Transcript

Take your Bibles and let’s go back to Ephesians, Ephesians chapter 2. As I’m taking this time in between expositions of a book to look at some foundational issues, if I’m not careful I’ll never get through because there’s so many of them and because you have given me time to study I’m just amazed sometimes as I go back and look at my resources on these topics of the amount of work that I’ve already got in them. And I’m trying to glean from that and give it back to you. I appreciate the comments so many of you have given me in recent weeks to say this has been helpful. It’s been a great renewal for my own heart.

And I have to remember, though, 20-something years ago, since we went to Ephesians, so many of you were not here. So it’s new material to some degree to so many of you.

But Ephesians 2, verses 8 and 9, we have these words from the Apostle Paul to the church at Ephesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one should boast.

I’ve been reminding you the last few weeks as I’ve thought back on foundational things in the growth and the reformation of this particular church, and the different things we purpose to go to the scriptures and to church history, and try to get ourselves more closely aligned. And there was a lot of work over several decades to see these developed here. Never in perfection, but substantially on track by the grace of God.

First one would be true membership. Secondly, competent leadership. Thirdly, corrective church discipline. Biblical conflict resolution. Biblical counseling. Having a biblical theology, and then having a Christ-centered, biblically sound music program, a renewal in the biblical role of women, a maturing in biblical love, which Jesus said, if you don’t have that one for another, all your doctrine doesn’t matter. We have far too much today of folks preaching sound doctrine without the emphasis of living out the love that doctrine should produce in our hearts. Personalized strategic world missions, what a journey that was. The biblical role of the pastor regaining or reclaiming the scriptural definition of a pastor’s role. And so foundationally to us, every member ministry through small groups — but as I said before — none of them were more consequential than what I’m building on in this series of messages, and that is true conversion, true salvation, true evangelism. Just what is that? Just what does that look like? And I told you when we came to Ephesians 20 plus years ago and preached through it, These were not new doctrines to us, but this is like driving the nails in the coffin of man-centered, hoop-jump, easy-believism, and getting back to a richer biblical understanding of what is true conversion.

We left the days of baptizing a person three or five times by the time they were 20 or 21 years of age because they kept looking for a different angle, a different hoop jump or type of activity they must do, quote, to be saved. When the Bible doesn’t speak of those angles or those activities or those rituals you might perform, those activities you might perform in order to be converted.

First of all, we looked at that faith is a gift from God. This text makes that exceedingly clear. For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, implying the whole of salvation is not of yourselves. It is the gift of God. And we know both our saving faith that gets you on the salvation roll is the gift of God. And also your serving faith, the faith you draw on to use your spiritual gift to minister to one another in the body of Christ, that is the gift of God. We owe him for everything. We’re indebted to him for absolutely everything.

But now we move over to Roman numeral two, and that is the assurance of salvation. And I call this that faith is the assurance of salvation. Did you get that? Faith is the assurance of salvation. Paul simply writes, for by grace are you saved, here it is, through faith.

The possession of faith is the assurance that God has saved us. God has put us in Christ.

Now, There are kind of two sides to this coin, biblically speaking. On one side of the coin, for some reason, I pictured two mules pulling a plow. And one mule says, saved forever, eternal security, once saved, always saved. The other mule pulling alongside is, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. One of those is your justification. The other one is your sanctification. But that second one is also your assurance of salvation. You are not saved by your works or by your activity, but it helps assure you. of your standing in Christ.

So let me sub-point here, A, talk about the presence of faith. How does that faith arise in your heart? Where does it come from so that we might gain assurance by recognizing that this faith resides within us? I read about a physician, an eye physician, ophthalmologist, And he had learned how to perform a surgery that in some cases could damage or rather repair the damaged nerves of the eye and bring visual sight to one who was completely blind. On this occasion, he was performing this surgery on a younger man who had two beautiful little daughters, but the man had never seen his daughters. And he often remarked how he would love to see his little girls in beautiful dresses. And that surgeon went out on his own and got those two little girls, the dresses, put them in the dresses, brought them into the man’s room, and on the day he removed the bandages, had those two little girls there. And when he took the bandages off, it was blurry at first, but then the light began to come. His eyes, for the first time, reacted to light, and he saw before him, for the first time, his little girls.

