Comments on: On Faith’s Crumbling Edge: Restoring The Uprooted Assurance Of The Ordinary Christian

By: Tim W

Tim W — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:31:40 +0000

“Revivals, youth camps, youth revivals, testimony meetings, Christian concerts, youth rallies….all of these events were likely to feature the uprooting of any semblance of assurance a Christian happened to be carrying around.”

My mom converted from catholicism to protestantism because in protestantism, she finally found assurance. She felt like she could finally relax and stop worrying about her salvation. I’m the opposite; I never was able to feel secure and assured the way she did. So I guess protestant or catholic or whatever the denomination, it doesn’t matter.

By: Tina

Tina — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 07:07:17 +0000

Just to clarify. You can actually be a Southern Baptist and be a follower of Jesus Christ. I know that is kind of off the thread, but it seems like I read a large amount of SBC bashing on the net nowadays.
We aren’t perfect, but there are some of us who haven’t gotten on the bus just yet. =)

By: Jazzki

Jazzki — Thu, 31 May 2007 09:00:06 +0000

—The New Testament’s proper and plain concern for evidence of the reality of the Holy Spirit can become a cause for much doubt that the evidence is ever adequate or convincing. Again, **when the sensitive conscience is put on the witness stand, it rarely feels that the evidence is sufficient to clear the bar of judgment as a “true Christian.**—
This (especially the starred part) sums up what I was groaning about over at the “Dangerous Grace” thread.

By: Jason S. Kong

Jason S. Kong — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

=) A well received response. Yet, I still question this – for the teenager who was unable to reconcile her faith and her life beyond that. Even as you explained the cross, the gospel and assurance of salvation, this teenager did not fully comprehend, as mentioned in your passage. They recognize that a faith that lacks in works is a dead faith – they live in a dead shell that represents their faith. It decays and smells of disease and shallow levels of maggots. They find that difficult to reconcile.

Perhaps it’s not really that “Am I really a Christian?” as more as “Am I a Christian who is dead in my faith? Am I no better off than one who is not a believer? As one who acts the same as the latter, would it be better off just to throw off that title which I blaspheme by my very being?”

How can you reconcile that when they are convinced that for all the gospel has done, they have changed from one with no faith to one whose faith is dead? Both lack life, and they realize they are lifeless in their shell of lies.

Perhaps I missed the answer in there, but where do these people lie? How exactly do these scenarios conclude in your sessions?

By: Cultural Savage

Cultural Savage — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

I am reminded of John’s comments: “…I am writing this to prevent you from sinning but if anyone (or perhaps everyone??) does sin we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus the Upright. He is the Sacrifice to expiate our sins, and not only ours, but also those of the whole world.” (1 John 2:1-2). Question: are we calling people to a point of conversion or to a life of learning to live rightly in the lavish grace of God? Having grown up in church, the more I see we Christians placing aside the Gospel as something we have mastered the more I see us forgetting humanity and the divine call to love… for here and now we are the tangible body of Christ, and we are the agents of grace to wounded man, both believers and unbelievers. Perhaps we all should ponder a bit more the words of a blind man, “… Oh Lord I believe! Help my unbelief”. What does this mean to our humanity and to the humans around us?
Great post Michael. Keep thinking in the light! Grace and Peace to you all.

By: James Aguilar

James Aguilar — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

I have at times struggled with this question as well.

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

We ALL have struggled with this question. And it’s SO insidious–we hear stories from other Christians of their VICTORIES and their VICTORIOUS Christian lives as proof of their salvation. My wife got to the point where she questioned her faith after hearing the women at her bible study go on with victorious-living talk. Dad Rod was one person who brought sense into our lives on this–and re-reading Romans 7. The key is the place of the Gospel and Law in our lives. Keep on talking about this!

By: Patrick

Patrick — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

My priest once told me a bit about his views on confession and reconcilliation. (Honest, I think this is relevant to the part about the counselee’s question on failed faith.)

His approach starts with an understanding that sin always involves messing up a relationship. That might be a relationship with God. It also might be a relationship with other people (which still displeases God, so still screws you up with Him).

Are you with me so far?

