The Testimony of the Holy Spirit

Without the application of the Spirit, the promises of God will lead to self-deceit, carnal presumption, and fruitless lives. Without the illumination of the Spirit, self-examination tends to introspection, bondage, and legalism. The witness of the Spirit, divorced from the promises of God and from scriptural inward evidences, will probably lead to unbiblical mysticism and excessive emotionalism. So the three reinforce each other when they are given by the Holy Spirit.

Why are you confident that you are a Christian? Our assurance can increase and decrease in different seasons of our life. But as we've learned over the past couple of days, there is a biblical way to understand and grow in our assurance, whether by the promises of God in Scripture or the fruit of God's work in our hearts and lives. But what about the role of the Holy Spirit? And how should we approach this element of assurance without falling into mysticism? That'll be our topic today on this Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind. This is the final message that you'll hear this week from Joel Beakey's series Assurance of Faith. So that means it's also your final opportunity to request the complete 11-part series on DVD, along with digital access to the messages and study guide.

So head on over to renewingyourmind.org, or use the link in the podcast show notes to request this practical resource with your donation of any amount. Helping us to avoid emotionalism and mysticism, here's Dr. Beakey on the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Okay, we're going to begin this lecture on assurance by looking at Romans 8, 16. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. Let's pray. Gracious God, as we approach this vast subject, so complex in some ways, so beautifully simple in others, give us wisdom, help us from above, and be near to us, we pray.

In Jesus' name, amen. The Westminster Confession of Faith, 18.2, says we get our basic assurance from the promises of God. That is buttressed by inward evidences of grace or faith. And then we also have this thing that's called the testimony of the Holy Spirit. The testimony of the Holy Spirit.

And this is worded in a particular way as follows. The testimony of the spirit of adoption, witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God, just quoting Romans 8, 16, which spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, that's our down payment for what's going to come, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption. So as surely as we have that direct testimony of the spirit to our souls, the witnesses with our spirit, so surely we know we're sealed to the day of redemption. Now this is the most difficult part of assurance in the Westminster Confession, and the divines knew that there was a vast amount of mystery surrounding this subject, because whenever you talk about the Holy Spirit, it is a bit mysterious, isn't it? Because we can't see the spirit the way we can see Jesus in our human flesh, and there's so much about the spirit that is mysterious to us.

He's like the wind who comes and blows, when and where He will. But also the divines worded it this way because there was a minor disagreement among them. It wasn't substantive, that created division. But basically what happens is that some of the divines said the testimony of the Holy Spirit is actually given to the evidences. So they would say evidences slash by the testimony of the spirit, there's really not a third category.

That's the way Anthony Burgess felt. So when I reflect about my hungering and thirsting after Christ's righteousness, and I conclude that yes, I do hunger and thirst after Christ's righteousness, the spirit is witnessing with my spirit that that's true so that my conscience is clear when I say yes, I do know something of that, and therefore the conclusion is I'm a child of God. So the other group of divines, people like Samuel Rutherford and others that were there at Westminster, said yes, it's true, the spirit's testimony is needed here, but we want to talk about something else, a direct testimony of the Holy Spirit that comes with power to comfort the soul.

And so they had in mind not something reflective, but something direct. They called it an immediate act of faith, a direct act of faith, rather than immediate act of faith through the means, through the means of reflection. So a direct act of faith is, I'll just pick a text, say God speaks this promise to your soul with a great deal of power.

I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee. And that can give you a boost in your assurance big time if you feel that text is powerfully applied to your soul. And so at such times the believer feels the personal application of the word to his soul by the spirit, witnessing with his spirit that this is true for him. And when that happens, it may not be very frequently, some believers may never have this, others may have it once in a while in their life, we must not elevate that above these two kinds of assurance, because then we might end in mysticism.