” That’s faith. That’s a good illustration of faith. You see, the man didn’t learn to see. He did no activity to see. The surgeon did it all. His eyes just responded to the stimulus that was there before him. This man did not trust in any works or any new vitamins or any new health regimen. He just trusted in the surgeon and he could see. That’s where faith comes from. It’s something of a mystery. Someone else does it for us, but we know the time when we begin to sense and see truths, realities that are only seen and embraced by faith. Like that man brought in that light for the first time, so faith brings in and discerns the light of God’s truth for the first time. The possession of faith. If your heart stopped suddenly, and if you stopped breathing suddenly, and fortunately, someone nearby knew artificial resuscitation, and they begin to form those resuscitation procedures on you, and then finally, you took the first breath. Literally, you came from a place of death to life. That’s faith, that’s salvation. It’s when you take the first breath, that’s faith. There’s a moment in time when there is the response to God’s work under the teaching or preaching of the gospel, where for the first time, the light comes on. Maybe not brilliantly bright, but the light comes on, and you begin to see the truth, Christ, who he is, and what he can mean for you in salvation.

In John 15:26, Jesus says, When the Holy Spirit comes, he will testify of me. He will bear witness to you of me. He will reveal me. Has the Holy Spirit of God come into your heart so that the light is beginning to come on so that you see Christ? Not just an intellectual grasp of the details or facts about Christ from the Bible, but the truth that Christ is for you, your salvation. That’s faith. It’s the possession of faith. And seeing that evidence of faith is what gives you the only true assurance of salvation.

1 John 5:10 gives us some insight here. John writes and says, the one who believes in the Son has the witness in himself. He’s kind of saying it backwards from what you might want to say it, not correcting the scriptures. But if you have the Holy Spirit in you, witnessing to you about who Jesus is, then you’ll have belief in the Lord Jesus himself. But it takes the Spirit coming inside of you and giving you that.

Then he has this sort of paragraph, intersection part in the middle here. The one who does not believe has made him a liar because he has not believed in the witness that God has borne concerning his son. God comes in the person of the Holy Spirit and bears witness concerning who Jesus is. And you can’t know who Jesus is. You can’t rest and rely on Christ as Savior if the Spirit has not come in and enabled you. to grasp that.

Then the last phrase of 1 John 5:10, and the witness is this, that God has given us eternal life, you could say, and the faith that leads to eternal life, and this life is in His Son. So in other words, this witness, this Holy Spirit comes in, and He shows you, He reveals to you, He convinces you who Jesus is, and that’s your faith. It’s the gift of God.

How does all this work? I don’t know. Jesus did not care to explain it, so I’m not going to try to. Jesus told Nicodemus, well, Nicodemus, you must be born again. Nicodemus says, how do I do that? He said, well, Nicodemus, it’s like the wind. Well, Jesus, what do you mean it’s like the wind? Well, the wind blows where it wills. You don’t know where it’s coming from. You don’t know where it’s going, and that’s how everyone is who is born again.

I’m not going to give you some sort of silly, unbiblical hoop jump for you to grab hold of to make you feel better. I want you to wrestle with, do I have the evidence of the faith that only the Holy Spirit can give a man? So there’s that aspect of, I know for sure I’m resting in Christ, but at the same time, never losing that, I am striving to work out my salvation with fear and trembling. as my faith enables me to keep walking on.

