The Believer's Assurance

One of the hallmarks of Reformed faith is its insistence that the believer can know with complete assurance that he or she is right with God in this life. Such assurance is sorely lacking in the Roman Catholic and many other churches that teach being righteous is a kind of partnership between us and God. They teach that sin mars that partnership so you really can't be sure of your destiny because you don't know the future state of your soul at the moment you die. That's why priests rush to the bedside of the dying to deliver that last pardoning Eucharist to be sure that all recent sins are covered. There is nothing in Scripture that teaches such a cruel superstition.

It was against such insecurity and ecclesiastical abuse that Martin Luther and the other Reformers recovered the teaching of the early church and the Apostle Paul that we can have confidence before God, the complete assurance of our saving faith.

There are three convictions by which believers are assured.

1. The Objective Cognitive Conviction of Scripture

The Bible is the word of God. What it says is true. It's testimony is objective. The witness of the Scriptures is that our salvation is entirely God's doing and, as such, we can be confident in His eternal faithfulness.

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified. (Romans 8:28-30)

God has never called someone that he also hasn't justified. To be called and justified is to know that God means to finish his work of sanctifying salvation in our lives. God does not abandon the redemptive work he starts within us.

Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. (Hebrews 10:19-22)

Jesus opens a way for us to live in his presence. He assures us that because we are able to believe we can know that our hearts and consciences though darkened from time to time by doubt cannot condemn us.

We can stake our lives on the promises of God's Word. The Bible is our great comfort and the next two convictions spring from it as evidence that we are saved.

2. The Subjective Conviction of the Internal Witness

We can also have assurance that we are right before God by the fact that "God's Spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are children of God" (Romans 8:14-17). The Holy Spirit assures us that Jesus includes us.

We know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us. (I John 3:24).

Now, this internal witness is not merely some inner voice telling us whatever we want to hear. The Bible says we are test these spirits, these messages, these convictions to see which are of God (I John 4:1). What about that inner voice that criticizes you, tells you that you can't be certain, dredges up old forgiven sins? This is not the witness of the Holy Spirit. You can apply this simple test to the voices in your head: ask the voice to confess Christ. Call it by name, "Spirit of criticism, spirit of doubt, spirit of depression -- confess Christ." Any spirit not of God will flee. Your conscience is not the Holy Spirit. your conscience can fool you. Your conscience is usually the voice of your Mom or Dad or some other authority figure. If your conscience can confess Christ, you can trust it. Otherwise, ignore it.

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

3. The Behavioral Conviction

God's Word also tells us that in addition to the subjective internal witness of our spirit, we can also be assured of our salvation by our behavior.

By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments (I John 2:3. 3:24).

These texts in I John used to bother me because they sounded like earning points with God by keeping commandments (covenant ofworks). But in the Greek, the word for commandments is not nomos (law, ten commandments) but a word that means teachings or precepts. So the third way we can know we are saved is because we genuinely want to obey the teachings of Jesus. We don't have to be perfect and get it right, but we can be assured of our standing with God if we want to obey Christ and follow Him.

My six-year-old grandson called me this week to tell me he had invited Jesus into his heart. I was so happy and so was he. But that night his nine year old brother couldn't get to sleep. He cried and cried and would not be comforted because he told his parents that he had doubts about God and was afraid that if he died he wouldn't be in heaven. He called me the next day and I used these three points to help assure him of his salvation.

"Do you think about God and what he wants?" I asked.

"All the time," he answered. "Every day."

"Sinners don't care about pleasing God, I explained. "They don't care about spiritual things, but God has given you the Holy Spirit because he wants you to know that you belong to him and there's not a doubt you can have, not a mistake that you can make, not a sin you could commit, not a decision you can make that will ever separate you from God's love and God's faithfulness to see us through all the way to glory."

"Wow," he said. "That makes me so happy."

"Me, too," I said choking up a bit. "Me, too."

Tongues

I am reading a book titled The Gifts of the Spirit by Derek Prince, and am finding it very insightful with regards to the workings of the Holy Spirit. It is fun to awaken some old memory files (from high school) with regards to some of the information contained therein. Such as ministry gifts (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers), and the nine gifts of the spirit; the revelation gifts (wisdom, knowledge and discernment), the power gifts (faith, healings and workings of miracles), and the vocal gifts (tongues, interpretation and prophecy). It is the latter gifts that were and still are a tad confusing to me. It is this confusion that brings me to ask for some clarification.

Mr. Prince gives a basic definition to the vocal gifts and notes that they “are not intended to be all-encompassing, but rather practical introductions.”

Kinds of tongues – ability given by the Holy Spirit to speak in a language not understood by the speaker.

Interpretation of tongues – ability given by the Holy Spirit to speak, in a language understood by the speaker, the meaning of words previously spoken in an unknown language.

Prophecy – ability to speak words given by the Holy Spirit in a language understood by the speaker.