They warned about that. We must always subject it, make sure it's grounded in the word, make sure it collaborates with the fruits of our lives. But when we receive that testimony of the Holy Spirit directly, that can be very sweet in our spiritual pilgrimage to the celestial city. And it often seems at such times that the Holy Spirit is picking out of the 1,189 chapters in the Bible, the particular text from the particular chapter that is most suited for our particular need at that point in time. And we just marvel. It can come in a sermon, it can come in your meditation, it can come in your daily Bible reading, it can come out of nowhere where you can be doing something else and it's suddenly as if the Holy Spirit just impresses you, overwhelms you with a particular text, a direct testimony of the Holy Spirit.

J.I. Packer describes it this way. This is a direct and immediate sense of God's fatherly love given as kind of an immediate communication, like God saying, I love you, directly, immediately to the soul through his word. Or like a father saying to his child, I love you, as a good parent sometimes does. So with God and his children, the spirit who comes in as a spirit of adoption mediates to us these high moments, this thrilling realization that God is, as it were, saying to my soul, I am thy salvation. I am your father.

I love you. Now, if you've never experienced anything like this, this should not bring you to despair. It doesn't mean you're an inferior Christian anyway.

This is no second blessing. But if you have experienced it, you know what it's like. It overwhelms you, it masters you, it makes you balance a mission before the triune God. The fruit, by the fruit you should know, the fruit, when it's a genuine work of the Spirit in your soul, is it humbles you before God.

It makes you smaller, it makes Christ bigger in your life. And often, the Puritans said, the Spirit does this in the greatest trials of our lives. When we're in the greatest need, we cry out to God. And that coincides with Romans 8 16, because Romans 8 16, when we cry out, Abba Father, which is the verse before, and the Spirit witnesses with our spirit that we are the children of God, that word cry there refers to times of great need, great need. God supplies wondrously. I can tell you in my own life, for example, I've had this a handful of times. But I had it once when I was in just tremendous need, it was for a long period of tremendous need.

I had five different people in different places around the country when I was in tremendous need. Call me up and tell me that the Lord has laid upon their heart, Isaiah 54 verse 17, for me. No weapon that is formed against you shall prosper and every tongue that shall rise up against you in judgment thou shall condemn. For this is the heritage of the servants of the Lord and their righteousness is of me.

That's the really comforting part. Their righteousness is of me, saith the Lord. That text had been very precious to me earlier in my life when the Lord applied it to me powerfully.

It just reinforced, reinforced, reinforced. And it just gave such an assurance in my soul that God would not only bring me out of this trial, which He did eventually, but also that He was my God and my salvation. So when this happens, there's a sweetness, there's a power to it. Then thy word becomes sweeter than honey in a honeycomb and all the graces of God within you, it feels like they're all augmented and you walk with a greater tenderness before the Lord and a greater sense of love and this type of thing. So this is what Samuel Rutherford, William Twist, Henry Scudder, Thomas Goodwin, that group of divines at Westminster believed then that the witness of the spirit described in 815 of Romans contained something distinct from that of verse 16. So they said the spirit's witnessing with the believer's spirit by syllogism, verse 15, was something different from his witnessing directly to the believer's spirit by direct applications of the word. So Henrik Meyer in his New Testament commentary says the former, that is the evidences, leaves in its wake the self-conscious conviction, I am a child of God, praise be to God. And on the basis of the syllogisms finds freedom to approach God as Father. The latter speaks the spirit's pronouncement directly on behalf of the Father.

You are a child of God. And on the basis of hearing sonship from God's own word by the spirit, we approach him with the familiarity of a child. So both have the same effect. It's just that usually the direct testimony of the spirit comes with a considerable degree of power and may give a real boost to assurance at that particular moment. Now, the important thing is that all the divines were agreed that if this was true, the direct testimony of the Holy Spirit, it was in no way superior to the other two. All would say that except for Thomas Goodwin, and I won't get into that detail.

