Assurance

Well, today we are beginning a short series which is called "Short Steps for Long Gains." And here's the idea. A few years ago, Simon Manchester, who is a friend, he put together a little book which was written to provide a focus for Christians who meet together regularly and briefly to look at God's word, to pray and sort of share a bit of their lives together. The book looks like this: Short Steps for Long Gains.

I had the privilege of working with Simon for about five years. I think he is a great pastor because in the days that I worked with him, he was always meeting people, having one-on-one meetings with people over lunch, over morning tea, over coffee and things like that, constantly. Constantly. And the challenge when you do that is how to move the conversation from just a friendly conversation over coffee or lunch or something like that, a warm and convivial conversation, to something that is maybe a bit deeper. And in that vein, he came up with this little book.

It's not a book that has got a lot of content in it. It's pocket-sized. It's like an A to Z of Christian living. And it goes like this: A is for assurance, B is for Bible, C is for Christ, D is for discipleship, E is for evangelism, F is for fellowship, G is for growth. You get the idea. It just goes like that. And it's just one verse. That's all it is. And then seven questions based on the verse, just seven questions to talk about as discussion starters to stimulate conversation. It's one of these books that's not heavy on content, like say the Alpha course is, where you've got videos and lots of things like that. The two people who are reading it have to supply the content, it comes from the group.

I've used this in a variety of settings. Currently, I meet with two young men who work in North Sydney CBD and we have lunch once a week and we chat about one of the topics and we work our way through it. Our group is very creatively named "Tuesday Lunches." And sometimes we skip over one. We look at it, we think, "Ah, let's skip that one." For example, there's one, M for marriage. Neither of these guys are married, so we just skipped that one because couldn't really see the point. And what I thought I'd do is I'd share this with you and encourage you to do it.

What I've done up the back is there are about 40 of these which you'd be free to take if you'd like to. One of our themes this year is growing. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if people in little groups, little twos and threes perhaps, not much bigger than that, met together over lunch or coffee every fortnight or so? It might be someone else from church. It might be someone from a different congregation in this church. It might be someone who used to go to church and doesn't anymore and they would like to meet and do this. I guess couples could do it, that would be possible. Any kind of combination of people who you think would enjoy and benefit from this, from a period of thinking about Christian growth and spiritual understanding. And I've got them there and you're very welcome to take them. If it turns out that we need lots more, I can organize for some more to be purchased.

And then I thought, what about a short topical series that is based on some of these just to kick it off? That's what we're going to do today. A short topical series based on just a handful of these topics. And maybe if you've got one that you really want me to deal with, then maybe we could, you could mention it and we could maybe do that towards the end of this series.

Today what I want to talk about is assurance. Assurance, that's number A in the book, A is for assurance. And the Bible verse goes like this: "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life." It was the verse from the day. You can see it on page 1210 of the red Bibles, 1210, and it's at the top right-hand side if you're following there, verse 13: "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know you have eternal life."

I'm talking to you about assurance. Assurance is a declaration that inspires confidence. It can be a description of our psychological state, that is, I am assured of something. Some of us are more easily assured than others. Some of us are more confident than others. Some of us are very confident about everything in general and some of us are less confident about lots of things. Some of us lack confidence, especially about things to do with the future. Some of us need to operate with a fairly high level of confidence. We just need to operate that way. That's the way we're just psychologically put together. And others less so. The threshold is different from person to person.

Sometimes confidence comes from experience and is affected by whether you've done it before. If you've seen this particular scenario before and you're comfortable with it, you might be more confident, and maybe if you have not done it, you may not be as confident. What sort of traveler are you when you find yourself in Abu Dhabi and you realize you've missed your connecting flight and you're told that you're going to be put up overnight? What do you do? Are you the sort of person who just charges off into the distance? They tell you you have to go to level three and go to immigration, then you have to go to level one and go to this desk here and you need to get a voucher and then the voucher takes you to the taxi and the taxi takes you. Do you just charge off into that because you know what to do? Or are you someone who just asks someone and then asks the next person, then pretty much asks every person you can see just to make you get it right? Or are you the sort of person who finds somebody else who's in the same boat as you and just go, "I'm going to stick with you because you seem to know what you're doing"?

See, when you've experienced something before, you tend to be a little bit more confident. But what if you've not experienced it before? When it comes to matters of the future, how sure are you that it will be sunny when we leave church today? You might say to yourself, "Well, it's unlikely to be sunny because it's been so wet." Or you might say, "Well, the probability is we're going to get a sunny day at some stage. Maybe today is the day." How sure are you about peace in Ukraine? You see, we can't know the future like that. But what about the assurance we can have in God? What about heaven? What happens after we die? Is that a certainty or is that an uncertainty? And what about you? Are you sure? Are you sure what will happen to you after you die?

In 1979, Billy Graham came to Australia. It was his third visit of open air evangelistic missions. And in 1979, he was interviewed on the Mike Willesee show in the 7:00 p.m. time slot, prime time, and he was asked by Mike Willesee if he thought he was going to heaven. Billy Graham replied with the words to the effect of, "I know I am." Mike Willesee was astonished. See, how can you possibly know something like that? How can you be so sure? Is it arrogance? Is it impudence to predict that that is where you're going to stand before God? Is it saying, "I'm perfect"? See, I might say, "I would like to think so. I hope so." But am I sure? Is it presumptuous to say that God will accept me, that he will forgive me? And if so, on what basis would I do that?

