Assurance will make us love God, and praise him. Love is the soul of religion, the fat of the sacrifice; and who can love God as he who has assurance? The sun reflecting its beams on a burning-glass makes the glass burn that which is near it; so assurance (which is the reflection of God’s love upon the soul) makes it burn in love to God. Paul was assured of Christ’s love to him – ‘Who has loved me:’ and how was his heart fired with love! He valued and admired nothing but Christ. (Phil 3:3). As Christ was fastened to the cross, so he was fastened to Paul’s heart. Praise is the sacrifice we offer to the crown of heaven. Who but he who has assurance of his justification can bless God, and give him the glory of what he has done for him? Can a man in a swoon or apoplexy praise God that he is alive? Can a Christian, staggering with fears about his spiritual condition, praise God that he is elected and justified? No! ‘The living, the living, he shall praise thee.’ (Isa 38:19). Such as are enlivened with assurance are the fittest persons to sound forth God’s praise. – Thomas Watson
The Command to Celebrate and Rejoice
As we seek to build a community at Vintage that shines as a light in our city to the glory of God, and sees lives transformed, we must remember the power source of all of our labor, which is the joy of the Lord. We ought to drink deeply, with joy, from the wells of salvation every Sunday together.
[Neh 8:10 ESV] “10 Then he said to them, “Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”
This joy that is in the Lord Jesus is an explosive and potent joy that enables believers to accomplish things that would be impossible otherwise.
Some things to notice from the passage: Rejoicing. Celebrating. Eating the fat and drinking the sweet wine…breaking open the bottle of champagne is a good thing. The leaders of the Israelites, Nehemiah and Ezra, are commanding his people to celebrate. Commanding his people to rejoice. And this celebration is not simply a call to sing a song and dance a little jig. He is telling them to eat the fat and drink the sweet (or good) wine. Translated into modern English, it would be: Go home and celebrate, buy the 40-dollar Ribeye for everyone in your family, and crack open that bottle of wine that you have been saving. Invite anyone over that cannot afford these things and rejoice! Enjoy yourselves.
And this rejoicing is necessary. He is not just commanding them to rejoice in order to win their vote! He is not people-pleasing here. They need to rejoice because there is work to be done; the joy of the Lord is your strength. If they are going to finish the job of building the temple under intense opposition, they need to be animated by intense joy in the Lord. A happy working song needs to be on their lips.
Here is the lesson: A morose church that is constantly feeling bad about itself – constantly feeling bad about how little it has accomplished, how great its sins are, and never responding to the Lord in joy – will likely accomplish very little. They might appear spiritual for not being worldly, but they will not have the strength to build. Because the joy of the Lord is our strength.
This does not mean that we aim for life-coach-y, upbuilding, superficial cheerfulness all the time. What is perhaps most remarkable about verse ten is the verse right before it says this:
[Neh 8:9 ESV] “9 And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, “This day is holy to the LORD your God; do not mourn or weep.” For all the people wept as they heard the words of the Law.”
The context of Nehemiah commanding the people to rejoice and celebrate is that he just got done reading God’s word so powerfully that the people literally wept under conviction of how short they and their ancestors have fallen in light of God’s word. Essentially, what these leaders are saying is this: Because you have wept, don’t weep! Because you have been convicted, cheer up! Because you have seen how sinful you have been, feast! This is a lesson that we really must learn if we are going to be effective at all.
Men and women are capable of accomplishing a stunning amount of work. The great monuments of the world stand as testaments to what people can accomplish. We can form governments, invent tools, build structures, transform towns, and labor with unceasing energy. I love to read stories of men and women of old that accomplished remarkable things, like George Whitefield, who literally set America on a Christian track at it’s birth by his tireless preaching and evangelism; or George Mueller, who built orphanages; or Charles Spurgeon, who built churches, schools, and orphanages; or missionaries like William Carey that learned something like 10 languages and translated the Bible into multiple, even after losing all of his work midway through his work due to a fire.