Why are you still here in this building, in this church, on this day, after all these years for some of you? Because your faith will not let you go. Now, it’s good to take a vacation. It’s good to be away. Jesus took 11 breaks from people so he could get some rest, keep his heart in line with the Father’s will. There’s a place for that. But you get away for a little while and something in you says, I’ve got to get back. I need that. That’s who I am. Those are the people I belong with. That’s your faith that God put in there. So the believing of faith reveals that the Holy Spirit is in you. The witness, the Holy Spirit is the one who reveals Christ.

Listen now, so there is no activity that I must do to find the assurance of salvation. No activity. Okay, pastor, what is it? Can I do this or this or what little hoop jump, what ritual can I perform, be a part of, partake of that can assure me that I’m gonna get to heaven? I don’t have any. I have something better than that. I have the infinite, almighty God in the person of the Holy Spirit witnessing to you in your heart.

Now, we do have an activity that God performs in our hearts that does assurance, but it’s not an activity that we perform to gain assurance. Now, I’ve used this in several messages. It’s the basis for one of our counseling books for seekers. I’m going to revisit it briefly here, and that is there is this activity of God in a truly saved person’s heart that brings them assurance.

I’m going to put this under what I call the Amen of Faith. You’ve heard that before, haven’t you? I like to use that phrase, the Amen of the Holy Spirit or the Amen of Faith. Amen means I agree. That’s right. I’m with you on that. Amen. So the Holy Spirit is in you, actively witnessing to you, Bible word, actively testifying to you, Bible word, actively convicting or convincing you, Bible words, of certain things. And as he is actively convincing you in your heart of certain things, that is your assurance that you’re his.

So this newborn nature, that God put in me. Now listen to me, this newborn man that’s in me at conversion naturally agrees with the Holy Spirit’s conviction and testimony in my heart. Now, to complicate things, there’s the old man still there, and the old man still loves the world, the old man still loves the flesh, the old man still likes the values of this present age, but increasingly, I don’t like the old man, and increasingly, I love more the new man. That activity helps me know I have faith. That activity of increasingly disliking the old way, the old me, and loving more the new me is the evidence, an activity in me, if you will, that assures me that I belong to God.

So I’ll call thee the biblical evidence of saving faith. We’ll hit on these rather quickly. Again, they’re used in other places, but it fits so perfectly here. are the amens of the Spirit in our life that we can draw from a balance of biblical truth. But before I say that, let’s be done with analyzing your life to see if you might have performed the proper rituals, i.e. works or activities that might save you. Stop that. but instead look for biblical evidences of saving faith, the work of the Spirit within your life.

So Christianity, you see, is not a new approach to life. Christianity is new life. The mysterious surging of a new reality that comes inside of you Jesus called it being born again. Paul writes it’s being alive in Christ. And I’m not afraid. I’m 100% convinced, Dr. Seale, that Baptists and evangelicals have boiled this down to a simple hoop jump. We’re not looking for people to see if they might have evidence of new life. We’re asking them, did you do the deal? Did you perform the activity? That’s not biblical. It’s just not there. I’d rather you wrestle a little with it, struggle a little with it, and go blazing into heaven when you die than give you some simplistic extra biblical concoction of an activity or hoop jump whereby you might feel good for several years down here, but you won’t make it up there. This has been the plague of professing Christendom all through the centuries. And unfortunately, Baptists and evangelicals have fallen in often to the same kind of error.

So we’re not looking for just a new approach to life, but we are looking for, do we possess new life? Do we have the Amen of the Holy Spirit actively working in us? And one way to know that is, what does your heart say to you during the preaching of the word? What does your heart say to you when you’re having a Bible study or small group study or your own personal study?

Now, actually, we give the Amen to the Spirit’s witness of the Bible truth. But I just generally put it as the Amen of the Spirit because unless the Holy Spirit illumines, makes real, testifies of the Bible truth, you can’t give the amen. But when you give the amen, that’s evidence God’s at work in your life. You must belong to Him.

