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Let us say with Fanny Crosby in her poeticized classic hymn Blessed Assurance. Blessed assurance Jesus is mine oh what a foretaste of glory Divine heir of salvation Purchase of God Born of His spirit Washed in His blood Perfect submission All is at rest I and my Savior am happy and blessed Watching and waiting Looking above Filled with his goodness Lost in his love this is my story this is my song Praising my Savior all the day long this is my story this is my song Praising my Savior all the day long that.

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Should be the song of every believer. Blessed Assurance Jesus. But as we've heard this week, our assurance can increase or diminish over our Christian life. So what can a struggling believer do? That's our topic today on Renewing your mind. Today is our final day in Joel Beeke's Assurance of Faith series and you'll hear him summarize practical steps we can take when our assurance is weak. If you'd like to own this series, request the 11 part DVD set along with digital access when you give a donation before midnight tonight@renewingyourmind.org so what advice is there for those who lack assurance of their salvation or who struggle with doubts? Here's Dr. Beeke.

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Well, I want to conclude this series on Assurance of Faith by just reading for you. Mark 9, verse 24. Straightway the Father of the child cried out and said with tears, lord, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief. Well, I want to wrap up then with a few questions that I'd like to try to answer. Three or four questions. The first is this. I cannot deny that I'm a true believer, but what should I do when I don't feel close to God and I don't feel very assured that I am saved? Well, be persuaded first of all that God wants you to have assurance if you're a true believer. He does not want you to be forever searching for assurance like a hamster on a hamster wheel. He wants you to know who your father is and who your adopting Spirit is and who the Son is, and to rejoice in the triune God of salvation. So what I've been saying all course long is basically 10 things. I'm just going to summarize them for you here. Number one first of all, pray to God that He'll grant you the light of His Spirit, grant you the light of His Spirit, and show you that you belong to God and are saved. Second, spend time with the promises of scripture, particularly those, but not only those that have been precious to you in the past, and pray for grace to rest your soul, to anchor your soul in those promises. Number three. As an outgrowth of those promises, flee to the basics of the Gospel. The basics of the Gospel that Jesus Christ has come to save sinners just like you, sinners just like you, and rest your soul on those basic truths of the Gospel and all the precious truths that accompany the Gospel. Things like God's election, God's care, God's union with believers through his atonement, and Christ's continual effectual intercession over you. Rest in Christ by faith. 4. In dependency on the Spirit, examine yourself by some basic inward evidences of grace. Have I learned to mourn over sin? Well, that's a mark of grace. Matthew 5:3. Do I hunger and thirst after Christ's righteousness? You remember, we used that one several times. 5. Ask the Spirit to bear witness with your conscience through the word of God that you are indeed a true believer, witnessing with your spirit. 6. Use the means of grace diligently, especially as the Westminster Larger Catechism says in question 154, especially the word sacraments in prayer. Seventh, resolve before God to turn from your ungodly unbelief, to flee the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and all worldliness and known sin, and to run the race set before you, laying aside sin and looking to Jesus. You see, if the world is as empty as Christians say it is, and Jesus is as real and full and rich as Christians say he is, how foolish it is to live for this world. If Jesus is real, friends, he's worth everything. Follow him fully. Like Caleb, you will never, ever be sorry. I've been a pastor now by God's grace, for more than 40 years, and I've met tens of thousands of people in my life. I've never met one ever, who said, I'm sorry I spent so much time in the means of grace. Sorry I spent so much time with the Bible. Sorry I spent so much time in prayer. Not one sorry I listened to so many sermons on sermon audio. Not one. But I've met a lot of people that said, if only I hadn't thrown my life away to this world. If only I hadn't sought the Lord when I was young. If only I hadn't wasted 35 years or 50 years or 70 years. You see, it doesn't make any sense not to turn from your sin and to turn to the Lord. Number eight. Remember that your real identity is found in Christ. Romans 6:10 says, Reckon yourself dead unto sin and alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So when Satan comes with his temptation, do what Luther did. Luther says, satan, are you here again? You don't belong here, Satan. If you want to get at me, you have to get my head. My head's in heaven, and you can't reach him anymore. Satan, you're a defeated foe. But you can't get me by coming at me, because I belong to Jesus and he will care for me, you see? Send him to Jesus, because Jesus has already defeated him. Number nine. Consider the solemnity of what the Puritans call the last four things. Death, judgment, heaven and hell. We're all headed there, and we're all going to be there, just with a few more blinks of the eye. Why would you live this short, poor, perishing, temporary vapor cloud like life that comes and goes? Why would you live this life for the worldly things and not prepare for death, judgment, heaven and hell? My dad used to always pray at the dinner table. I must have heard it hundreds of