The Assurance of Salvation
One of the things you’ll notice in this section of the Psalms is that they’re all framed in a similar way. These are all Psalms of David, and most of them are linked to specific moments in David’s life — we’ve seen that going back to Psalm 51 and it’s going to continue through 72 — which means, the same basic outline keeps getting repeated:
First, David faces adversity.
Second, David models for us how to trust God in the middle of that adversity.
We’re gonna see this over and over again, and of course the details are different and each psalm brings its unique value, but this broader theme stays the same. It’s that we must learn to trust God in challenging situations.
The Bible’s Basic Message
And just in case we begin to feel like that’s getting redundant, we should remember that this is also the repeated basic message of the entire Bible!
Luther once said,
"The whole Scripture principally aims at this thing: that we should not doubt, but that we should hope — that we should trust that God is a merciful, bountiful, gracious, and patient God to his people."
Another way to say this is that the whole Bible has this main goal: don’t fear, have faith. … Don’t fear anything that is not God; have faith only in God … because of Jesus Christ.
And that’s it. If you’ve ever wondered: what is God saying to me in his Word? He’s never saying less than that.
… if you could take and eat and swallow this Book, and really live it out, the main application that would characterize your life is Christ-centered faith in the place of soul-crushing fear.
And I’m speaking broadly here. This is in big bold letters, but what I’d like to do in this sermon, is to bring this down to the level of daily experience and the work of the Holy Spirit … and I wanna talk about something we’ve not talked about in detail before, and that’s the topic of the assurance of salvation.
The plan for this sermon is to do three things:
Recognize assurance in David’s example here in Psalm 56
Understand the meaning of assurance (including what it is and what it’s not)
Suggest one means through which we might experience more assurance in our lives.
First, let’s pray:
Father in heaven, thank you for bringing us together with your Word open before us. This morning we know that we need your Holy Spirit and his power to receive what you have for us in your Word. Pour out your Spirit, as we ask, and glorify your name, in Jesus’s name, amen.
1) Recognize assurance in David’s example
Okay, the first thing we need to do is to recognize the assurance of salvation in David’s example here in Psalm 56. Like in the other psalms of this section, David is facing hardship. The superscript says that this is when “the Philistines seized him in Gath.” We read about this in 1 Samuel 21, which was at the start of when David was on the run from Saul. And there’s a lot of ironies in this story.
Earlier in 1 Samuel 21, when David was first fleeing from Saul, he came to the town of Nob, which was a little town in Israel where all the priests lived, and when David got there he was hungry enough to eat the holy bread, and he was desperate enough to ask the high priest for weapons — because David was literally on the run. He had nothing with him.
And the high priest, Ahimelech, told David that the only sword he had to give him was the sword of Goliath the Philistine — which means: wait a minute, why do these priests have the sword of Goliath?
Well, it’s because David had killed Goliath on behalf of Israel in 1 Samuel 17. And David’s victory over Goliath for Israel was so epic that Goliath’s sword had become a museum piece in Israel!
But see, now David has to take that sword to defend himself because Saul and the army of Israel are trying to kill him.
And then, right after this, in 1 Samuel 21, verse 10, David fled to the land of Gath, which was a Philistine town — but what’s important about Gath is that it was actually the hometown of Goliath. Back in Chapter 17 when Goliath is first introduced, the text says,
“There came out from the camp of the Philistines a champion named Goliath of Gath…” (1 Samuel 17:4).
So get what’s going on here: David, on the run from Saul and Israel, finds himself holding Goliath’s sword and standing in Goliath’s hometown, now with his own people against him. Can you imagine how retrograde that must have felt? It was betrayal, like we saw last week. Everything for David had gone backwards. David had already been anointed king; he had defeated Goliath; he was on the up and up! But now, at this point, things are worse than ever.
David’s Hardship (verses 1–7)
And so, we get it when David describes the situation in Psalm 56 as if the stress is suffocating him. He can’t escape it. We hear that in the phrase “all day long.” David repeats this in verses 1, 2, and 5. And we should hear David using this phrase the same way we do — it’s a complaint. And you know what I’m talking about. Think about how we use the phrase. We don’t say: “All day long the kids have been so obedient!” or “All day long my boss has been such an awesome person!” That’s not how we say it. We usually mean something negative by the phrase. And it’s fascinating to me. Even we, as 21st-century English speakers, we say “all day long” usually to communicate weariness. And that’s what David is doing here:
All day long an attacker oppresses me
All day long my enemies trample on me
All day long they injure my cause
His enemies are out to get him, and they will not stop. So David is just sick and tired of it.
