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To say it as simply as possible. If you spend little time alone with God and little time alone with His Word, you shouldn't expect large dosages of growth in assurance because you're not using the book that the Holy Spirit uses to grow you.

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For every believer, there are times we can feel distant from God. We begin to lag in our spiritual life. We start to lose interest in spiritual things, and if it goes on too long, we can even wonder if we were ever saved to begin with. This week on Renewing youg Mind, Joel Beeke joins us to help us think through the question of assurance. How can I truly know that I'm saved? These messages are from his practical and theological series Assurance of Faith, and we'll send you the entire series on DVD along with digital access to the messages and study guide when you make a donation today@renewingyourmind.org so how can we cultivate assurance in our lives? Here's the Chancellor and a professor at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Joel Beeke.

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I'm reading from the Westminster Confession of faith, chapter 18.3 this infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it. Yet being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation, in the right use of ordinary means attained thereunto. And therefore it is the duty of everyone to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure, that thereby his heart may be enlarged in peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, in love and thankfulness to God, and in strength and cheerfulness in the duties of obedience. The proper fruits of this assurance so far is it from inclining men to looseness. Well, obviously the text I'm going to read with this, because it's embedded in 18, paragraph three, is 2 Peter 1:10 brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure for if you do these things, you shall never fall so chapter 18, paragraph three of the Westminster Confession really deals with five things, right in order. It deals with the relationship of faith and assurance. It deals with the time involved in attaining assurance, the means to attain assurance, the duty of pursuing assurance, and then the fruits produced by assurance. You have an opening line about the relation of faith to assurance, then followed by timing, means, duty, and fruits. So first, then, the relationship of faith to assurance. This opening line of 18.3 has caused a lot of ink to be spilled by scholars, and it says this, this infallible assurance doth not sole belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it. So here's the debate. Does 18.3 mean to say that assurance is altogether separate from faith? Or does it mean to say that full assurance is something different from the seed of assurance that is in faith? And I would argue the latter when it says this infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith. But that a true believer may wait long before he be partaker of it isn't saying that in faith itself there's not the seed of assurance. There is faith never doubts. So faith has a seed of assurance in it. It's like an acorn. And that's the way one of the Puritans compared it. Actually. He said, when you look at an acorn, is that an oak tree or is it not? Well, if you're meticulous, you're going to look at it and say, yes, in a sense it is an oak tree, because everything in the oak tree is in that acorn. But someone else will come along and say, you know, come on, that's ridiculous. I know an oak tree when I see it. That's not an oak tree. So the Puritans wrestled with this and what they said was this. In every exercise of faith there is the seed of assurance like a little acorn. But that acorn is not yet an oak tree. So assurance belongs to the well being of faith, because assurance is like the full tree. So there's not a total separation there. But when the Puritans spoke about assurance of faith, they were talking about the full oak tree, not about the little acorn. That's the simplest way to explain away that debate without falling into heresy on one side or on the other. Now, what about the time involved, the time involved in attaining assurance? 18.3. A true believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of assurance. Now remember, we're talking about the full oak tree. Now. We're not talking about incipient insurance in the beginnings of faith. All believers have that. So what they're saying is that ordinarily before a believer is a robust believer with full assurance of faith. And all those fruits we heard about at the beginning of this course, that usually takes some time. An infant does not usually grow up in one day. So grace usually grows with age. And as faith increases, other graces increase as well. Now that's not to say that's not to say that in the Bible and in Puritan thinking, some beginning believers don't display a lot of zeal. When you first find Christ, you're full of what the Puritans used to call first love. And you have all kinds of zeal. And you may have a certain excitable kind of assurance at the beginning. And as you move along in your spiritual life and you realize that indwelling sin still remains in you, you may actually lose some of that excitable zeal. And so the more we grow in strength and stableness in the faith, said Richard Sibbes, and the more we are refined in the faith, the more our assurance will normally grow. So in the ideal form of the Christian life, we should be growing in assurance all our life long, so that when we become older, we be seasoned Christians, full of assurance of faith. Thomas Brooks said, assurance is meet for strong men. Few babes, if any, are able to bear it and digest it. Charles Spurgeon said that some young believers make a great mistake by expecting ripe fruit upon a tree in early spring. And because that season yields nothing but blossoms, they conclude the entire tree to be barren. And you see, that's a mistake that can bring barrenness on our soul. When we don't have seasoned assurance right away, we can conclude, oh, well, it must not be the work of the Lord when it really is. You remember the blind man that was healed in John 9. At first he didn't see things clearly, did he? Saw men as trees walking, but yet he said, I know I was blind, but now I see. But as he became a little more seasoned in the further dialogues, you could see already the maturity coming in his thinking. Now, that does not mean to say, however, that age and experience guarantee assurance. Nor is it impossible for God, in rather unusual cases, to give large dosages of assurance to beginning believers. We're speaking not about exceptions here. We're speaking about the general rule of thumb. Normally, believers grow in assurance as a season in