times. Lord, let our entire lives be nothing but a preparation to meet Thee in the righteousness and peace of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what life is all about. And number 10, be comforted by God's faithful track record to you over the years and the decades. Remember me talking about that a bit? God has been good to you all your life long. He's always been better to you than you've ever been to Him. He's got a good track record with you, and for you. Trust him, then cast yourself upon him. He who has been with you this long won't desert you in the end. So take these 10 things. Summarize them in a couple words each. Make a little card of them. When you're tempted to doubt, just read those 10 things again. Question number two. How can I possess assurance when I still so often doubt? How can I possess assurance when I still so often doubt? Well, John Calvin said it is ordinary for believers, even assured believers such as Abraham, David, and Jeremiah, to have doubts at times. Doubt seeks to dislodge faith in nearly every pilgrim traveling to the celestial city at one time or another. But as William Goodge, another Puritan, has pointed out, the presence of doubt does not mean that faith is absent, as David, of course, and the other psalmists make abundantly clear in the Psalms. When we believers doubt the reality of our faith, we must remember that our doubt does not arise out of faith, but out of our flesh's weakness. Hence the cry of the Father of the demoniac, lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief that must be our prayer too, no matter how much assurance we have. Doubt is unbelief, and unbelief is always sinful and the root cause of all sin. So God never recommends or praises doubt. And though his patience with doubters is staggering, he rebukes their doubts. Luke 24:38, 39 for doubt robs him of his glory, and it makes Christianity look weak and ineffective to a watching world. And doubting is dangerous for us because it tends to put our feelings ahead of our faith. It contradicts the biblical teaching of putting right thinking and believing first so that right living may follow. And doubting is also dangerous because it distracts us from serving Jesus wholeheartedly. It denies us answers to our prayers. It robs us of the joy of our salvation. It challenges our bedrock belief that salvation is by faith. Doubt wars against our faith now there are many reasons why believers doubt today. Some of them are physical. Their natural temperament, depression resulting from the cascading of trials, tiredness, exhaustion, depressing burden of serious and painful diseases. Some of the reasons are intellectual. We try to reconcile clashes between the Bible and history. We try to wrestle with inspiration, infallibility of Scripture, with the claims of science. We may doubt because of conflicts between the earth's origins and the creation evolution debate. Sometimes we grapple with making sense of the Bible and suffering. Sometimes we doubt when we try to reconcile God's sovereignty and man's responsibility, or other riddles or the big question, whence evil? But most of the reasons believers doubt are spiritual. The ongoing burden of indwelling sin, the lack of strong exercises of faith, the lack of feelings of love for God, the frustrations of seeing negligible fruits of grace in personal life in a ministry outreach, enticements of a hostile world, the attacks of Satan, the father of doubts. Well, here's two remedies for your doubting. First, address your doubts face to face before they injure your faith irreparably. Recognize the danger of doubt. Confess to God. Confess perhaps to one or two of your closest, wisest, most confidential Christian friends that you're struggling with certain things. Seek counsel from them and go to the Scriptures for a resolution of your doubt. And and other biblical literature and spiritual disciplines. Don't just cover it up. Don't just try to squelch it inside of you. Express it. Express it even when you're alone with God. That's what the psalmist did. The Puritans called it spiritual soliloquy, that you speak to your own soul as if your soul is out here. And you speak to it and you give it counsel in the midst of doubt. Why art thou cast down, O my soul? Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise him who is the health of my countenance and my God. And secondly, let your triune God's work overshadow Satan's work. Trust in your great High Priest. Ask the Spirit for grace to obey Jesus. Words to Thomas. Be not faithless, but believing. Entrust yourself to the Father and his promises, for the Father of all comforts is more powerful than the Satan of all doubts. And to maintain that close personal walk with God to maintain those means of grace, they're so important for our daily sustenance. Well, these things are all critical in our lives. And if after you followed all this advice, you find that your doubts grow worse and become chronic and unrelenting, then I would say to you, before it gets worse yet, go to a wise pastor, biblical pastor, and seek help. Seek good spiritual counseling for your soul's relief, your soul's liberty, your soul's assurance. And it really doesn't have to be a pastor. Maybe you've got a seasoned Christian friend who's very wise. Just be around that friend, talk to that friend, get counsel from that friend. And the best thing to do sometimes is just be around people who are more holy than you are. You know, when Jeff Thomas, one of my best friends from Wales, had his 50th anniversary, my wife and I were privileged on that occasion to be with his family. And all the children and grandchildren were there. And Jeff stood up and gave him a speech, and it was fascinating. And he looked those grandchildren, all those grandchildren in the eye, and he said, now, you know what you gotta do? You gotta go out and find friends who are more holy than you are