Living the assured life

2 Corinthians 1:15-22

Apprehending and experiencing the assurance, the confidence, of our salvation is intended by our savior God to be our normal spiritual experience and reality. Assurance is an engine for good works in Christ, encouraging us to do and grow well. It is also our rescue and safety net when we doubt, when we sin, when our hearts are bad, when we fail the Lord and question the reality of God’s love and acceptance for us. And it is our shield against the Accuser, Satan, when he hurls the darts of accusation.

There are two major ways, two imbalanced approaches to assurance that can be corrosive to our confidence in our salvation:
1. To be so focused on the list of Assurance verses and their details, to be so
“check the box” oriented on the items of promise themselves, that our
assurance becomes too abstract and impersonal. We can lose experiential
contact with the Persons of the Father, Son and Spirit, and their personal
love, work, sweet intention and acceptance to us. This to our assurance, is
the corrosion of abstraction.
2. To be so caught up in the experience of God, to be so existentially focused on
the experience of our perception and feeling of the internal witness of the
Spirit in measuring our sense of assurance. Here we confuse our own senses
and feelings of moment by moment fellowship with the Lord, and their
natural creaturely waxing and waning (hot/cold, close/distant), with actual
assurance and especially its warrant. We look to ourselves and our
subjective feelings so much that we lose sight of our Triune God and His
promises. This to our assurance, is the corrosion of natural experience.