Goodwin actually did think it was superior. But that's why I said these two are like your meat and potatoes, the promises and evidences, and the testimony of the Holy Spirit is like a sweet dessert after the meal. But where all the divines were agreed on was that the best way to approach assurance of faith is to strive by the grace of God, and we'll hear about that in our next lesson about how to cultivate assurance, to strive for as much of all three kinds of assurance as possible. The more you have of all three kinds, the greater, the more robust is your joy in the Lord, and the greater is your assurance of faith. The important thing also that they all agreed on is that the activity of the spirit is essential in all three kinds of assurance. Without the Holy Spirit, you don't have, according to Paul, according to the Puritans, any assurance.

As Burgess said, as a man by the power of free will is not able to do any supernatural good thing, so neither by the strength of natural light can he discern the gracious privileges God bestows upon him. Without the application of the Spirit, the promises of God will lead to self-deceit, carnal presumption, and fruitless lives. Without the illumination of the Spirit, self-examination, number two, the evidences, tends to introspection, bondage, and legalism. The witness of the Spirit, divorced from the promises of God and from scriptural inward evidences, will probably lead to unbiblical mysticism and excessive emotionalism.

So the three reinforce each other when they are given by the Holy Spirit. Now, I have personally in my life thought long and hard about the testimony of the Holy Spirit for well over 30 years. This has been a very dear subject to me, not just because it was my doctoral dissertation, but because I'm a pastor, and I pastor people who struggle with assurance. So I've written to people, I had a correspondence chain for a while with Ian Murray, for example, and I really think that Ian Murray has the right balance when he said to me, I do believe that this can be in the lives of certain people, but it must never trump the promises or the evidences, because we need to be careful not to get into some kind of second blessing with this. But I think that if you deny the third form of assurance here altogether, and you take this all as one run-on sentence, then you have another problem. What do God's children do with this special kind of assurance?

Because many of them, I've talked to hundreds of people in my life who've experienced something similar to this. Even in my own personal life when I was delivered from my bondage of sin, the Lord spoke through one of his messengers, there's a way of escape in Christ Jesus, even for you, speaking to someone else, but it came to me with so much power. It set my soul at liberty for the first time in my life. My sins rolled off my back. I was overwhelmed. I was rejoicing. I was weeping.

I went to bed weeping. My hands were up in the air until about 3 o'clock in the morning. It was the only morning in my life I think I was Pentecostal in a way.

I was just like rejoicing with joy unspeakable. And 3 o'clock in the morning, I went down, I woke up my dad, brought him out, told him my soul has been saved. And from that moment on in my life, my assurance has wavered in different circumstances, and I grieve that I'm not more sanctified than I am. But from that moment in my life, I've never doubted in any substantial way my salvation.

That was a defining moment in my life. And I feel like the Holy Spirit directly applied these words to my soul through the Word, through the Word. So the Spirit takes Bible-based words at times and can apply it directly to our souls.

And Richard Sibbes describes this experience well, another Puritan. He says, The Spirit doth not always witness unto us our condition by force of argument from our sanctification, but sometimes it pleases him to immediately by way of his presence as the sight of a friend comforts without discourse, so by his very presence he can enlarge our soul and give us comforting joy by direct application of the Word of God, taking the things of Christ and revealing them directly to us through the Word with an unusual degree of power, so that we may know a peace that passes all understanding. I want to read a quote to you that's a bit lengthy, but it's from James Boyce, who's a well-respected in Reformed circles, as you know.

It's taken from his exposition of Romans, where he works with his text. This is what he says, I am convinced that Romans 8 16 teaches that there is such a thing as a direct witness of the Holy Spirit to believers that they are sons or daughters of God, even apart from the other proofs I have mentioned. Proofs being the inward evidences. In other words, it is possible to have a genuine experience of the Holy Spirit in one's heart. Experience the Spirit?

I know the objections. I know that no spiritual experience is ever necessarily valid in itself. Any such experience can be counterfeited, and the devil's counterfeits can be very good indeed. But the fact that a spiritual experience can be counterfeited does not invalidate all of them. I also know that those who seek experiences of the Holy Spirit frequently run to excess and fall into unbiblical ideas and practices.

