The Inward witness of the Spirit
There is no subject of experiential religion discussed by Reformed Christians as frequently as the issue of personal assurance of salvation. How can I know that I am saved? The apostle Paul writes of the Holy Spirit bearing witness with our spirits that we are the children of God. How does the Spirit do this? There are three sources of this divine ministry of assurance:
1. The witness to our adoption of the Spirit-breathed Word The Bible addresses this theme of our sonship. It has this teaching about adoption, as we have seen. The devil will say to us, ‘Look, a man like you couldn't possibly be a child of God. Only the good, and sincere, and conscientious, and law-abiding, and godly are the sons of God.’ But the Bible says, ‘No. God justifies the ungodly who believe in Jesus.’ The Scripture says to me that sonship does not depend upon works; it depends upon faith in Christ. The Bible says ‘Sinners like you . . . men who believe what you believe, and hang on to God as you do, and respond to providences as you do, are the sons of God. Men who acknowledge that they need a Saviour, they are the Sons of God.’ Rabbi Duncan said, ‘Sin is the handle whereby I get Christ.’ The Bible says that a man whose life is indefensible, who often cries O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me . . . can be a child of God if his trust is in the Lord. That is the witness of God's word.
2. The witness of our own conscious convictions that we are children of God I know that I'm a believer in Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I believe I would die for that faith. If I were to be confronted with the alternative of cursing Christ or being shot, then I would choose the coup de grace; I believe that I would. I hope I will never be tested about this, nor any of you. I know that I pray to God in the name of Jesus. I know that I believe he died for my sins on the cross. I know I love the gospel, and I love to hear the gospel, and I love books about the gospel, and I love the gospel people of God. I know that I don't encourage sin; I am not pro-sin, and I grieve when I do sin, as I do every hour. Now the Spirit's personal witness to me can only be made within that context. It is made in the context of a life that has declared war on sin. It is in that context that I cry, ‘Abba! Father’. So a conscious persuasion has built up over many years that I am the sort of man of whom the Bible says, ‘This is a son of God.’
3. The Spirit’s own witness to my sonship. What the Spirit does is to drive home the message of the Word. He helps me believe the incredible fact that God justifies the ungodly. It is simply incredible. You know that all the structures of hypocritical men rise up against that statement, ‘God justifies the ungodly’ All my pride, and all my egotism resists those words, but the Bible says it, and the Spirit assists me to believe it. He guides me in self-examination, and he gives me grace to understand and see the evidences of God's power and footprints in my life.I am saying to you that there is Scripture, and there is my consciousness, but it is the Spirit that makes the evidence powerful, who witnesses with the Word, and who witnesses with my consciousness, and gives me the assurance that I am a son of God. The Spirit educates and enlightens me in the law and the gospel, and the Spirit creates understanding, but more, he also creates the right affectionate response to the promises and commandments of the word. The blessed man delights in the law of the Lord (Psalm 1). The Spirit can give me joy that is unspeakable at the promises, so I can lie on my face in wonder at God's glories. But the Spirit can create a very different emotional response, as he did in David in Psalm 51. He can also make me cry, O wretched man that I am as the holy commandments convict. All the time he is energising me to believe and obey and respond to his Word as my delight and praise. There is this inner witness to my sonship.
What a privilege a believer has of knowing that he is a child of God, and that he can say to the Creator, "Abba! Father." Do we cherish that? Do we realise that we are the most immensely privileged people in the world? We can talk to God, and instinctively we do so, in all kinds of circumstances. We can lay all our cares before him. You go back to your childhood and you remember how you could sleep on the back seat of the car because Daddy was driving. Your parents did the worrying. If there was a slate off the roof you didn't lose a minute's sleep. You didn't worry about the bills or about the food. It is the same with ourselves and our Father in heaven. We have no right to be torn and divided about things that should be matters of trusting prayer, laid before God and left to our Father to look after - all to our complete satisfaction.
When James Kennedy's daughter Jennifer was about five years of age she picked up the habit of calling her parents 'Anne' and 'Jim'. She heard all their friends come into the house and address them like that, and so she did the same. After a few weeks of this Jim sat her on his knee and said to her, ‘Jennifer, do you know that there are thousands of people in the world who can call me Jim, but there is no other person in the whole world who can call me 'Daddy' except you, and to you, alone, my dear Jennifer, my name is . . . Daddy!’ So it is with us Christians: while being chosen by him is a wonderful blessing, it is even more wonderful that he has predestined us to be adopted as his sons and daughters through Jesus Christ. We can look into this God's wonderful smiling face and we can cry ‘Abba, Father.’ When the Lord Jesus taught his own disciples to pray he said that they were to say, Our Father which art in heaven . . . .