God has no second plan.
He has no second thoughts. Salvation is in Jesus. He doesn't need another Savior. He doesn't need Jesus to be 90% Savior and you to be 10%. All of salvation, all of life for all eternity is in His glorious Son. Christ is the affirmation of God's love for hell-worthy sinners. Christians can sometimes struggle with assurance, doubting whether Christ has truly saved them. Have you, after giving into some temptation, then began to wonder, Why did I do that?
Was I ever truly a Christian? Perhaps dissatisfied with your spiritual growth, you've been plagued with guilt or doubt. If that's you, then I'm glad you're listening today, as we'll be thinking about assurance over the next three days, and today considering the primary ground of the believer's assurance. Our guest teacher today on Renewing Your Mind is Joel Beakey, and his series on assurance is 11 messages. You can own the entire series on this important and very practical topic when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.
We'll send you the DVD and give you lifetime digital access to all the messages and study guide. Thank you for supporting the daily outreach of Renewing Your Mind. Dr. Beakey serves as president and professor of systematic theology and homiletics at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Here he is on God's promises and the primary ground of the Christian's assurance. In this lecture on assurance of faith, I want to look with you at 18.2 of the Westminster Confession, which is the most important paragraph ever written on this subject.
So here it is. This certainty is not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion, grounded upon a fallible hope, but an infallible assurance of faith, founded upon, and here it comes, the divine truth of the promises of salvation. That's what we're going to look at in this address. The inward evidences of those graces into which these promises are made, that's what we're going to look at in the next address. And the testimony of the spirit of adoption, witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God, which spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.
That's what we're going to look at in address number seven. So we're going to have three addresses on these so-called three grounds of salvation. The first being the promises of God. And to that end, I want to read to you from 2 Corinthians 1, verses 18 through 20. But as God is true, our word toward you was not yea and nay. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us, even by me and Silvanus and Timotheus, was not yea and nay, but in him was yea.
For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him amen, unto the glory of God by us. Well, John Murray, the famous Westminster Theological Seminary professor, said that these particular words of 18.2 of the Westminster Confession speak of the grounds of assurance. And he said this, when we speak of the grounds of assurance, we are thinking of the ways in which a believer comes to entertain this assurance, not of the grounds on which his salvation rests. The grounds of salvation are a secure for the person who does not have full assurance as for the person who has.
Remember the illustration of the rock. So, when you remember that, then in this sense, 18.2 presents us with what John Murray called a complex ground of assurance, which includes a primary objective ground, which is the divine truth of the promises. So this is your objective ground of assurance, the promises of God in Christ Jesus.
That's your objective ground of assurance. That's the solid rock upon which you ground your faith and your assurance. But there are also two secondary grounds, inward evidences and the direct testimony of the Holy Spirit.
We'll talk about those two in the next two addresses. So let's look then in this address at divine promises in Christ. Thomas Brooks the Puritan said, But also the very life and soul of faith.
They are a mine of rich treasures, a garden full of the choicest and sweetest flowers, and them are wrapped up all celestial contentments and delights. Anthony Burgess said, I'll explain to you in the next lecture that both are needed but the main one is the promises of God. Now that emphasis on God's promises in Christ implies several things for our experience of assurance.
And in the rest of this lecture I want to give you four or five of those things. Number one, we do not gain assurance primarily by looking at ourselves or anything we have produced apart from God's promises. But first of all, by looking to God's faithfulness in Christ as he is revealed in the promises of the gospel. So the same offers of grace and gospel promises that lead us to salvation in the first place are sufficient to lead us to assurance as well. So Paul tells us in the verses I read, 2 Corinthians 1, 18-20, that gospel promises in Christ cannot fail.
Cannot fail because God's character is true and faithful. But as God is true, our word toward you was not yea and nay. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, preached among you is not yea and nay. But in him is yea for all the promises of God in him are yea and in him amen to the glory of God by us.