In 1 John 5:12-13, he who has the Son has the life. He who does not have the Son of God does not have the life, because that’s what we’re looking for, is the one who has the true spiritual life of God in him. Not just he did this or he did that. An hour coming, and now is (John 4:23) when true worshipers must worship the Father in spirit and in truth. In other words, he’s bringing them out of the Jewish external cold legalisms. Not just that you did all the things the Jewish law requires, but a true worshiper, Jesus says, is the one who has the Holy Spirit. He worships in spirit and in truth.

Now, here’s some of these biblical evidences of saving faith.

Number one, I see and feel the weight of my sin. Would you say that’s generally the pattern of my life? It’s stronger and weaker. Man, brother Jeff gets up there and yells at me and I feel like a sinner again. That’s not all bad. Matter of fact, that’s what I experienced when I opened the Bible. We see afresh that there is this triune holy God that is infinitely pure and infinitely righteous and infinitely good and all holy. And we continually see ourselves before him as undone and unclean and worthy of his wrath and judgment. That’s an evidence. That’s the spirit witnessing to you that this is true. And something in you might say, oh me, but at the same time it says, amen, I believe that. That’s true even of me. It seems that I’m seeing more of the darkness of my heart. It see that I’m seeing more my ever-present lust to disobey God. That’s a good indication that the life of God is in you. That’s a good assurance that you belong to him. He’s not witnessing to people those type things who are not his. He only tells his children these things.

My sins are a burden to me. I’m beginning to loathe them. As one Puritan father stated, the sins which my flesh loves, I hate. Did you get that? In one sense, I wanna be careful, I don’t wanna be misquoted, but in one sense, you’ll always still love sin. until you get your glorified body. That’s what your old body does. That’s what the old man does. But once you’re saved, you begin to love God more. Paul talked about that in Romans chapter 7. Pulled this way, then pulled that way. Pulled this way and pulled that way. Aren’t you glad he takes out a big old club and whacks us when we almost go too far and wreck our marriage or wreck our home or wreck our ministry? Thank God for whack-a-preacher, whack-a-mole, whatever it is, whack-a-church member. I don’t do that. God does that. He’s whacking some of you right now. I see and feel the weight of my sin. That is the activity of the Holy Spirit giving you evidence, assurance that you’re his.

Number two, I see my need for Christ. Yeah, I need him, but it’s kind of like this. I might get lazy and get some doldrums, but generally the trajectory should be I see more and more that I need him as my prophet. I realize more and more I’m stupid and only he is all wise. I realize more and more this whole world and all of its teaching, philosophies, and values are ridiculous and unwise, and only he is all wise. I need him as my prophet.

I’m seeing more and more that he and he alone is my priest. I know it’s true, but more and more I’m realizing and resting on the reality that only he can connect me to a holy father. There’s nothing else that can cause me to stand in a right standing before a holy God but Jesus. I see my need for him and it’s growing. I need him as my prophet. I need him as my priest and I need him as my king. I’m seeing more and more that I should bow before him. I should hallow him. I should honor him, love him, submit him as my king.

Number three. Ken to that one, there’s kindled in me a flame of love for Christ. I love Jesus. You have put me in a bondage, a glorious bondage of preparing and praying and studying the text and decades probably wouldn’t be too strong of a word, but We had significant criticisms and corrections and enunciations and scandalous things said about what we believe and what we do. And so it caused me to pour myself with energy into studying the text because like the early Puritan fathers, if we’re gonna be persecuted for this, we need to be right. I don’t wanna be persecuted for a bunch of man’s ideas. I told John O. Simms one day, and he’s quoted it back to me a million times. He said, one day you told me, Brother Jeff, if we’re going to suffer, and we’re going to suffer in the ministry, you’re going to suffer in life. We’re going to suffer. We might as well suffer for the truth. Isn’t that good? I don’t say many profound things. That one might be close. If suffering is going to come, praise God, let’s suffer for what matters.