Will it be to stand before God and give a good account of ourselves? "My life, well, it hasn't been too bad. Could have been worse. Could have been better, but could certainly have been worse. I've done this and I've done this and I haven't done this and I haven't done that." And usually what we do at this stage is we look down the line to find people who are worse than us so that we feel better, because there are lots of people in the world who are worse than us. When it comes to how good we are, we try and find someone worse than us to make ourselves feel better. When it comes to how rich we are, we look up the line and we say, "Well, I'm not as rich as that person." But when it comes to how good we are, we look down the line and try and find someone who's worse. But how can I really know?

Now, the passage in 1 John and the argument of those 15 verses we read, it's not a simple argument, and I'm not going to get into the details of that argument today. I just want to focus on that one verse, 1 John 5:13. He says this: "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life." The Apostle John is writing this letter and he's writing this so you may know. He seems to think it's possible to know. The issue here is eternal life, that you may know that you have eternal life. That is the issue. That is the issue above all issues.

I went to a funeral two days ago on Friday. One of my former students, he was the school captain, he was 39 years of age. The chapel of the school was packed with former classmates and friends. He had a lot of friends. He was a very, very popular person. He was a lovely human being. He was the sort of person that people just loved. And I take yourself back to the teenage boy that I once knew. And I thought to myself, what words did he hear from my lips? And the temptation there is to surely to say, "You don't need to hear about eternal life because that's a long way off into the future. Not yet anyway. You've got your whole life ahead of you. I need to talk to you about now." But eternal life is the issue, always, for him, for us, for everyone. That is what John is speaking to us about here, that you may know that you have eternal life.

Now, the surety of eternal life gets decided in this life. That's what the verse says. That's why John is writing to them. Most people think that you live this life and when you come to the end of your life, God decides whether you go up or you go down. But eternal life gets decided in this life. And the implication here in John's writing is that people can have eternal life but not know it, to not realize or not be sure have several straight lines, say three straight lines, and they're bounding an area, then that area is going to be called a triangle. And if you add up the angles of the triangle, it will always equal 180 degrees. That's Euclid's mathematics. I thought you'd enjoy that on a Sunday morning. The way it works is if his assumptions are correct and the logic is correct, you can be certain the answer is correct. The answer follows from the assumptions and the logic. You've got to be sure the assumptions are correct though. But assuming they are, it will be certain [ certitude is better.

Now, the Puritans in the 17th century in England and New England in the United States, they wrestled with this. They said, "How could you know you had eternal life?" And the Puritans, they have much to commend themselves. There's much that's good in them. But they said the answer to that is introspection. Look within yourself. Look within your heart. Do you see within your heart evidence of good works? So they would say the Bible says, "Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy." "Are you a merciful person?" "Yes." "Then you will obtain mercy." That was their method. But what if you're not a merciful person? Will you then obtain mercy? The Puritans, people like Baxter and Perkins, they produced a flood of literature, not looking towards salvation but trying to work out whether they had assurance. And they said, "Look into your life. You can determine whether you have eternal life. Look at what you do." But the trouble is, it's a tyranny. Because when you look into your heart, if you look hard enough, you're not going to see good things there.

Sometimes in history, it took another little course where people asked, "Have you had an experience of God? Have you had an experience, say, of the Holy Spirit?" The Wesleys, for example, sat in this particular camp. But what if I've not had the experience? See, again, it's just looking into your heart to see in yourself whether you have evidence that you can be sure you've got eternal life.

Look at what 1 John says: "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life." It's got something to do with the Son of God, because it's you who believe in the name of the Son of God. That's the key. And if you look at the verses just before verse 13, verses 11 and 12, just very briefly, he says this: "And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son does not have life."

The question is, do you have the Son? What does it mean to have the Son? Quite simply, what it means is if you have your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, that his death on the cross was for you, for the taking away of your sins, that by his dying for us on the cross, that you were forgiven on that very first Good Friday when the Son of God gave his life, on that day, you were forgiven. And that is the source of your assurance. That is the source of your conviction. That is the source of the certitude that you have real eternal life. And it becomes the moment you say yes to him.

In the Old Testament, the Bible preempts it like this. It says things like this, Psalm 103: "As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us." And Isaiah 38:17, it says, "You have put all my sins behind your back." Or Micah chapter 7, that Julie read to us: "You tread our sins underfoot and hurl our iniquities into the sea." Or Isaiah 43:25: "I am he who blots out your transgressions and remembers your sins no more." God says that our sins have gone as far as the east is from the west. They are in the bottom of the sea. They're behind his back. They are trampled underfoot. They are blotted out from his memory. And if that be true, what can possibly stand between you and God, between you and God and knowing him for eternity, eternal life?

The German reformer Martin Luther wrote to his friend Jerome Weller. Weller had faced a season of severe depression. He began to be overwhelmed with doubt and Luther wrote these words to him: "I know one who suffered and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Where he is, there I shall be also."

The great reformer John Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, he wrote, "For faith totters if it pays attention to works, since no one, even of the most holy, will find there anything on which to rely. Rather than struggle to find assurance through the examination of your works," Calvin says, "cease the practice entirely. Contemplate your eternal life in the mirror of Jesus' death on your behalf." That's the thing to focus on.

Blaise Pascal, famous French mathematician, inventor, scientist, philosopher, a huge intellect, he died in 1662. His servant discovered a small piece of parchment sewn into the inside of his jacket. At the top, Pascal had drawn a cross. Underneath the cross were these words: "The year of grace 1654. Monday, November 23, from about half past ten at night until about half past midnight. Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and of the scholars. Certitude. Joy. Certitude. Joy. Peace. The sublimity of the human soul. Just Father, the world has not known thee, but I have known thee. Joy, joy, joy. Tears of joy. I do not separate myself from thee."

Apostle John says, "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life." Let's treasure this.

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