grace. Then Westminster addresses the means of assurance. This is a very important point. It goes on to say this being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given to him of God, the believer may, without extraordinary revelation. That's again against Roman Catholicism. And then here come the key words in the right use of ordinary means attain to assurance. The right use of ordinary means. Now, what are they? Well, they're the spiritual disciplines, of course, and there are probably about 15 of them if you want to detail them all. But in the Puritan mind, there are four major means or spiritual Disciplines that we must use to grow in assurance. The first is, of course, as you would expect, the Bible, God's word, both law and Gospel, precept and promise. The Bible, read the Bible, heard the Bible, believed and obeyed the Bible, memorized and meditated on the Bible, prayed and sung, is God's primary road to holiness, to spiritual growth, to assurance of faith. That's why Peter says, desire the sincere milk of the Word that ye may grow thereby. So if you would grow in assurance, you need to read the Bible habitually, memorizing it, searching it, meditating upon it, living it, loving it, listening to sermons based on it. You need to compare Scripture with Scripture. Proverbs 2, 1:5 sets before us several principles for personal growth. Teachability, receiving God's words, obedience, storing up God's commandments, discipline applied to the heart, dependence, crying out for knowledge, perseverance, searching for hid treasure, to say it as simply as possible. If you spend little time alone with God and little time alone with His Word, you shouldn't expect large dosages of growth in assurance because you're not using the book that the Holy Spirit uses to grow you. Let me give you a poignant example of that. In my own life, my bags were packed once. I was going to do a conference in San Francisco, about to leave in 10 minutes for the airport, and one of my elders called me and he said, I've got a real problem. He says, God has abandoned me. I'm a reprobate. I fear I'm a hypocrite after all, and my very prayers are an abomination in his sight. I need to come and see you. I go, oh, brother, I'd love to see you right now, but I'm just leaving. I'll come and see you as soon as I get back, three days from now. Meanwhile, in those three days, I want you to spend a half an hour alone with God. 10 minutes reading the Bible, then move to meditation. The Puritans call meditation the halfway house, by the way. The halfway house between Bible reading and prayer. 10 minutes meditation and then 10 minutes in prayer. Oh. He said, I can't do that. I said, you must do that. He said, no, I can't. It's an abomination to the Lord. I said, if you don't do it, it's a double abomination to the Lord. You need to do this. When I got back three days later, there was a little note on my chair that said, no need from the secretary. No need to talk to Mr. So and so. All is well with his soul. He just needed to get back in the Word. I never even had to visit him. If the Bible is to get into us and grow our assurance, we must get into it. Spurgeon said it the best backsliders begin with dusty Bibles and they end with filthy garments. To neglect the Word is to neglect the Lord. But when you read the Word, as Thomas Watson put it, as a love letter is sent to you from God normatively, you will grow in assurance. Especially, said Watson, when you think in every line you are reading that God is speaking to you these particular words, the Spirit will bless it, to warm you, to transform you, and to assure you with his power. And so there's a difference, isn't there, between just reading the Word? In our Dutch circles, we do, we read the Word after every meal. There's a difference between reading 5, 10 verses after every meal and studying the Word. I think the Dutch custom is good, don't get me wrong, but to really meditate on the Word, digest it, chew it, ruminate on it, that's what's important. That's what helps us with growth in grace. And so it's good to have a good Bible with good notes. I use the one that we produced, the Reformation heritage KJV study Bible, all solid, good Reformed notes. And as I read it, I look at the notes and I meditate on it, and the notes help me reflect more. And then each chapter ends with a section on thoughts for personal and family worship. And so I read those and I think about those. Well, then when you go to pray, you can pray better, and you've got the main takeaways from the chapter and you can digest those and chew on those. So a good study Bible like that will help you immensely in growing in assurance. Richard Greenham, one of the Puritans who wrote an entire book, it's a short book to be sure, on how to read the Bible, said, we must read the Bible with more diligence than men are digging for hidden treasure. And he says that diligence makes rough places plain, the difficult easy, and the unsavory tasty. Now then, you need to meditate. You need to meditate to help augment assurance. Meditation helps prevent vain and sinful thoughts. It helps provide inner resources from which you can draw. It serves as a weapon against temptation. It provides relief in afflictions, and it glorifies God. And then, of course, you need to put into practice what you read by praying about what you're reading and by sharing with others about what you're learning. And by pursuing consciously, holiness. A second means is, of course, the sacraments. They're designed to assure us God's sacraments complement His Word. It's interesting. The puritans often speak of sacramental assurance, not because it's a different kind of assurance than we get from the Word, but just because we get that assurance through the sacraments. So each sign in the sacraments, the water, the bread, the wine, all three direct us to believe in Christ and his sacrifice on the cross. So the sacraments are spurs to Christlikeness and therefore to holiness and to assurance. Now, Robert Bruce, one of the very early Puritans, put it this. While we do not get a better Christ in the sacraments than we do in the Word, there are times when we get Christ better. So what he meant by that is we get the same Christ in the Word and the sacraments. But because in the sacraments, God comes peculiarly low to us and involves all five of our senses. So we smell the wine, we taste the wine, we touch the bread, we see the elements, we hear the Word that comes to us. As the elements are being distributed, all five of our senses are involved. And God comes so low. And he says, as surely as you eat this bread, as surely as you drink this wine, so surely when you put your trust in my son alone, I will wash away all your sins. And when we believe that promise, as we sit at the table of the Lord, our assurance can grow. And then thirdly is prayer.