But there’s kindled in me a flame of love for Christ. And the more I study, the more I learn of him, the more I love him. And that’s why I want to pour over this and pour it into you so that your love for him and your treasuring him is more today than it was last week and last month and last year. If I come by your deathbed and I’ve said something like this to you a thousand times, I don’t wanna hear I did this, I did that, I did what you said, preacher. I want you to look at me and say, pastor, I love Christ. I love him. And I’ll go out of that room where you’re about to take your last breath with hands held high and say, praise you, Lord Jesus. How precious. He has something nobody can give or take away.

Number four. Increasingly, I find myself hating what God hates. I find myself hating what God, in other words, I keep growing in my contempt for this world. 1 John 2, 15, do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. And John’s not writing it, boom, moment you’re saved, bingo, all your love for everything but Jesus is completely gone. Now, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? That led John Wesley to an errant teaching on a second blessing. You get this second blessing, and you become perfect, and you quit sinning. Boy, I wish that was true. I’d ball it up and give every one of us a quart of it. Doesn’t work that way, though. But the trajectory, the witness of the Spirit in me that gives me assurance I’m His is that I do increasingly grow in hatred for the things that God hates. And he hates Satan, and he hates this world, and he hates this world system. We look at what men value, what people give their energies to, and the priorities of their lives, and we realize God’s not the center of it, and it grieves us.

And like the psalmist, one of the things that we hate that grieves us deeply is the false professions out there, the counterfeit Christianity that’s out there. At the psalm, it said in Psalm 119, 113, I hate those who are double-minded. They say one thing, but they don’t really love my God. I hate it when they take the name of my God and mix him up with a lot of man-energized, man-devised systems, rituals, churchy things, instead of giving them the truth. I hate that. Double-minded. Believe one way, but actually live the other.

In contrast to that, the fifth thing, the fifth evidence that gives us assurance, I love what God loves. Boy, that begins, are you listening to me? That begins with the people of God. I always have to give a clarification here. I don’t mean every church and every congregation, because in so many churches and so many congregations, they’ve packed their churches with unsaved people. People who don’t know Christ, they know the system, they know being a good Baptist, they know the sacraments and the rituals and the ordinances, but they don’t know God.

And so you go into those congregations and there’s usually some people who really love Jesus and praise the Lord for that, but there’s a lot of people who don’t. And it’s hard to love them with the kind of love, well, it’s impossible to love them the way God enables a true Christian to love another true Christian. You do love them, but it’s not the same. And that’s why I tell you I’ve seen that love quotient, that spirit raw love element grow in this congregation over these decades as I think we have grown in the percentage of people that truly love and know Christ. And it’s just beyond discussion. It’s just wonderful. to love those people.

Listen, Jesus died because he loved his church. Therefore, we will love his true church, his truly converted ones that belong to him. I know that we’ve passed out of death into life because we love the brethren. I’ve often told you there are people that, humanly speaking, you wouldn’t hang out with. Humanly speaking, you don’t have anything really in common with them, but you get in church, and you open your Bibles, and you pray, and you see that humility and that love for God, and you say, you know what? But I love them. That’s an evidence. That’s the Holy Spirit in you, testifying that you should love other true believers.

Number six, the Spirit helps me in Bible study and prayer. Can I make a confession to you? I don’t always enjoy, as someone said, as a pastor, you have to get pregnant every Monday and you have to deliver that baby the next Sunday, then you got to get pregnant again. Well, I will say this, if you’ll work hard, young preachers, if you’ll work hard in those early decades, you will have an enormous reservoir of things to draw from in the final decades. But nevertheless, it’s hard to get started sometimes. Small group leader, do you just wake up on Monday morning, hot dog, hallelujah, get out the word of God, I’m getting to teach it again this Sunday. Not always, sometimes maybe, not always. But here’s what you find. When you do it, it starts speaking to you again. It starts becoming alive again. It starts refreshing your soul again. And then for a preacher, it becomes alive in your study. And then God, by his Holy Spirit, hopefully brings it alive again in the delivery.

