. If you do nothing He says, it is no wonder that you cannot trust Him, and are therefore driven to seek refuge in the atonement, as if something He had done and not He Himself in His doing were the atonement.” And finally, ” He knows that you can try, and that in your trying and failing He will be able to help you, until at length you shall do the will of God even as He does it Himself,” The Christian life really lived, even though imperfectly, is what brings comfort.

By: pentamom

pentamom — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 20:06:51 +0000

Somewhere along the line evangelical culture has forgotten that as we grow in our faith, we grow in our sense of sin and in our grasp of God’s grace.

Because we forget that, we come to believe that every time we experience our own sinfulness more deeply and embrace God’s grace more deeply than we previously had, we’re “saved” in a way that we weren’t “saved” before and so presumably weren’t “saved” at all until now.

Pass that kind of thinking down through several generations and you get an entire culture filled with kids and then adults mirroring J.D. Greear’s experience. Things like the Heidelberg are great antidotes to that kind of thinking, but sadly even most churches that embrace the Heidelberg tend to relegate it to “formal catechism” and the rubber-meets-the-road spirituality that is preached and modeled is more revivalistic and feeds the “I’m REALLY getting saved THIS time” syndrome.

Confessing that it is Jesus who “makes me” wholeheartedly willing and ready to live for Him precludes the idea that we have to be ready (“really ready, for real”) first, before we get His help. We just have to listen to ourselves when we confess it.