The Spirit and Assurance | Romans 8:1-17
Brian Hedges | May 18, 2025
Let me invite you to turn in your Bibles to Romans 8. In a few minutes we’re going to be reading Romans 8:1-17.
For many years, I’ve been a great fan of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who was probably the greatest preacher, expositor of Scripture in the twentieth century. I’ve quoted him many times, told stories from his life many times, in this pulpit.
I’ve been reading here recently a couple of books on Lloyd-Jones, including a biography by Ian Murray, and then a new book that’s just been released that’s about Lloyd-Jones’ doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Lloyd-Jones, throughout his life and throughout his ministry, laid great emphasis on the ministry of the Holy Spirit. He preached often on the various aspects of the Spirit’s work, and especially on the assurance of salvation and how this was a great need for Christians and one of the great privileges that is given to the Christian through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
But I was really fascinated to discover just a couple of weeks ago that there’s this new book on Lloyd-Jones, and it has an appendix with a never-before-published excerpt of Lloyd-Jones’ journals. In fact, it has two journal entries. This probably comprises maybe ten or twelve pages of this book and they’ve never been published before. These date from 1930 and 1931, when Martyn Lloyd-Jones was in his first pastorate in South Wales. He was only about thirty years old. So I bought the book, mostly so I could just read those journal entries. And I was fascinated by what I read.
He was already a pastor; he’d been pastor for about three years. He was regularly preaching. He was seeing God bless his ministry in the church. In fact, there were many conversions and even something of a little revival that took place in that first pastorate in Wales. But three years in, Lloyd-Jones himself was struggling. This is what he wrote. He said,
“I have not a definite assurance of my salvation. I am not full of joy unspeakable. My spiritual life is still one of effort and of striving. I cannot say that the Spirit beareth witness with my spirit that I am a son of God.”
Then he recounts his preaching from the last several weeks, and how he had preached on the need for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, seeing God bless these messages. And he writes, “What then is wrong with me personally? Why do I not know it as a living fact in my own experience, as others have done?”
This is remarkable, because Martyn Lloyd-Jones was not very self-referential in his sermons. This has never been published before.
I was just fascinated to read this; I found it really encouraging to me personally.
I wanted to begin with it for a couple of reasons. There are two lessons that I think we learn from this journal entry of Lloyd-Jones.
Number one, it shows that all great spiritual leaders are just human. They still have feet of clay. They are faced with the same kinds of temptations and doubts and struggles as ordinary Christians. If you ever find yourself—you’re there sitting in the chair Sunday by Sunday, and you wonder, “Do the pastors and leaders of the church struggle the way I do?” The answer is yes. Yes. Even someone as great as Martyn Lloyd-Jones had these seasons of doubt and of struggle.
Secondly, it also shows that someone may be a genuine believer in Jesus Christ and yet have doubts about their salvation and lacking in assurance. I think it’s almost certain that Lloyd-Jones at this time was a genuine believer. He really had experienced a deep transformation in his heart and life several years before. He believed in Jesus Christ, and yet he was still struggling. He was struggling with doubts, he was struggling with his remaining sins, which he names in this journal entry. But he was lacking in a deep sense of certainty that he himself was a child of God.
Assurance is a great need and a great privilege, but not something that all Christians have. In fact, you can be a genuine believer—be saved, born again, eternally secure in God’s eyes—and yet not have an assurance of your own salvation. On the other hand, you can think that you are saved when you’re not. So you can have a false assurance; you think you’re saved when you’re really not.
So how do you know? How do you know the difference? How do you experience a genuine assurance of salvation? That’s what I want to talk about this morning.
So this is the fourth sermon in our series, “The Spirit and His Work.” Let me just kind of summarize where we’ve been the last several weeks.
Week one, we talked about the unbreakable bond between the Son and the Spirit. The work of the Holy Spirit is to point us to Christ, to glorify Christ, to lead us into the truth about Jesus Christ.
Week number two, we talked about the Holy Spirit and salvation. And we saw that the Spirit gives us new life. He gives us new birth by applying to our hearts the salvation that has already been accomplished by Jesus Christ. He does that through new birth as we are born again, and we receive new life and new hope from God.