He helps me. Prayer. How many times do you start praying and it’s just cold rote doing it? But the more you pray, the more your heart gets warm. You start cold, but you end with a warm, joyous spirit. That’s evidence that the Holy Spirit is speaking to you. that you belong to God.

Number seven, and these aren’t empirical or absolute, you might gonna have 12, you might could round these off or reduce them down to five, but the principle is what we’re talking about. But number seven, I look forward to his return. The more I walk with him, the more I learn of him, the more I serve him, the more I look forward to seeing him. The more I look forward to be stripped of my sinfulness and clothed in his righteousness. I look forward to his return.

I’m not saying you have all of these at equal strength or whatever, but generally speaking, these are some good biblically based evidences that the Holy Spirit is in you and he’s bearing witness to you. He’s the one that enables you to have these type desires and these type feelings. So this kind of activity within you is the activity you work for, look for, for assurance. You don’t look for some activity you do. You look for the activity he is doing inside of you.

It’s not the activity of Jewish legalism. It’s not the activity of observing the Roman Catholic system. It’s not the activity of observing the Church of Christ system. And unfortunately, it’s not the activity of many Baptist and evangelical systems we’ve developed that are not even mentioned in scripture. It’s not necessarily repeating a prayer, that may be fine, but that’s not enough to know if you’re truly converted. It’s not just the activity of walking down an aisle to the front of a building. It’s not just the activity of taking the preacher’s hand or filling out a card or raising your hand when the evangelist says, if you want to be saved, raise your hand.

And do you remember the tomato steak? That was taught to me early on as a Christian. If you doubt your salvation, you just pray and say, Lord, Jesus, I ask you to save me, and I believe you saved me. And you go outside, and in your yard, maybe somewhere next to the house with a lawnmower, you drive a tomato stake in the yard. He said, that’s my tomato steak that reminds me I’ve asked Jesus to save me, and that gives me assurance of salvation. That makes me wanna spit. That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in all of my life.

Holy Spirit of God or tomato steak? What’s your assurance? Are you with me, church? Now, look, I want to be kind. I did that for a while, and I realized I just can’t keep doing this, and some well-intending good people have done these kind of things, but it’s simply wrong. I cannot promise you heaven based on a tomato steak in your shrub bed, but I can if you will look for the witness of the Spirit in your life.

Verse 9, John 2:8-9 “for grace are you saved through faith. That’s not of yourself. It’s a gift of God”. Here it is not a result of works so that no one may boast. No place for you to say, wait a minute, I asked Jesus to save me. I did something. I walked to the front. Anytime you start with “I”, it’s over. The evidence of saving faith I see from the scriptures is in my life. Not perfectly, but at least the germ, the seed is there. So an abiding, active faith is the assurance of salvation. And all of it is the gift of God. We are stripped of all boasting. There’s no ground for boasting when it’s all of grace. It’s a free gift.

Romans 4:2-3 reminds us, for if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. What does the scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

Just a few key thoughts, and we’re through. Here’s a key truth to remember. It’s not new from my lips. It might be new to some of you, but not to many of you. In true essence, we are not saved by faith. Though that’s the channel, we are saved by the object of our faith. Quit analyzing your faith and analyze the object of your faith. Whoo, that’s good stuff. If Satan can get you to analyze your faith, he’s going to always find a little quirk, a little weakness here, a little weakness there, but he ain’t going to find no weakness in Jesus. There’s no weakness in him to save you.

Sometimes you have to fall on your face before this holy, wonderful, perfect, never failing Savior and say, my faith is weak, but oh Christ, you are not. And that’s what I hang and pin my salvation on. Not on my works, not on my goodness. It’s all of you. We’re stripped of boasting. We’re not saved by faith, but by the object of our faith. Our faith has no intrinsic merit or worthiness. It’s the object of our faith that has intrinsic merit and worthiness. Christ alone is the meritorious agent of our salvation. God saves us not on the worthiness of our faith, but on the worthiness of the one in whom we believe. We are saved by grace alone. And therefore, God’s not in debt to us.