In other words, Paul is saying God doesn't speak out of both sides of his mouth. He's not saying my salvation is sure in Jesus Christ but if you go there and cast yourself upon him there's some possibility that it won't be sure. No, God's word is always trustworthy.
That is your assurance. And that's true in Jesus Christ despite all your unworthiness. And therefore, Jesus Christ is God's everlasting, sure, full yea.
And amen it shall certainly be. While they were together in eternity, when Christ took our frail flesh and lived among us, and now also in heaven at God's right hand, Christ has always been God's yea, God's yes. From eternity past to eternity future, he is God's yes. And God doesn't need your yes to make your salvation sure.
He wins your heart. But the foundation is not your yes. The foundation is Christ's yes. God has no second plan. He needs no second plan.
He has no second thoughts. All salvation is in Jesus. He doesn't need another savior. He doesn't need Jesus to be 90% savior and you to be 10%. He doesn't need apostles to help you to get saved. All of salvation, all of life for all eternity is in his glorious son.
Christ is the affirmation of God's love for hell worthy sinners. And he comes to you and he says come to me. Trust my promises in my son. Trust my yes. And that's why we as preachers, this is good news. We don't have to preach yes and no to you.
We don't have to leave you hanging. Paul says we don't preach yes and no. Yes you may come but no you may not come quite yet until you've done this or you've done that. No we preach yes in God's yes. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Thou shalt be saved. So our assurance lies in the gospel, in the promises of God in Jesus Christ. For the Puritans, those three things were synonyms. Gospel, Christ, promises.
And they used all three interchangeably. That is our hope. So God tells us in the Bible that we are in trouble because of our sin.
Yes, big trouble. We're on our way to hell by nature. But he also tells us in the Bible that he's willing to rescue the greatest sinner who comes to him as a poor, needy sinner through Jesus Christ. That Jesus' death truly saves those who believe in him alone for salvation. God says this is sure. So my assurance thrives when my soul encamps at the foot of the cross. My assurance thrives when I realize that God did not rescue Christ from the cross because he was rescuing us through Christ's obedient life and his sin atoning death. But while God was bringing darkness over Jerusalem during the crucifixion, he was bringing us into his kingdom of light. So as Jesus bled, God the Son was paying the price for our redemption from sin's guilt. This is God's yes.
His Son does it all. And because our full salvation rests on Christ, therefore all the promises that are tied to that help strengthen our assurance as well. Promises about the unchangeability of God. If God doesn't change, his yes is always yes. Malachi 3 verse 6, I'm the Lord, I change not. Therefore you sons of Jacob are not consumed. The eternality of God's electing love.
I've loved thee with an everlasting love. Jeremiah 31 verse 3. The irrevocability of God's gifts.
The gifts and calling of God are without repentance. Romans 11, 29. The inviolability of God's oath. Hebrews 6, 17 through 20. The perfection of Christ's work as mediator. Hebrews 10, 19 through 23. The sovereignty of the Spirit's application of that work. 1 Corinthians 2, 10 through 14. The Father's electing love. The Son's atoning death.
The Spirit's application of all that the Son has merited. All are equally sure. And when a sinner throws himself by the grace of God at the foot of the cross and trusting Christ alone, the entire Trinitarian sureness of almighty, unchangeable, invincible, eviolable God is all confirmed for us and assured in us. Because this God does not lie. That's the foundation of our assurance.
And that's a rock. Philippians 1, 6 says, being confident. You could say being assured of this very thing. That he which begun the good work in you will perform it unto the day of Jesus Christ. You see, God's not a yea and nay God. He won't begin it and then abandon you. When he begins, he finishes by the grace of God.
Number two. As assurance grows, God's promises become increasingly real to the believer personally and experientially. You see, the promises of God and my personal assurance of faith, they reinforce each other.
And that's a beautiful thing. Because when we have an experiential knowledge of God's promises, when these promises become sweet to us and precious and we rely on them, then our hearts echo the truth of those promises. That's one reason why we have to come to church every Sunday. We need to constantly be reinforced every week again of the gospel, the promises of God.