God’s Care (verses 8–13)
But also, in Psalm 56 we see that David remembers God’s care for him. David knows that God knows that he is sick and tired. This is verse 8. David says that God has kept up with his tossings (his sleepless nights); God has collected his tears.
So God is not distantly familiar with David’s situation, but he knows everything about it, even more than David himself.
And David, therefore, in verse 9, trusts that God will stop his enemies, and David worships God in verse 12, because he knows that the worst of all his enemies, death, has been defeated (that’s verse 13). And so that’s Psalm 56 in a nutshell.
There are two basic parts: there’s David’s hardship (verses 1–7) and then God’s care for David (verses 8–13). But the main theme to see here is David’s assurance — which shows up twice, in the first part and the second part. We see this in the refrain of verses 3–4 and then in verses 9–11. And I want you to see this. Look down at verse 3. David says:
When I am afraid,
I put my trust in you.
In God, whose word I praise,
in God I trust; I shall not be afraid.
What can flesh do to me?
David’s faith is easy to see, right? Speaking of “don’t fear, have faith” — that’s what this is! Literally, David says:
“in God I trust; I shall not be afraid.”
Again, the main goal of the entire Bible is that you’d say that!
But then notice that David says this refrain again in verses 9–11, but here he amplifies it. He turns it up a notch. He says, starting at the end of verse 9:
This I know, that God is for me.
In God, whose word I praise,
in Yahweh, whose word I praise,
in God I trust; I shall not be afraid.
What can man do to me?
This again is David’s faith, and we’ve seen David’s faith before, but if we slow down here, we begin to see that this is faith of a different quality. David is saying that God is for him … and it’s not just that God is for him, but it’s that David knows that God is for him. The same idea is repeated in Psalm 118, verse 6 when the psalmist says
“Yahweh is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do to me?”
God is on my side. God is for me.
Look, that would be the most exaggerated, arrogant thing any human could ever say, if it wasn’t true.
But it is true, and David is absolutely sure of it. And that’s why we see his faith here, but it’s faith of a higher degree. It’s a different quality of faith that we don’t always see in the Bible or always experience ourselves — and I just want us to recognize this for now, okay?
David’s example of faith here is robust, to say the least. This is a strong, stubborn, anthem-heralding kind of faith. This is not a mustard seed, okay? (and mustard seeds are great; we love mustard seeds; but this is not that). This is not a “bruised reed or a smoking flax” kind of faith (and again, nothing wrong with that). But David’s example of faith in Psalm 56 is a blazing fire kind of faith. It’s what’s been called “the assurance of faith” or “the assurance of salvation.”
And now I want to explain more of what that is.
First, we needed to see it in the psalm — we need to recognize assurance in David’s example — but now I want us to focus in on what assurance is.
2) Understand the meaning of assurance
Now maybe you’ve read or thought about this topic of assurance before or maybe you haven’t, either way, I think there’s a good chance we all think about assurance more than we realize — especially in how we pray for other Christians.
This is something that occurred to me a couple years ago. I realized that when I pray for other people — my family and friends, our church — the most repeated thing I’d pray is that we’d be assured of God’s love for us.
I found myself praying that over and over again, even after I’d pray for other specific things. I’d pray for others, like you do, for physical healing and a good job interview and financial provision and relational reconciliation — all real-life stuff — but as I’d pray for these things, I’d conclude each petition with something like “… and more than anything, God, make this person know what you love them and that you’re with them and for them.”
And if we think about it, my hunch is that when we pray for other Christians we tend to pray this way a lot. When we pray “God be with so-and-so…” — how often do we pray that? I find myself praying that God be with Christians all the time — but of course God’s going to be with them; the Holy Spirit indwells them; Jesus promised to never leave them — so what we’re really asking when we pray this way is not simply that God “be with” someone, but we’re asking that the person know God is with them. We are asking for an experience of God’s nearness.
We’re not asking that these Christians become Christians, but we want them to know what it means to be a Christian. We want them to have assurance. We pray this way all the time.
Because here’s the thing, if you have assurance, everything else gets put in perspective. … Let me press this a little more … Think about how we greet one another. When we greet one another, it’s common to say: “How are you?” Or “How’s your week been? How’s your day been?” and so forth …
Well, if we really wanted to know how we’re doing, a more direct way to get down to the bottom of that question is to ask: “Hey, do you know that God loves you?”
And the reason that’s more direct is because no matter what your week has been like, or your day — maybe you’ve had a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day” … maybe you’ve had the worst day on paper that you could imagine — it doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter how bad your day has been, if you know God loves you, you’re gonna be okay.