Every such experience must be tested by Scripture. But in spite of all these objections, which are important, I still say that there can be a direct experience of the Spirit that is valid testimony to the fact that one is truly God's child. Haven't you ever had such an experience? An overwhelming sense of God's presence? Haven't you at some point, perhaps at many points in your life, been aware that God has come upon you in a special way and that there is no doubt whatever that what you are experiencing is from God? You may have been moved to tears. You may have felt deeply some other sign of God's presence, by which you were certainly moved to a greater and more wonderful love for Him. See, that conclusion is important.

It bears fruit. You end up loving God more. You're humbled more beneath Him. So, what are we to make of this? Well, let me give you some conclusions. Number one, do not make too much of these experiences. The main thing in the Christian life is to walk every day in God's promises and precepts. Number two, such experiences must be tested by the Word of God to avoid false mysticism. If such experiences are merely emotional, they will not be grounded in the truths of God's Word. Three, such experiences must be tested by the fruits of our lives to avoid antinomianism. If these kinds of experiences produce the fruits of the Spirit— love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control, the fruits of the beatitudes, etc.— you may know by their fruits that they were genuine testimonies of the Holy Spirit. If, however, the fruit of such experiences is that you become puffed up with your experiences, and you end up living a careless and presumptive lifestyle, a kind of high-minded attitude of superiority over other Christians, you can be absolutely sure these experiences are of the devil and not the Holy Spirit. All Spirit-worked experiences bear God-honoring fruits.

And finally, such experiences also involve the testimony of the Holy Spirit, witnessing with our spirit that we are the children of God. That is made abundantly clear also by the canons of Dort written 30 years earlier, before the Westminster Confession. Though using slightly different language, it's interesting, the canons, head 5, article 10, provide the same primary ground of assurance and the same two secondary grounds of assurance that Westminster does. And so it says this, This assurance, however, is not produced by any peculiar revelation contrary to or independent of the word of God. That's against Roman Catholicism.

This is the canons of Dort now. But assurance springs, number one, from faith in God's promises, which He has most abundantly revealed in His word for our comfort. Number two, from the testimony, they jump to number three on Westminster, from the testimony of the Holy Spirit, witnessing with our spirit that we are children and heirs of God. And number three, lastly, from a serious and holy desire to preserve a good conscience and to perform good works, which is another way of saying evidences of grace. So in summary, the activity of the Spirit is essential in every part of assurance. Without the application of the Spirit, promises of God lead to self-deceit and carnal presumption. Without the illumination of the Spirit, self-examination will produce introspection. And the witness of the Spirit, divorced from the promises of God and from scriptural inward evidences, will degenerate into mysticism.

These three great strands should not and cannot be separated from each other. That was Joel Beeke on this Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. You've heard about the conferences for Ligonier hosts around the world.

Perhaps you've attended one. But did you know that we also host conferences at sea with our study cruisers? Next February, you can join me, Ken Jones, Derek Thomas, other Renewing Your Mind listeners, and friends of Ligonier on an eight-day Caribbean study cruise. Together, we'll consider the promises of God and the rich theological truths found in Galatians 3. These times together are filled with teaching, fellowship, and refreshment. So if you'd like to join us, you can learn more at ligoniertours.com or use the link in the podcast show notes.

I'd love to see you there. As you heard today, Joel Beeke helps us navigate the topic of assurance with great care and biblical faithfulness. So if you'd like to complete the 11-part study, make a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800 435 4343, and we'll send you the DVD set and grant you lifetime access to the study guide and the messages. The study guide is filled with reflection and study questions, quizzes, and prayer suggestions to help you use this in a Bible study or adult Sunday school setting. This is the final day for this offer, so visit renewingyourmind.org before it ends at midnight tonight.

R.C. Sproul taught in seminary, preached from the pulpit, and he communicated theological truths as he wrote children's books. Next time, you'll want to join us as you hear him read his much beloved story, The Lightlings. That's tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind. .