That's why we need to open the Bible every day. Every day getting the promises coming our way. The world promises so much. Satan promises so much.
And they never deliver. But God does even more than what he promises. He does exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think. And so we go to those promises again and again and again in Christ to find our assurance. Some weeks ago I had a lady who shook my hand at the door of our church and she said, you know, I was just thinking, she said, every week you're really bringing us the same message. It's always about Jesus and his promises.
But she said, you know, every week it seems like we need it again. And just gradually we get more and more secure in those promises. That's the beauty of the Word of God. One Puritan put it this way. When I compare the promises of God in scripture with what I have experienced about God, then I say my salvation is secure and proven, for God's promises can never fail me. So God's promises are the footpaths on which Christ meets our soul. Because, said Thomas Goodwin, the Puritan, if one promise belongs to thee, my friend, then all do. For every promise conveys the whole Christ in whom all the promises are made and who is the substance of them all. And that reminds me of one of my very favorite Puritan quotes about the promises of God.
It's by William Sperstow. He wrote a whole book on the wells of salvation being opened. And he calls the wells of salvation the promises of God.
And what he said is this. The promises are instrumental in the coming of Christ and the soul together. They are the warrant by which faith is emboldened to come to him and take hold of him. But the union which faith makes is not between a believer and the promise, but between a believer and the Christ of the promise. So what's the promise? The promise really is Christ. And the promises come into the soul like footpaths. And you lay hold of those promises by faith and you have assurance.
In fact, Sperstow says God goes so far in his word because his word is like an open letter to you, a long 1,200 page letter to you. And so what he does with every promise is he takes every promise like a golden coin, Sperstow said. And he fills his bag with just a huge amount of golden coins, thousands of them in the Bible, thousands of promises. And he comes to you and he unloosens the string of the bag and he pours the whole mountain of golden coins at your feet and he says, Sinner, take what you will.
You can have them all when you have Christ. And then Sperstow goes on, you know the Puritans are so good at illustrating things. He says, God's gospel promises are like stars at night.
When you first walk outside in the country late at night, you look up in the sky and you say, oh yeah, there's a couple stars out. Oh yeah, there's a few more. And your eyes get adjusted and oh, I've seen dozens of them now.
Oh wow, there's hundreds of them up there. And Sperstow says, if you keep looking, before long the whole firmament from every quarter with a numberless multitude of stars is richly enameled as with so many golden studs in the heavens above you. And he says, so when a Christian takes time to meditate on God's promises, the number of promises and the light coming from those promises as he meditates may at first seem to be small and weak so as to be insufficient to quell my inner doubts and fears and dispel my darkness and my struggles with sin. But as we read the Bible further and we meditate further and we begin to see thousands of promises coming out of scripture everywhere together with a bright light that shines upon them clearly and distinctly, our souls are ravished and filled with delight and assurance.
God's word is sure. And then third, the Christ-centeredness of personal assurance is accented in God's promises. For as the Puritan Edward Reynolds said, Jesus Christ himself is the sum, the fountain, the seal, the treasury of all the promises of God.
Sum, fountain, seal, and treasury. Can't get much better than that, of all the promises of God. And Reynolds explains, all the promises are made in Christ, being purchased by his merits. They're all performed in Christ.
They're all administered by his power in office. For the promises are the rays and the beams that come from Christ, the Son of Righteousness, in whom they are all founded and all established. So that every promise apprehended by faith carries a man to Christ and to the consideration of our unity with him in the right whereof we have claim to the promises. So now you see why the promises are the foundation. The inward evidences, which we'll look at in the next lecture, they help assure up that these promises are really meant for me because I'm living out of them and their evidence, the fruit of them is evidence to me. And that's going to be important.
I'll show you why. But that's never the most important. The most important is always the objective outside of ourself in Christ.