Pennance is not about being forgiven because you say these prayers or do these good deeds. Pennance is about re-establishing a good relationship. So, for example, if I go to him and confess that I take my wife for granted (there are many forms of this), his standard pennance is to tell me to buy my wife flowers, hire a babysitter, and take my wife out to dinner. It is meant to tell me to start getting my focus back on a good relationship in marriage. Sure, prayer is always a good thing. But what do you think makes God happier: more prayers or a husband and wife getting closer in their marriage?

If I ever have the burden of counseling someone who feels that he is not a Christian because he has not been living like one, I hope that I can do a decent job of advising him on how to start repairing the relationship that is damaged. If an altar walk didn’t do it the first time, maybe there is something else that will. For many of us, though, it really does take being told to do some specific thing in order to get headed in the right direction. Naming our demons gives us some power over them (identify the specific problems so you can face them, rather than a general feeling of there being problems). After that, a push in the direction of right relationship will do more to help than any debate about assurance ever could.

Well, that’s this Catholic’s take on it, anyway. It really does work for me.

-Patrick

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

thank you.

By: ch prost

ch prost — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

As a 40 year old Reformed minister, I find your long critique of Piper’s rare biblical clarity who suggest a man indeed test HIMSELF in regard to his ASSURANCE of being saved(not in regard to how one objectively IS justified or saved of course) the sadly cliched response of 98% of Reformed teachers today. The objective doctrines and truths of the gospel and Jesus Christ and his work can never be evidence for anyone that it actually HAS BEEN applied applies to oneself personally for the simple reason that no matter how strongly one believes with fullest conviction those truths of what Christ did, mere head knowledge and “positive thinking” and “naming it and claiming it” that “he died for me” doesn’t make it so if you do not have anything more than the head knowledge and conviction without a BIBLICAL concept of faith and regeneration as described in Scripture which, as Piper so wonderfully describes in many of his other writings and teachings, includes some sense of a new and supernatural born again love and joy in the light of Christ that will lead to growing fruit and good works EVERY TIME. But forget my longwinded logic… look at the Scripture itself, and it seems to me that whenever the issue of ASSURANCE or testing to see if one personally is in the faith and one of the elect, the bible always points us (e.g. most of 1John) to our own fruit and good works at least as much as every Reformed evangelical AND fundamentalist will point us to the mere objective truths and say “you believe, therefore be assured!” and never “you beleive (pisteuo), good… even the demons beleive (pisteuo)” You yourself can not find any fault with Piper’s repeated use of the bible which you youself quote, as you wrote:
“I have no particular disagreement with the general unfolding of this text, but I believe honest, sensitive consciences will be driven to doubt and a loss of assurance by the emphasis that we look to the evidence of our lives rather than to Christ alone as the ultimate ground of assurance. All the efforts and kinds of obedience that flow from a passage like this will ultimately be an inadequate ground for assurance.”

I say, if people who FAIL the biblical tests for assurance aren’t assured, ALL THE BETTER! Isn’t that the point? Do you want to give people a ground for assurance that the bible does not? The “sensitive conscience” you are concerned about (if he exists as often as he claims he does today… perhaps all these “sensitive consciences” of modern times 95% of the time are merely people the Holy Spirit is fighting to convict against the efforts of Christian ministers to repent) would not be the target anyway of Piper’s admonition as you quote him yourself saying “IF these things (growing love and godliness) are not your earnest concern” then they have reason to be concerned.
It is also unfair to attempt to weave Piper into all the fundamentalists who attempt to get people back into the baptistry… or to come up for an altar call for numbers. Piper does no such thing, and that is evident merely from a reading of his message you have quoted that he simple wants people not to “come up and get saved” but to make a calling election to a salvation they already claim “sure” and heed the warnings throughout Scripture against shipwrecking of faith, drifting away and falling short of which Scriptures like Rom 11 and Hebrews 4 warn us to be fearful of.

Oh to find just a few more modern day ministers like John Piper to dare meekly state and believe what Scripture makes clear multiple times and what used to be the common Reformed and Puritan teaching on the subject of assurance of justification, which is a subject far removed from how we are actually to be justified. Oh for more Reformed teachers that would grasp more fully the distinction between the monergism of justification and the synergism and striving of sanctification in their own minds, and trust (as Scripture does) their hearers to make the same simple distinction and leave the phantom boogeyman of “legalism” in his soteriological place of justification.