Then last week, Phil Krause, one of our elders, preached a great sermon on the Spirit and the Christian life. He talked about how we live the Christian life in the power of the Spirit as we walk in the Spirit and we bear the fruit of the Spirit in our lives.
Today, I want to talk about the Spirit and assurance, the Spirit’s work in the assurance of our salvation, and I want us to do this in Romans 8, perhaps the greatest chapter in the Bible. We’re just going to look at Romans 8:1-17, and not even everything in these verses, but I want to begin by reading this passage to us, Romans 8:1-17. You can follow along and your own copy of God’s word or on the screen.
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
“You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.
“So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.”
This is God’s Word.
Now, Romans 8 has to be one of the greatest passages in the Bible, and this particular section of Romans 8 is so full; there’s no way that we can cover everything in it. But lots of sermons have been preached on this over the years. I could recommend to you the volumes written by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, or you could go back into the Redeemer Church archive. A number of years ago, when we were preaching through Romans, I spent three sermons on just those seventeen verses.
Today, I want to take a more narrow focus, and I want to look particularly at the issue of assurance, and I want to do that in three steps.
1. The Possibility and Privilege of Assurance
2. Some Hindrances to Assurance
3. How the Spirit Assures Us
1. The Possibility and Privilege of Assurance
So first, the possibility and privilege of assurance. I just want to establish that it is possible to have the assurance of our salvation and that this is a great privilege that we should all desire and seek after.
Now, you might wonder, is it even debatable whether this is possible? But it certainly is. There are some who would deny that it’s even possible to have certainty that you are really saved and would think that claiming such a thing would be a dangerous thing. This is particularly notable in the Roman Catholic Church. The teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is that you can have hope but not certainty that you are a Christian, and that you must maintain the grace in your heart through the practice of good works. In fact, after the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church believed that the great Protestant heresy was the doctrine of justification by faith and the assurance of salvation. This is what they were so deeply critical of.
But I think when you look at this passage in Romans 8, as well as many other passages in God’s Word, that certainly we see that there is the possibility of assurance. Just look at some of the phrases here.
The passage begins by saying that there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ.” If there’s no condemnation in Christ, that means that they cannot be condemned. They cannot be condemned for their sins. In fact, Paul revisits this theme later in the chapter when he asks, “Who can lay any charge against God’s elect, God’s chosen ones? Who is the one who can condemn? Christ Jesus has died. He’s risen again. He’s at the right hand of God. He is interceding for us.” There is assurance of no condemnation for those who are in Christ.
Then the passage goes on to talk about the freedom that we have from the law of sin and death, freedom we get through the work of the Spirit. It says that those who set their minds on the Spirit have life and peace. It tells us that if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us, that our mortal bodies will also be raised in glory.
Verse 14 says that “all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God,” and then this beautiful passage in verse 15 says that “the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirits that we are the children of God, and if children of God we are heirs of God, fellow heirs with Jesus Christ.”
All of those verses strongly seem to indicate that it is possible to know that you are not condemned, to know that you have the Spirit, to know that the Spirit dwells in you, to know that you are a son or a daughter of God, to know that you are a child of God; and that the Spirit himself bears witness in our hearts to assure us of these realities.
We could add to this those passages of Scripture that speak of the Spirit as a seal and a guarantee of our salvation. We read one of those a few minutes ago in our assurance of pardon from 2 Corinthians 1. You could compare that with Ephesians 1:13-14. Both of those passages speak of the Spirit as both seal and guarantee.
Then, add to that Philippians 1:6, where Paul says, “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” He’s expressing a degree of certainty about the Philippian believers to whom he writes. He’s sure that God will complete the work that he has begun.
Then you have 1 John 5:13, where John says, “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.” He wants us to know that we have eternal life. That’s assurance. It’s not a guess, it’s not a flimsy wish; this is a deep and an abiding certainty.