See, the question of how we’re doing — whether we’re asking others or we’re asking ourselves — the answer to that question has to do with assurance. How deeply aware are we that God loves us?
That’s the issue. That’s what the topic of assurance is about. And I want to start by saying all this because I want you to know how important this topic is. This is a big deal in the Christian life, and it’s worth us thinking carefully about.
So then, what exactly is the assurance of salvation?
What Is Assurance?
Well, the actual word for “assurance” is only used a few times in the New Testament, but the concept of assurance shows up a lot.
For example, we find the word in Colossians 2:2. Paul says he struggled for the Colossian church,
“that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ” (Col. 2:2).
You heard the word there. “Assurance” — the Greek word plerophoria is in Colossians 2:2.
But most of time we don’t find the word, we find the concept, like in Ephesians. In Ephesians Chapter 1 Paul prays for the church to have the eyes of their hearts enlightened so that they may “know their hope” — and isn’t that interesting? Paul doesn’t pray that they “have hope,” but that they know their hope. He wants them to know the hope to which they’ve been called (Ephesians 1:18).
Then in Ephesians Chapter 3, Paul prays that God would strengthen the church with God’s power in their inner being so that they would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3:14–19). See, Paul isn’t praying that these Christians become Christians; he wants them to know what it means to be a Christian! He wants them to experience the assurance of their salvation in Christ.
That’s what Paul prayed for the church. That’s what he labored for.
Because assurance is the deepest experience of faith in this world.
Which is is why the Puritan Thomas Brooks wrote a book about assurance in 1654 and titled it, Heaven on Earth: A Treatise on Christian Assurance.
In this book, Thomas Brooks defines assurance as “the gift not of having grace, but of knowing you have grace.” He writes,
“It is one mercy for God to love the soul, and another mercy for God to assure the soul of his love” (39).
That’s basically what we see in David example in Psalm 56. David’s doesn’t just have God’s grace, but he knows that he has God’s grace, even despite his circumstances. That’s assurance. This is a robust degree of faith.
That’s what assurance is, and now let me say what assurance is not. And for this, I lean again on Thomas Brooks. In this book on assurance, he notes two important qualifiers:
First, the experience of assurance is not required for salvation.
Listen: we are justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. We examined this carefully in the Book of Galatians. Our justification is not according to our works or intellect or ancestry or anything to do with us. Our salvation is all of Christ through faith alone.
So then how does assurance factor in?
Well, assurance doesn’t get us salvation; assurance knows we have salvation. Brooks says,
“Assurance is required to the well-being of a Christian, but not to the being of a Christian; it is required for the comfort of a Christian, but not to the salvation of a Christian” (41).
See Thomas Brooks understands, as did all the Puritans, that many Christians lack the experience of assurance in the Christian life — and that doesn’t change anything about the fact of their salvation.
To make this point, Brooks goes to Romans 8. (Now, I think Romans 8 is where we see the best example in the Bible of the concept of assurance. We don’t have time to look at it now, but the ending of Romans 8 is basically a New Testament version of Psalm 56!) But in Romans 8:15, that’s where Paul tells us that because of the Holy Spirit, because we’ve been adopted by God, we call God, “Abba! Father!” We call God that. That’s who God is.
And as an example, Brooks brings this down on a human level and says:
“Look, the fact that we know we have an earthly father is not what makes that person our father.”
But, he says, knowing that we have a father does bring comfort.
So Brooks says: the weakest saint calls God “Father” (that’s who he is), but it is a special comfort to cry out to him, “Abba! Father!” That’s assurance.
Assurance is not required for salvation, but it’s an experience of robust faith in the salvation we already have. In that way, it becomes part of Christian maturity.
Here’s the second qualifier:
Second, the experience of assurance is not something that we can just make happen, but it’s a special gift that the Holy Spirit gives.
And I think this is the main reason why this topic is not talked about all that much today — at least not how the Puritans talked about it. It’s because if assurance is a special work the Spirit gives, and some (or many) Christians don’t have it, but others do, that doesn’t seem fair to us.
This is the same reason we don’t talk much about heavenly rewards. The fact that some Christians in heaven will have more rewards than other Christians really bothers our egalitarian instincts. But look: some Christians in heaven will have more rewards that you and me, and it’s going to be okay. And some Christians today have more assurance than you and me, and that’s okay too.
In fact, it’s more than okay, because in heaven when we see that others have more rewards than us, we’re going to love it! The abounding blessings of our brothers and sisters is going to make us so happy — and we can start to practice that now when we see others who have greater measures of faith.
