Assurance of Faith, Even When Weak
I was 18 and home, face planted in the pillows strewn about my bed. My Bible lay open next to me, each verse a reminder that I’d lost God’s favor. Each kind promise reassured me that it wasn’t mine.
For many years, I lived in a world where failure cordoned off God’s presence, in a world where I was either better or worse in God’s eyes depending on the effects of my Christian striving. I could recite “by grace, through faith” as the foundation of my salvation, but my heart shouted otherwise—I labored for God’s approval.
My life was perpetually an imbalanced scale—on the one side, the good that I did. On the other, the bad. The scale always tipped mercilessly toward the bad, a reminder of what God saw each time I approached him. This is why I hid my face from God in the pillows, mourning his rejection of me. This is why, some years later, I uprooted pillows and blankets—searched under chairs and in drawers—for lost keys. I was going to be late for my job waiting tables, so I searched for those keys with a steady cadence of contrition, convinced God was punishing me for something I’d done.
This is why salvation’s assurance was shaken when things went wrong—surely God was just as tired of my sin as I was. Surely he’d unchosen me. Many days brought an unhealthy fear, nestled in my uncertainty of who God was and what he was like.
Some years ago, I began meeting others who put into words what I felt.
Historical Uncertainty
William Cowper, the writer who penned the words to the classic hymn, “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” also struggled with whether God had actually chosen and saved him. At one point, he wrote: “I [once] thought myself secure of an eternity to be spent with the spirits of such men as He whose life afforded the subject of it. But I was little aware of what I had to expect, and that a storm was at hand which in one terrible moment would darken, and in another still more terrible blot out, that prospect forever.”
In other words, he vacillated between certainty that he was saved and certainty that he wasn’t. At one moment, he felt secured of eternity with God, yet in another moment, he thought he had lost that security forever.
More recently, I was introduced to Sarah Osborn, a seventeenth-century Christian woman who journaled her struggles with perfectionism. (Now, she didn’t say this outright, but I recognize a fellow perfectionist when I see one.)
She recorded her balancing act of identifying as a sinner saved and a sinner forgotten in her journals. This eventually culminated when revivalists George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent came to town. While spiritually stirred up by Whitefield’s preaching, a crisis of faith followed Tennent’s preaching. She knew that God saved sinners, but had he reallychosen her to save? She felt she couldn’t be sure.
Reading Osborn, I had a sister who knew how I felt. Her journals are short, but they detail the uncertainty that comes when we’re in charge of saving ourselves. As soon as we give in to sin, or mess something up, or fail, we’re convinced that we’ve lost God’s favor. We wonder if God has had enough.
I was also introduced to Fanny Crosby, who wrote the words to the hymn “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior.” Have you heard it? The refrain goes like this:
Savior, Savior,
Hear my humble cry;
While on others Thou art calling,
Do not pass me by.
In Crosby’s words, I hear a child desperate for God not to overlook her. Please, Lord, I know you have a lot to do, but please don’t forget me. Please remember that I’m here. How many times had I prayed this for myself? How many times did I feel like I was clinging to the hem of Christ’s robe, barely hanging on, desperate to keep an uninterested Savior interested in me? Desperate for Jesus not to pass me by.
Fanny Crosby would pen the words to the hymn “Blessed Assurance” later in her life. She exchanges the timid hope for Jesus to stay near her for a confident confession:
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
O, what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.
I wonder what passed in the years between the writing of these hymns? When I read these words, I notice a clear conviction. She let what was true triumph over untruth—there’s little fear that God might pass her with unseeing eyes. After all, Jesus belongs to her—she is his, and he is hers. The salvation she tastes on earth is just a foretaste of what is certainly to come. She is an heir, purchased by God, born of his Spirit, washed in his blood.
Blessed Assurance
I’ve grown less dramatic since I was 18 years old. You’ll be pleased to know that I no longer throw myself on my bed and bury my face in a pile of pillows. I usually put my car keys in the metal dish in my kitchen. And like Fanny Crosby, I’ve learned from all of the times that God has proven himself faithful and sure. I’ve learned to lean on him as I did the day I first believed. And he has gathered me up and carried me through doubt and uncertainty, through tears and triumph (Ps. 107:3). God has proven himself trustworthy in both trial and joy—God has proven himself to be good.
“Our sin and uncertainty, our self-reliance and self-worship, are all reminders that God is still carrying on the good work within us that he started, a good work that he has promised to finish.”
We have so many opportunities to grow, don’t we? Just when we think we’ve made it, something small sweeps us off our feet and forces us to catch our breath. Our sin surprises us. Our suffering makes us question God’s goodness. We grow weary and forgetful by Monday morning. And we neglect to meditate on Jesus and his cross, placing all the weight of our salvation on us—on our works, on our giftings, on our ability to please the Lord. Our redemption becomes unsure only because we believe it to be so. We replace the efficacy of the cross with the inefficacy of our sacrifices or our heart’s good intentions.
Our sin and uncertainty, our self-reliance and self-worship, are all reminders that God is still carrying on the good work within us that he started, a good work that he has promised to finish. A good work that began when Christ purchased and washed us in the blood of his cross (Col. 1:20). That work often repeated by Paul to the Philippian believers: “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6). This work that we cannot hurry or manufacture. This work that we can’t abandon because our heavenly refuge would never think to abandon it.
Less and less over the years, my faith has become unmoored to what I’ve done, what I’ve accomplished, and who I am. Now, this is the anchor that holds me sure, the truth that holds on to me when I’m too weak to hold on for myself: through the cross, what God has started, he will finish.
Jesus, keep us near the cross.