and be with them and let that holiness rub off. You know, when you're around seasoned Christians who are full of assurance of faith, they take you under their wing and they counsel you. God can use that as a powerful spiritual tool to help you grow in assurance as well. And you can go to them with your questions and your riddles, but most of all, you can become more like them by associating with them. Thomas Watson is one of the most cryptic of all puritans. Succinct. Not all puritans were wordy. Thomas Watson says in three words, a wealth of practical divinity. He says, association begets assimilation. Association begets assimilation. And don't forget to read sound biblical literature. Some people say, oh, I can't read the Puritans. Oh, yes, you can. You start with our Puritan treasures for today, which are all short Puritan books rewritten in contemporary English so that it reads like it was written yesterday. You pick up any one of them. I think we have 11 now. Pick up any one of them. And you know what you decide. Within five minutes you'll decide, wow, this is not fluff. This is real substance, deep spiritual substance conveyed in simple words. And you'll want to read more. By the time you're done reading that series of little tiny paperbacks, you'll want to read the Puritans themselves. Then begin with Thomas Watson. He's very easy to read. Or John Bunyan or John Flavel. And I know I'm a little strange this way, but I want to say to you, I get more spiritual help from my assurance of faith from reading the Puritans, and I've been doing it for over 50 years, than any other spiritual discipline. Now, maybe that makes me unspiritual. I should get more help from reading the Bible, right? But you know what? When you read the Puritans, it's like reading the Bible in many ways, because there's 200 texts sprinkled across every page. And you can look up the text. Don't read fast, read slow. Look up the texts that aren't quoted. Just absorb it, let it sink in, meditate it, pray over it, and you will be greatly, greatly helped. Now, if you're not a believer, I pray God that these lectures will make you realize how critical it is that you become one. And that you realize as never before what you're missing when you don't have this truly joyous assurance of faith. How can you face imminent death, my friend, and eternity not knowing whether you're in Christ or not? Not knowing whether you're going to end in hell or in heaven? Shake off your sluggishness, cry out to God for mercy, and don't rest until you too can say, my Lord and my God. Now, it's important. It's important that you realize that you don't become a believer by looking for assurance first. You become a believer by realizing your sinfulness and your need for Christ. By recognizing that the way to Christ is open for hellworthy sinners. And by casting yourself with all your sins, believing and trusting him alone for salvation at the foot of the cross. Come and welcome to Jesus Christ. That's the title of Joseph Hart's famous hymn, Come ye sinners, poor and wretched, weak and wounded, sick and sore, Jesus ready stands to save you Full of pity joined with power. He is able, he is willing. Doubt no more. Let not conscience make you linger. Nor of fitness fondly dream. All the fitness he requires is to feel your need of him. This he gives you. Tis the spirit's rising beam. Come, ye weary heavy laden, Lost and ruined by the fall. If you wait until you're better, you will never come at all. Not the righteous, but sinners. Jesus came to call. He's calling you, my unsaved friend, right now. Right now. He stands ready to save you. He's willing to save the greatest of sinners. You say, but what if I'm not elected? No, no, no, no. You don't begin with election. George Whitefield said, go to the grammar school of Repentance and faith before you graduate to the university of election. But once you know you are saved, you see, then you can look back and say, oh, I'm saved because he elected me. You see, that's it. Election is not an enemy of sinners. Election is a friend of sinners. If there were no election, no one would be saved. No one would come to God. God draws you. He's willing to be your God. Never, never, never use election as an obstacle for coming to God. The Bible never uses it that way. The Bible says to you, my unsaved friend, whosoever will let him take the water of life freely? Charles Spurgeon says of that text. Does this text exclude you? Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Does that shut you out? No. It includes you. It invites you. It encourages you. Nowhere in the word of God is it written you'll be cast out if you come. Or that Jesus Christ will not remove your burden of sin if you come and lay it at his feet. A thousand passages and promises of scripture welcome you, and not one stands with a drawn sword to keep you back from the tree of life. Our Heavenly Father sets his angels at the gates of his house to welcome all coming sinners. Come just as you are. And having come, then seek to know full assurance as one of life's greatest joys. As one of the Puritans, Thomas Brooks, put it, assurance is glory in the bud. It is the suburbs of paradise. It is a cluster of the land of promise. It is a spark of God. It is the joy and the crown of a Christian. Let us seek it, let us turn to God for it. Let us say, with Fanny Crosby in her poeticized classic hymn, Blessed Assurance, Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory. Divine heir of salvation. Purchase of God Born of His spirit Washed in His blood Perfect submission All is at rest I and my Savior am happy and blessed Watching and waiting Looking above Filled with his goodness Loving lost in his love this is my story, this is my song Praising my Savior all the day long this is my story this is my song Praising my Savior all the day long for of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever. Amen.