These gifts are under our control and we are therefore responsible for what we do with them. This I understand. What is troublesome to me (lack of understanding) is “kinds of tongues”. Prince states that there are two kinds – that which is private versus public. Private would be like deep spiritual conversations with God alone and not edified publicly. Public gift is for the edification of an assembly of believers. As the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Cor 12:8-10 (I think) ‘first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, after those miracles, the gifts of healings…” Basically the ministry of the word takes precedence over all other forms of ministry and has final authority. I have paraphrased what Prince has in his book, but I understand the basic concept here. It is the tongues for public assembly that have me perplexed – is the speaking of tongues publicly the use of a language not familiar with the speaker (e.g., my native tongue is English but when so directed I start speaking in say the native tongue of a group of Africans while I was on a mission trip to that area). OR would the kinds of tongues mean the ability to praise the Lord in a meaningful way or the ability to all of a sudden give a specific prayer that a person or situation needs or for the group as a whole (intercessory tongue) to be directed rightly and know the will of the Lord?

In his book Prince talks about four kinds of tongues: praise, Intercession, rebuke, and exhortation which is to be followed by interpretation in order to be fully understood. There are examples of each which make sense – again my confusion is over the language used unknown to the speaker but understood by the listeners (example above) or is it in the language of the speaker and understood by like users of the language?

Perhaps I am being nit-picky here and if so then I have been since high school, although at the time I just let it roll off my back.

Any thoughts to this would be appreciated. Thanks - Cecelia

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Thank you, Cecelia, for a great question that gets our Granbury group ready to study Acts 2.

The doctrine of "tongues" can be a touchy subject, one that has divided Christians for quite some time, especially since the rise of Pentecostalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Derek Prince was a well-known charismatic leader who influenced millions through his books and radio broadcasts. Although his theological categories were not similar to my own Reformed perspective, he was a deeply respected Christian leader and became actively involved in trying to heal some of the excesses of the charismatic movement.

My own position on the doctrine of tongues has yo-yoed over the years. I've seen its divisiveness in churches I have pastored and I've seen it's blessings in the believers of many different churches who genuinely love the Lord. My own study leads me to conclude that there are, as Prince states, two kinds of "tongues" mentioned in the New Testament: the private "groanings too deep for words" (Romans 8) and the public miracle of language as described in Acts 2.

Luke describes the miracle of tongues as happening when new believers believe the Gospel and receive the Holy Spirit. There is no normative pattern of Holy Spirit filling in the book of Acts, but Luke clearly understands the gift to be one of speaking in authentic languages. It's possible for example that Cornelius, a Roman, begins to recite Jewish Scripture in praise of God. He was a God-fearer who knew the Psalms and it seems perfectly reasonable to expect he began to sing or pray the Hebrew words of God in joy inexpressible in his native Latin.

The letters of Paul deal with a different matter. There was (and still is) a phenomenon among the Greek mystery religions of people speaking gibberish when in a state of emotional ecstasy (much like a sports fan may let go with a stream of unintelligible syllables at a game-winning play). Converts in Corinth were bringing this behavior into public worship and creating chaos in the assembly of believers. Paul is willing to acknowledges the private gift of prayer language that edifies the believer, but he strictly regulates public expression in worship to real languages capable of being translated.

Charismatics sources have always supplied anecdotal evidence of people in prayer meetings suddenly speaking a language unknown to them and people from another place in the world understanding what is being said. However, at my last study of this subject, all of those instances were undocumented and fall into the category of urban myths.

But God's call is not limited to our human skills. The Scriptures say that speaking in languages not known to us but known to God and sometimes to others is a gift of the Holy Spirit, although described as the least of the gifts. I Corinthians 13 was not written to be read at a wedding, but the description of how God's gifts function, most especially the gift of tongues.

"If I speak with the tongues of men or of angels (there's the two types)..., but have no love, I am a noisy gong or crashing cymbal."

Body, Mind, Soul, Spirit

These four words are used in all kinds of esoteric conversations by Christians, pagans, Buddhists, New Agers, psychologists, and movie stars. We think we know what these words mean and how they should be understood within a context. But our 21st century Western view of these words is derived more from Greek philsophers as interpreted by the medieval Roman church strongly influenced by Aristotelian logic. Logic creates clash. Two things are set against each other. This is called dualism. Body is one thing; soul is another thing; logic rejects that they are the same. Philosophical dualism gives us the sacred-secular paradigm. Then along come contemporary rationalists and materialists to shrink the model to the single dimension of body, everything else being unprovable to science. So what does the New Testament mean by these words: body, mind, soul, and spirit.

Because we are Christians, let's start with what Jesus taught. In Matthew 22:37, Jesus affirms the greatest commandment to be "Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind" (quoting Deuteronomy 6:5). Mark's Gospel adds "and with all your strength." Neither Moses nor Jesus describe in what ways we love with our heart as opposed how we love with our soul which isn't differentiated from the way we are supposed to love with all our mind. These are not separate entities. The intent of the commandment is that we are to love God with our whole being. This is the simplest way of summarizing the Old Testament understanding of who we are. You don't have a body, you don't have a mind, you don't have a soul; rather you are a body-mind-soul unity.