It is possible to have assurance, and this is one of the greatest privileges that the Christian can enjoy. The Puritan Thomas Brooks called this heaven on earth, and he wrote a whole book on assurance by that title, Heaven on Earth. He said, “To have grace and to be sure that we have grace is glory upon the throne. It is heaven this side of heaven.”
Martyn Lloyd-Jones himself, much later in his ministry, when he’s preaching so much on assurance of salvation and the work of the Holy Spirit, said this.
“All Christian people are meant to have assurance of salvation. God has not only provided a way whereby we can be saved, but he lets us know that he has done so. This is a glorious aspect of the Christian life. The Christian is not meant to remain in doubt and uncertainty.”
This is one of the greatest privileges that a Christian can enjoy. On the other hand, the lack of assurance is one of the hardest burdens that the Christian ever bears.
2. Some Hindrances to Assurance
So why is it that sometimes Christians doubt? What are some of the hindrances to the assurance of salvation? Because not every person who is a genuine believer knows for sure that they are saved, that they have eternal life. What are some of the reasons for that?
Let me just say at the outset, there are lots of reasons. The seventeenth-century Dutch Reformed pastor, Wilhelmus à Brakel, actually examined fourteen different causes of doubt in the life of a Christian. It’s rich stuff, as he shows the way in which the word of God applies to each of those cases. We don’t have time to work through fourteen; I want to give you four that I think are the most common causes of doubt or hindrances to assurance. I’m going to do it in this way: I’m going to list and describe these without really resolving them, and then, in the final leg of the sermon, when we look at how the Spirit assures us, we’ll be back in Romans chapter 8, and I want to show you how each one of these things gets resolved by what the Spirit does. But let’s just look at these four common hindrances quickly.
(1) Number one, confusion about the moment of salvation. This is really common, and I think especially for people who are raised in the faith, they were raised in the church, and they think something like this: “I can’t pinpoint when I actually became a Christian, so is it possible that I’m not a Christian at all?” This is the person who does not have a dramatic “road to Damascus” experience. There’s not a dramatic testimony like a John Newton—once he’s a slave trader and then he eventually becomes a pastor. “I once was blind, but now I see.”
You might think, “You know, I can’t relate to that, because there never really was a time in my life when I felt like I didn’t know anything about God or I didn’t believe in Jesus.” You don’t know what it’s like to go from darkness to light, from death to life, from the power of Satan to the power of God, because you’ve always been in the church and you’ve always really believed. From the time you were a little child you were praying, and so you just don’t relate to this experience. So you hear someone give a dramatic testimony: “I was a drug dealer. I was a drug addict. I was involved in all of this sin, and one day I met Jesus, and my life changed!” There might even be some of you who’ve heard stories like that and there’s something in you that you kind of envy them, because you wish you could look back and you could see that kind of dramatic transformation in your life.
This can be a real problem for people, and I’ll address it here in a few minutes. But suffice it to say that it is possible to lack assurance simply for this reason. You believe in Jesus, you believe the gospel, as best you understand it, you’re trusting in him, you’re trying to walk with him; but you’re not sure, because you can’t see a moment in your life where there was a clear turning point.
(2) Here’s the second reason: guilt over past sins. Maybe it’s guilt over sins that you committed before you became a Christian. So especially if you became a Christian later in life, and your life before Christ was marked by all kinds of immorality. Maybe it was one big sin—maybe you committed adultery. Maybe you sexually or physically abused someone. Maybe you blasphemed the name of God. Maybe you told a terrible lie, or maybe you were a chronic liar. Or maybe you even took someone’s life, and you wonder, “Can God forgive that? Can God forgive that? My sins are so big! They are so huge! They are like mountains looming over me. Is it possible that God could forgive me for those sins?”
Or maybe it’s a sin that you committed after you became a Christian. Maybe you committed adultery as a believer. Maybe you found yourself bound up in some kind of an addiction. You just wonder, “Is it possible for God to remove that burden?”