In a single generation, people are able to bring about massive change for the better in their worlds, but most people do not. Most people’s lives have very little effect. Why is this? I propose that the main reason is that they lack the energy. They lack the fuel for the fire. They lack that strength that Paul says God so powerfully works within him (Col. 1:29). Nehemiah and Ezra knew this. They were seeking to rebuild something in Jerusalem. They were devoting themselves to a great work, and repentance was necessary. They could not continue to sow the seeds of their fathers and expect to reap a different harvest from them. Sorrow over sin and repentance was necessary…but so was joy. Joy in the Lord that was expressed in feasting and extravagant spending and a cheerful spirit. And it seems like Ezra and Nehemiah are saying: if you don’t have this joy you will not have strength.
And we can all relate to this, can we not? When things are going well and when life is looking up and everyone is healthy and you know exactly what you want to accomplish, are you not able to put your hand to the plow and labor with strength? But when you take loss after loss; when you are unsure of what it is all for, when you don’t believe much in what you’re trying to accomplish, your strength is sapped away from you and you barely have the ability to get out of bed in the mornings.
What This Means for Us
It means that we ought to strive after holiness and godliness, but there is a kind of Christianity that emphasizes godliness and holiness in a way that gives the believer no room to rejoice. Every message is convicting without joy at the end of it. Every person is doubting their salvation. Nobody feels as if they are praying enough or reading enough or sharing the gospel enough, and there is no bedrock of the joy of salvation to help them face these things and so all their strength is sapped away and families languish and churches die.
One of the symptoms of this kind of ministry is that, in order to avoid worldliness, they never call their people to go out and buy the 40-dollar steak, and the 50-dollar bottle of wine, and celebrate and share and rejoice in the goodness of God. Instead, they make you feel guilty for having steak and wine at all, and rather encourage a person to sell the steak and the wine and give it to the church as penance…all because they ought to be ashamed and guilty of even being able to afford the wine and steak!
Worldliness is of course a danger and a possibility, but when you let the fear of worldliness live rent free in your head all the time, you are unable to properly rejoice in the Lord. This renders you unable to have a party with your friends; unable to enjoy Thanksgiving and Christmas; unable to be generous with friends; unable to hear a message and rejoice in the gospel instead of only thinking about how short you fall. When your thinking trends this way, you have gone very wrong indeed. And what is so ironic about this, is that most people avoid all those worldly things in an effort to be fruitful, but your error will keep you from the very thing that will give you the strength to be fruitful: JOY.
What is Assurance of Salvation
And this brings me back to the chief joy in the Christian life. It is the assurance that all your sins are thrown behind the back of our blessed God and Savior. That the Father knows us and loves us personally; that the Son intercedes for us and pays for all of our sin, and that the Holy Spirit applies salvation to our souls and fills us as a down payment of what is to come. And to know all of these things without a shadow of a doubt! To be filled with the knowledge of the mercy of God towards sinners that come to Him in faith, and to know that it is not just for the world – it is for you. This is the chief joy of the Christian life, and has the explosive power of joy to empower believers to accomplish incredible things in their lives. To be wildly fruitful, and to glorify God in that, proves that we are his disciples. The kind of assurance that I am talking about is such a profound knowledge of the truth of your redeemed state that you get a taste of heaven itself. You so believe this thing to be true that you have a lively sense of the love of God in your life that enables you to labor and to serve and to face all kinds of difficulties with cheerfulness.
Here is what Thomas Watson said about assurance of salvation: “How sweet it is. This is the manna in the golden pot; the white stone, the wine of paradise which cheers the heart. How comfortable is God’s smile! The sun is more refreshing when it shines out than when it is hid in a cloud; it is a prelibation and a foretaste of glory, it puts a man in heaven before his time. None can know how delicious and ravishing it is, but such as have felt it; as none can know how sweet honey is, but they who have tasted it.”
This assurance is the source of inner strength that led martyrs to be burned at the stake singing hymns. People looked on in wonder at the strength of many Christian martyrs. In fact, early Roman emperors would destroy Christian bones and refuse them a proper burial after their deaths saying that, “the reason that Christians have such courage in death is because of their belief in the resurrection of the dead.”
Clearly, every Christian should hunger for this.