Paul writes most about body, mind, soul, and spirit. In 1 Thessalonians 5:13 he writes:

Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely (wholly) and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless..."

Each is a description of a whole human being as viewed from a specific perspective of life, not different substances arranged in some kind of hierarchy. Let's examine each of these in some detail.

Psuche (Soul)

Genesis 2:7 says God breathed into Adam the breath of life and he became a living soul. The Hebrew word for soul is nephesh. That same breath of life is given to the animals in Genesis 1:30. So, the Bible doesn't picture the soul as a carrier of our real selves into heaven (as did the medieval church). The soul referred to our human existence as living, breathing creatures.

When Paul writes about the psuche, he is clear that it does NOT get into heaven. After contrasting psuche and pneuma (spirit), he writes in 1 Corinthians 15:50,53:

Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable...For this perishable body must put on the imperishable and this mortal body must put on immortality.

Psuche is our creatureliness. It is not eternal It can be lost or destroyed (Matthew 10:28, 16:26). Jesus taught:

Don't worry about your psuche, what to eat and drink or about your body, what you will wear ...

The body is the outward being that needs clothing, what Paul can also refer to as the "flesh." Psuche is our entire humanity as seen from the perspective of our creaturely life that breathes, bleeds, and needs food and drink.

Pneuma (Spirit)

Let's introduce the meaning of spirit at this point because it is the logical opposite of psuche. Here's another passage that makes clear this contrast.

"The psuchikos person (one driven by their creaturely existence) does not receive the things that come from God's pneuma...We who are pneumatikos have the mind of Christ." 1 Corinthians 2:14, 16

The pneuma is a gift of God to believers. Biblically speaking, unbelievers don't have pneuma. Pneuma will be the life force of our resurrected bodies. One reason most Christians don't understand this idea is due to horrible translations of I Corinthians 15:44 that speak of the resurrection body as a "spiritual body." This gives license to all kinds of ridiculous speculation. But a better translation would be:

It (our mortal body) is sown a creaturely-animated body (psuchikos); it is raised a spirit-animated body (pneumatikos).

In the resurrection we will receive our glorified bodies; our salvation will be complete. We will be fully human from the perspective of God's redemption. But God gives us a down payment on eternity here and now. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 1:22 that we are given pneumatikos as a deposit on God's promise to resurrect us on the last day.

This helps clarify, I think, Paul's talk about the law versus in the Spirit in Romans 5-7. The law addresses only our psuche; but being in Christ means we have been given the foretaste of the pneuma.

Fronaima/Nous (Mind)

The ancients pictured their mind as residing in the physical heart whereas we are more likely to associate it with the brain. Psychology associates the mind with the self, but such a thought would be quite foreign to the people of the New Testament. In Romans 8:5ff. Paul says the mind is what we orient to, what we think and rationalize. Like the needle of a compass orients to true north, the mind orients to what is true or false. So, those who are oriented to psuche think about and rationalize the things of the flesh while those who are oriented to pneuma are focused on life and peace.

Romans 12:2 pulls together these aspects neatly. Believers present their psuche bodies as a living sacrifice as part of pneumatikos worship. Rather than being conformed to the world system, we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds; that is, re-orienting our lives away from the creaturly passions of the flesh/body that lead to death to re-orient to the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God. This is a picture of our sancitification: our spirit-driven life sacrifices our flesh-driven life as its act of worship and transforms life by the re-orienting of my desire and will toward Christ.

Summary

The New Testament does not see body, mind, soul, and spirit as separate parts of our existence, but as a differentiated unity as seen from a certain perspective.

Body/flesh is an entire human being, seen from the perspective of corruptibility, failure, rebellion, sin, and death.

Psuche is our entire human being, seen from the perspective of ordinary creaturliness, with breath and blood and sustained by food and drink.

Fronaima is our entire being from the perspective of thinking, feeling, willing, perceiving.

Pneuma is the gift of God that enables the elect to respond to God. That response is partial and fraught with struggle while in this body, but pneuma will be our entire humanity in the resurrection.

In Ephesians 4:17-24, we see it described this way. In verses 17-19 we see the psuche-driven life and mind characterized by:

futility...darkened in understanding...alienated from the life of God...hardness of heart...callous...given over to sensuality...greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

But in verses 20-24 reorienting to Jesus enables the elect to live a new way, the the beginnings of the pneuma-driven life putting off the old human existence:

to be renewed in the pneuma-driven mind, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

You Know Your Church Wants to be a Museum When

1. It puts God in a box called tradition.

2. Nothing changes – not worship, not music, and certainly not people – and any change is perceived as a threat.

3. People dress up in period costumes.

4. There’s more concern for buildings and property than people.

5. God’s Word is revered but not obeyed.

“God is not the God of the dead but of the living.” (Matthew 22:32)