So that's why Burgess has this really, really neat illustration. He said, we should not so gaze upon ourselves to find graces in our hearts that we forget those acts of faith by which we immediately close with Christ and rely upon him only for our justification. So he says this.
He goes on, I'll put it in my own words. He says this, when Joseph sent his wagons to take Jacob, to go see Joseph, he said it would have been foolish for Jacob to walk out and look at the wagons and say, these are Joseph's wagons. It means Joseph is alive. How wonderful are these wagons? I'm going to worship these wagons.
No, no. He says, Jacob's not going to end in the wagons. Jacob is going to look at the wagons and say, now I've really got to go to see Joseph.
I'm not satisfied until I see Joseph. And so Burgess says, when a safe sinner sees the evidences of grace within his own heart, in his own life, he's happy. It's like he sees the wagons, the fruits of God's work within him. God is here.
That's wonderful. But you don't end in the wagons. You don't end in the evidences. You want then the God who gives you the marks and the fruits of grace. And then finally, those subjective phenomena, like the inward evidences of grace, may sometimes feel more real than faith in God's promises. Such experiences give less glory to God than divine promises apprehended directly by faith. That's what the Puritans say.
And I think Burgess again says it the best. He says this, trusting in God and in Christ, when we feel nothing but guilt and destruction in ourselves, is the greatest honor we can give to God. Therefore, though living by signs and evidences of faith in us is more comfortable to us, living by faith also in darkness is a greater honor to God. So God is honored the most when you trust him unconditionally. So in conclusion, when Christian, in Pilgrim's Progress, was confined in Doubting Castle, and giant despair was beating him up and threatening to kill him the next day, do you remember what Christian did?
This is so vintage Puritan. He suddenly remembered he had something in his pocket. Remember what it was? The key of promise. And he plucks it out of his pocket when his partner, Hopeful, says, well, take it out and try it.
And using the key, he quickly opens all the castle's locks and escapes. You see, Bunyan's message is unmistakable. We don't need some special extraordinary personal revelation or experience to believe that these promises are given to us. We just need to use the promises, trusting in God, trusting in God, trusting in his son. And we need not fear that those promises won't be for us because he delights to give them to the poor and needy. So don't be shy when he pours those promises at your feet every time you open the Bible. Embrace them.
Live out of them. Rejoice in them. And discover to your astonishment and joy that giant despair is powerless to keep us as his prisoner when we are living out of the promises of God. The gospel promises of God in Christ are mightier than all the arsenals of Satan and his minions combined. Assurance of salvation does not result from the power of positive thinking. It flows from the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So the Puritans remind us that the subjective promise embraced by faith is infallible because it is God's comprehensive and faithful covenant promise and he is infallible.
And consequently, subjective evidence, though necessary, is always secondary for it's often mixed with human convictions and feelings even as it gazes upon the work of God. So all exercises of saving faith, the primary and the two secondary we're about to hear about, all exercises of faith apprehend, to some degree, the primary ground of divine promises in Christ. Thank God for his promises of the gospel.
That was Joel Beakey on this Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. And if you've been struggling with assurance, I hope today's message was a help to you. The team here at Ligonier Ministries is working every week to produce new resources with the podcasts, articles, books, video teaching series, online and in-person events, and of course, on-campus discipleship and education at Reformation Bible College.
And none of this would be possible without your generous financial support. That's why most days I'll highlight a way that you can support this global ministry that is serving millions every year. Today, when you call us at 800 435 4343 or visit renewingyourmind.org to make a donation, we'll send you the complete series that you heard from today, Assurance of Faith with Joel Beakey.
Plus, give you lifetime digital access to all of the messages and study guide to thank you for your support. This is an important topic that confronts most Christians at some point in their life. So I highly recommend taking the time to work through this study and reflect on the promises of God.
Give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes. Is God at work in your life? How do we know? And how can that aid our assurance of faith? Join us tomorrow to find out here on Renewing Your Mind. .