How to Get Assurance of Salvation
Let me lay out a few basic principles to encourage you to press on to assurance of salvation.
- Assurance of salvation is something that believers can grow in.
[1Ti 3:13 ESV] “13 For those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus.”
Clearly, by becoming a deacon and serving the church, Paul is saying that one of your rewards will be a confidence; an assurance in the faith that you did not previously have.
- You must be hungry for it.
[1Jo 5:12-13 ESV] “12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. 13 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.”
If you are prone to doubting, you must first recognize that God wants you – if you are a Christian – to be assured of your salvation. He does not want you to stay in a state of uncertainty about his grace towards you so that you will be motivated to live a Godly life. He is seeking your worship, and people that know that God has saved them worship Him in spirit and in truth.
- You must labor diligently for it and, yet, assurance of salvation is a gift.
[2Pe 1:10 ESV] “10 Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall.”
You cannot simply close your eyes and exert psychic energy with your face all scrunched up and increase your faith. You can’t simply decide to have a perfect faith after this sentence in the same way that you could decide to stand up from your chair. Faith is something that comes from hearing. It is something that comes to you, not something that you can conjure up within you. And at the same time, Jesus commands us to not be unbelieving, but to be believing. He rebukes the children of God for their little faith regularly. And so what do we do about this? Why would Jesus rebuke us for not having something that we cannot produce? Part of the answer must lie in the fact that people have not pursued it diligently.
There is a great little story on this topic about a young man in a church that was growing quite frustrated with the pastor. Here is how their interactions went:
Young man: “You preachers are the most contradictory men in the world; you say, and you unsay, just as it pleases you, without the least pretension to consistency. Why, you said in your sermon that sinners were perfectly helpless in themselves – utterly unable to repent or believe and then turned round and said they would all be damned if they did not.”
On hearing these words, Palmer tells us that he judged it best to reply, ‘in an off-hand sort of way, and with seeming indifference so as to cut him off from all opportunity to flirt with the gospel’. So, according to his biographer, he responded:
‘Well, my dear man, there is no use in our quarreling over this matter, either you can or you cannot. If you can, all I can say is that I just hope you will go ahead and do it.’
As I did not raise my eyes from my writing, which was continued as I spoke, I had no means of marking the effect of these words, until, after a moment’s silence, with a choking utterance, the reply came back:
‘I have been trying my best for three whole days and cannot.’
‘Ah, responded Palmer, raising his eyes and putting down his pen, ‘that puts a different face upon it; we will go then and tell the difficulty straight to God’.
We knelt down and I prayed as though this was the first time in human history that this trouble had ever arisen; that here was a soul in the most desperate extremity, which must believe or perish, and hopelessly unable of itself, to do it; that, consequently it was just the case for divine interposition; and pleading most earnestly for the fulfillment of the divine promise. Upon rising I offered not one single word of comfort or advice… So I left my friend in his powerlessness in the hands of God, as the only helper. In a short time he came through the struggle, rejoicing in the hope of eternal life.’
The point of the story is that realizing your need for God to move in your life and your own weakness is part of the humbling process that leads you to your knees crying out, “have mercy on me, a weak, unbelieving sinner!” It should not lead you to inaction, but, rather, intense action. And so you labor for assurance of salvation through prayer. You labor for assurance of salvation through diligently breaking off all known sin. You labor for assurance of salvation by diligently setting your mind on Christ. You labor for assurance of salvation by diligently going to church. And, all at the same time, it is a gift of God.
Conclusion of the Matter
Nothing fills my heart with hope and courage the same way that imagining a church full of saints singing to the Lord with joy in their hearts due to a full assurance of the love of God for them. Imagining fathers laughing from the belly over a steak dinner and giving thanks to God for all the kindness that he has shown them. Mothers smiling and being filled with courage and energy to work hard because they know in whom they have believed. These things are not frivolous; they are not secondary. Vintage Faith Church, the joy of the Lord is your strength! Seek the joy and strength that comes from a full assurance of faith and feast happily when you have it. Then pick up your shovel and sword and get to work building the temple of God.