How loved are you by God? Does God’s love for me require me to be in His servitude? Is His love for me contingent on my good deeds? Will He ever curse me should I be disobedient to Him? Do I need to pray more, fast more to have more favor with Him?
These are some very valid questions to some of us out there. What assurance can we have?
It is said by some that when a Christian speaks of being saved, and especially when they speak of being sure that they are saved, they're expressing a kind of religious arrogance. After all, only God knows these things. Besides, what if we're deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us? We can hope we are saved, but what right do we have to say that we know it or are secure or assured about it?
The fact is that our ability to 'know' anything for sure is quite limited. In a deeply fractured world even the knowledge of so called 'hard facts' such as those of science requires a lot of trust…. trust in the source of the facts, trust in how they found out, trust in how they measured, trust that they checked the facts, trust that they communicated it right, trust that we understand what they communicated. Many Christians forget how much we depend on trust, and lapse into talk of 'certainty' and 'absolute knowledge'.
No, we do not have unqualified 'certainty' about anything. We're not God, we're just people. However, it is possible to have 'assurance': a confidence that is so aware and secure that we can entrust and base our actions and our lives upon it without fear.
For a Christian, assurance comes by trusting the source: a God who loves us so much that it just would not do for God to sit around and sob over a fractured relationship with humanity, a God who loves us so much that God made the move to re-establish the relationship and get to work at fixing the brokenness of the world.
The challenge that many have is that any assurance they may have is wrapped up in the idea that they are or have to do something in order to gain God’s approval. In many ways this is exactly why many have so little of assurance of their standing with God. There is this sense that we need to “do” something.
Eugene Peterson said it well when he spoke of where real assurance comes from: "All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us."
Out of an Abba Father that is sure of us because he is so very fond of us comes assurance and a response…. a kind of “to do” list.
“So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life.... your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life…. and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.” (Romans 12:1 The Message)
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