The late J.I. Packer said,
“Assurance is more than than any bare human inference; it is a God-given conviction of one’s standing in grace, stamped on the mind and heart by the Spirit…” (Quest for Godliness, 182).
And the key parts there are “God-given” and “by the Spirit.” We don’t make assurance happen. There’s no switch we can flip; we don’t grit our teeth and clinch our fists to find it. The Holy Spirit gives us assurance as he pleases, and therefore we shouldn’t be angry or bitter when we don’t have it. See, there is a way to read Psalm 56, and to read David’s words in verse 9 — “This I know, that God is for me!” — and we can neither say it with David nor be happy for David that he can say it, but instead we feel frustrated that our experience is not like his.
Maybe it’s subtle, but we can read Psalm 56, verses 9–11 and there’s a little “meh” in our hearts — or maybe an “ugh” — because David is doing something here that we want to do, but can’t — and hey, if we’re honest, that’s most of us in this room, and it’s okay. It’s okay.
Christian, you are loved by God. He is with you. He is for you. And if you lack assurance of that, don’t be frustrated, but humbly ask God for it. You can pray for it like Paul does, that the “eyes of our souls be strengthened to see deeper into the truths of the gospel.” Pray for that, and then pursue it.
And that’s where we close.
3) Suggest one means through which we might experience more assurance in our lives.
I long for us, Cities Church, to be able to say what David says here in Psalm 56. I want us to have this assurance: “This I know, that God is for me!” Or as Paul says it in Romans 8:31: “God is for me, nobody can be against me!”
I pray that God, by the power of his Spirit, gives us that kind of faith no matter our circumstances. And as we pray for God to do this, we also put ourselves on the pathways where God tends to answer such prayers.
Thomas Brooks, in typical Puritan fashion, spends a ton of time on application. He says that although only the Holy Spirit gives assurance, there are ways and means we can practice in pursuit of it. He mentions several, but I’m only going to mention one.
And as it turns out, this is the third week in a row you’ve heard us say this, but here it is: One key means through which God gives us assurance is by our preaching the gospel to ourselves.
Or to be more specific, in Brooks’s words, we “see to it that our hearts run to Christ.”
We don’t pursue assurance as a thing in itself, but we pursue Jesus. And we pursue Jesus by reminding ourselves who he is and what he’s done. We open this book and we behold him. “For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ!” Get to know him! Thomas Brooks explains it this way:
“A person loves Christ by knowing, and knows Christ by loving. … He cannot love much that knows but little; he cannot love little that knows much. As a person rises higher and higher in his apprehension of Christ, so he cannot but rise higher and higher in his affections for Christ. Again, the daily mercies and experiences that they have of the love of Christ, of the care of Christ, of the kindnesses and compassions of Christ working more and more towards them, they cannot but raise their affections more and more for him. As fire is increased by adding fuel to it, so is our love to Christ upon fresh and new manifestations of his great love towards us.” (243)
Our knowing Jesus and loving Jesus go together, and we get both by daily remembering his love for us.
And one of the ways to do this, one way to preach to ourselves, is memorizing Scripture. Pastor Kenny talked about that last week. Take notecards, write verses on them, and post them up or take them with you, and maybe it’s not exact verse quotations, maybe it’s just simple reminders.
I have a friend who shared with me her strategy. She calls “Pocket Preaching.” She takes a notecard to stick in her pocket, but she writes a truth from Scripture on the notecard, and she writes it to herself as if Jesus was saying to her.
So in one notecard she has, it’s a little crinkled from being in her pocket, it says, from Revelation 22:
First her name, and then “You will see my face and my name will be written on your forehead.”
Could you imagine Jesus saying that to you?
It’s like whatever you’re up against, imagine — like John tells us in Revelation 22:4 — imagine Jesus saying to you, “Your name, and then, ‘You will see my face and my name will be written on your forehead.’ Have a nice day.”
This is preaching the gospel to ourselves. This is our hearts running to Christ. It’s remembering who he is and what he has done, and it’s a key means through which we experience assurance. And another key means is what we do each week when we come to this Table.
The Table
When we come now to the Lord’s Table, we are coming from all kinds of different places: feeble faith and strong faith, tested faith and new faith, tired faith and refreshed faith. We come from all kinds of different places, but we come to this same Table together — not on the basis of our faith’s quality, but on the fact of our faith’s object: that is Jesus Christ, crucified and raised for us. Jesus is the same true bread and the same true drink for all of us, and now is when we remember that. Together, we receive him.
