What is assurance of salvation and how can I have it?

Question 7001.

Assurance of salvation is the settled confidence that you belong to God and will not be lost. It is not the same thing as being saved, and keeping those two apart is the first step to understanding the whole subject.

Security is objective and rests on God. Assurance is subjective and rests in you. A believer can have perfect security and very little assurance of salvation, which is why sincere Christians sometimes lie awake wondering whether any of it is real.

Assurance and security are not the same

Security is what God has done. The believer is sealed with the Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance (Ephesians 1:13-14), and nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38-39). That is true whether or not you feel it on a wet Tuesday in February.

assurance of salvation is what you experience of that. It is the conscious enjoyment of a settled position, and unlike the position itself, it fluctuates. Illness, exhaustion, sin, poor teaching and temperament all affect it.

The distinction matters enormously in pastoral work. A believer who confuses the two will treat every dip in feeling as evidence of a lost salvation. I have set out the objective side in what eternal security means, and this article is about the subjective side.

God wants you to have it

Some traditions have taught that confidence about salvation is presumptuous. Scripture disagrees. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life (1 John 5:13). John states the purpose plainly. He wrote so that believers would know.

Hebrews urges us to draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith (Hebrews 10:22), using the word plerophoria, which carries the sense of full conviction. Paul says we have received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry Abba, Father (Romans 8:15). None of that reads like a caution against confidence.

Peter writes that we should be diligent to confirm our calling and election (2 Peter 1:10), which assumes that confirmation is both possible and desirable. The New Testament nowhere treats settled confidence as a danger to be discouraged.

So the assurance of salvation is not spiritual arrogance. It is the intended condition of the Christian, and a believer living without it is living below what God has provided.

Where the assurance of salvation comes from

The first ground is the promise of God. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life (John 3:36). Assurance built here asks a simple question. Have I come to Jesus? If yes, the promise applies, and the promise does not depend on my feelings about it.

The second ground is the work of the Spirit. The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:16). This is an inward persuasion that no argument produced and no argument can quite remove, and I have written on it in the witness of the Spirit.

The third ground is the evidence of a changed life. John’s letter is full of tests. Do you love other believers? Do you keep His commandments? Is there a direction of life that was not there before? These do not create assurance of salvation, but they confirm it.

Why the order matters

Take those three grounds in the wrong order and you will suffer. If you start with evidence, you will find your evidence patchy, because everyone’s is. Start with the promise, and the evidence becomes a supporting witness rather than the foundation.

The pattern in Scripture is always that God speaks and we believe Him. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness (Romans 4:3). Assurance rests on the character of the one who promised, which is why it can survive a bad week.

This also explains why introspection is such a poor route to assurance of salvation. Looking inward for confidence is like checking your reflection in choppy water. Look to Jesus first, and the reflection settles.

Why a genuine believer may lack assurance

Unconfessed sin is the most common cause. Sin does not cost a believer their salvation, but it fouls fellowship and the Spirit’s witness becomes hard to hear. David’s account of the season before he confessed describes exactly that flatness (Psalm 32:3-4).

Bad teaching is the second. A believer taught that salvation can be lost by any serious failure will never rest, because they will always be aware of their failures. Grounding assurance of salvation in performance guarantees its collapse.

Temperament and health are the third, and they are underrated. Depression, exhaustion and anxiety all attack confidence, and they attack spiritual confidence along with everything else. A believer in that condition needs rest, medical help and gentle company as much as they need an argument.

False grounds to avoid

Do not rest on an experience. A vivid moment at a meeting years ago proves nothing on its own, and building assurance of salvation on the memory of a feeling means rebuilding it every time the feeling fades.

Do not rest on comparison either. Measuring yourself against a believer who seems to struggle more than you do is a poor foundation, and measuring yourself against one who seems to struggle less will simply flatten you.

Do not rest on religious activity. Jesus warned of people who prophesied and cast out demons in His name and were never known by Him (Matthew 7:22-23). Busy service is not the same as belonging.

And do not rest on a decision as a transaction you completed. The point is not that you once walked to the front. The point is whether you are trusting Jesus now. A card signed in 1987 saves no one; the Saviour does.

How to recover it when it goes

Deal with anything on the conscience. Confess specifically, receive the promised cleansing (1 John 1:9), and put right what needs putting right. A surprising amount of lost assurance of salvation is recovered in a single honest conversation with God.

Then look at the cross rather than at yourself. Assurance is largely a matter of where the eyes are pointed, and the believer who spends an hour considering what Jesus actually accomplished usually comes away steadier than the one who spends an hour auditing his own heart.

Then go back to the promises and read them aloud. Assurance feeds on the Word, and a believer who has stopped reading Scripture will find their confidence thinning within weeks. Faith comes by hearing, and so does the strengthening of it.

Get back among God’s people as well. Assurance is not only a private matter, and there is something about singing the truth alongside others that reaches parts of us that private reasoning cannot. Isolation is where doubt does its best work.

Then talk to someone. Doubt grows in isolation and shrinks in daylight. Most believers who tell me they fear they are not saved are demonstrating, by the very fear, a concern for God that the unconverted simply do not have.

Assurance and the sensitive conscience

I want to say something directly to the tender hearted. If you are terrified that you have never truly believed, that terror is not evidence against you. People with no interest in God do not agonise about whether they belong to Him.

The remedy for such a person is not more self examination. It is to come to Jesus again, today, simply and without ceremony, and to rest there. Whoever comes to me I will never cast out (John 6:37). That verse has settled more troubled souls than any argument I have ever made.

Assurance for such believers usually grows slowly rather than arriving in a moment. Keep coming, keep reading, keep confessing, keep close to God’s people, and the assurance of salvation tends to settle over months rather than minutes.

So, now what?

Ask yourself the simple question rather than the complicated one. Are you trusting Jesus for your standing before God, or are you trusting something else, including your own trusting? If it is Jesus, the promise is yours and always was.

Then clear whatever is fouling the channel. Confess it, put it right, and stop rehearsing what God has already forgiven. Much of what passes for lost assurance of salvation is simply unfinished business.

Then be patient with yourself. Confidence that has taken years to erode rarely returns overnight, and the believer who expects an instant fix will read the delay as further evidence against themselves.

And take God at His word rather than at your mood. Your feelings will report the weather; His promise reports the facts. Which of those are you going to believe tonight?

I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.

1 John 5:13, ESV