Now wait a minute, Jesus, I prayed that prayer, you owe me salvation, you’re in debt to me. Wait a minute, Jesus, I went to the priest, and I performed the mass with the priest, so you’re indebted, I did what you told the church fathers to do, so you’re indebted to me for salvation. Wait a minute, preacher, the badness of madness, if I just raised my hand and tell Jesus I wanna be saved, I’m sorry, I did what you said, so you owe me, you’re in debt to me, you owe me salvation. Wrong upside down thinking. God’s not in debt to you. You’re saved. It’s settled. You’re in debt to him. You’re in debt to his grace and his love, his faithful covenant provision for you.

Romans 4:4 simply states, “Now to the one who works, the wages are not credited as a favor, but as what is due”. That is what is payment of a debt. If you did some sort of work that you think is going to help get you saved, and you perform that work well, and you look at God and say, now you owe it to me, you owe me a debt, then okay, then quote, according to your little system, then God’s in debt to you, you did the deal and you’re going to heaven. But If you, as the text says, now to the one who works his wages, not credited as a favor, but if you’re one who’s believed that it’s all an unmerited, gracious, loving favor from God to me that I’m saved, then it’s not the concept of I did the deal. I performed the activity and God’s in debt to me. No, we’re always simply in debt to him. Do you know the name Robert Robinson? Probably not because he lived from 1735 to 1790. But you do know something about him. Robert Robinson was a contemporary of George Whitefield, the great Calvinist Methodist evangelist who was one of the key instruments in the Great Awakening that shook Europe and shook the 13 colonies of America, whereby thousands and thousands of churches were started.

Wish we could have some of that evangelism today, amen? When you like for an evangelist to come to town and where we got X number of churches, we got double that many three years later because of the people who are genuinely saved. And by the way, these evangelists knew nothing of the systems we use in modern evangelism today. No walking to the front, no repeating a prayer, none of that stuff. Because you don’t have to do that stuff if God saves you. In other words, to gain assurance, you don’t have to do any of that stuff if it’s truly God who does the work.

But anyway, George Whitefield was preaching when Robert Robinson was on the earth. And during his early years, Robinson was a heathen. He was a member of a gang in downtown London. a bunch of hoodlums. And he heard that this renowned Methodist evangelist, George Whitfield, was preaching at one of the big coliseums in London. And he and some of his gang members said, we’ll go down there and we’ll mock these pitiful Methodists under the preaching of George Whitfield.

You know what happened. Robinson came to faith in Christ, gloriously converted, got some training, and later began to preach. pastored a rather large Baptist church in Cambridge for many, many years. And at the age of 23, he gave us a hymn that still blesses us today.

Come thou fount of every blessing.
Tune my heart to sing thy grace.
Every word in this matters.
Streams of mercy never ceasing
call for songs of loudest praise.
We’re indebted. We owe a debt of praise.
Gratitude, do we not?

Jesus sought me when a stranger.
Sovereign grace, all the favor, all of God.
Wondering from the fold of God.
He to rescue me from danger
interposed his precious blood.
Here it is. Oh, to grace how great a debtor.
Daily I’m constrained to be.
He to rescue me from danger
interposed his precious blood.
Oh, what a truth.

But we’re in debt to Robinson. We’re in debt to all of our forefathers, but far, far more. We’re in debt to our Christ who saves us.

Do you have in your heart, not imperfection, but clear abiding evidence of the witness of the Spirit showing you these things I’ve described from the scriptures because You must not, you must not wait to the end of your life and look back to something you did when you were six or nine or twelve. You must daily and weekly look to God again and say, oh God, show me afresh the evidences that I am one of yours, that I possess the witness and the saving faith of one of yours.

Very true, that one mule is eternal security, once saved, always saved. But that second mule pulling that plow says, work out your salvation with fear and trembling.