(3) Here’s a third reason why people struggle with assurance: struggle with present sins. You look at the descriptions of the Christian life that many people write about, even some of the descriptions in Scripture, and you don’t feel victorious. You find yourself ensnared in some way. Maybe it’s an addiction of some kind. Maybe you just feel defeated by recurring sins of anger or lust. There are moments when you repent, there are moments when you’re trying to walk with God, but you find yourself frequently relapsing, going back to the same old thing.
You hate it. You don’t like it. You don’t want to live that way, but you’re struggling to get victory. You don’t feel like you’re living on this higher plane of the fullness of the Spirit and the victory that we have in Christ, and there’s this ongoing struggle, this war. You feel more like you’re living in Romans 7 than in Romans 8, where you want to do the right thing, but you don’t find the power to do it. You find yourself doing the very things you hate.
(4) Then here’s another reason why people lack assurance: when they’re overly dependent on their feelings, their emotions. Maybe there are times in your life when you have felt close to God, but you feel high highs and low lows in your spiritual life. There are times when you feel close to him, but often you feel far from him. You presently have no strong emotions of joy or peace. You don’t know what it is to be filled with joy unspeakable and full of glory, to have the peace that surpasses all understanding. You don’t know that. That’s not your experience.
Because those emotions are not there, you wonder, “Am I even saved at all, to start with?”
Now friends, it is possible that you’re not a genuine Christian. It’s possible…these kinds of struggles. But it’s also quite possible that you are a genuine believer and that these are particular spiritual problems in your life that need to be addressed through the application of God’s word to your heart and life, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
I just want to encourage you right now, if you find yourself in one of these categories or something similar, maybe you haven’t quite hit the nail on the head for you, but you’re lacking in assurance for some particular reason, I want to encourage you that there are answers, that there is counsel that can help you, and that you are not alone in your experience.
One of the reasons I love the history of the church and I love reading these biographies and hymns and the things that give us the record of the spiritual experience of people who’ve been following God throughout the centuries is because everything that we face has been faced in some way or another by somebody before us.
I grew up singing a hymn that we’ll probably never sing in this church, but I want to read the words of it to you, because these words have comforted me at points in my life when I was really low in my Christianity. And this resonates more with me than it will with anybody else, because I remember the tune, I remember the minor notes; I have all that in my head. But the poetry is easy to follow, and I want you to hear these words, because this might be exactly where some of you are right now.
This is by an anonymous hymn-writer, as far as I know, and it goes like this:
“I am a stranger here below,
And what I am is hard to know,
I am so vile, so prone to sin,
I fear that I’m not born again.
“When I experience call to mind,
My understanding is so blind,
All feeling sense seems to be gone,
Which makes me think that I am wrong.”
You see, he doesn’t have the feelings, he doesn’t have the emotions, and it makes him wonder, “Am I even wrong about my spiritual state? Maybe I’m not a Christian at all.”
Verse three says,
“I find myself out of the way [he means the way of obedience],
My thoughts are often gone astray,
Like one alone I seem to be,
Oh, is there anyone like me?”
The isolation this person feels when he feels far from God!
“It’s seldom I can ever see
Myself as I would wish to be;
What I desire, I can’t attain;
From what I hate, I can’t refrain.”
That’s Romans 7. Here’s the person that finds himself doing the very things he hates.
“My nature is so prone to sin,
Which makes my duty so unclean
That when I count up all the costs,
Without free grace, I know I’m lost.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced those emotions. Not every Christian does, but I have. Martyn Lloyd-Jones certainly did. Perhaps you have as well. If that’s where you are this morning, I want you to know you are not alone, and there is help. And the help comes to us from the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit who assures us of our salvation.
3. How the Spirit Assures Us
So point number three, the last fifteen minutes or so now, I want us to look at four dimensions of the Spirit’s work in Romans 8, to see how the Spirit gives us assurance.
(1) Number one, the Spirit assures us by applying the gospel to our hearts. We have to start right here; this is where Romans 8 begins. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.”
There’s freedom here, and it’s freedom that comes from the Spirit, as the Spirit applies the gospel to our hearts and our lives, the gospel that tells us that there’s no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Why is there no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus? Here’s why: because he already took the condemnation! He already took the condemnation, and if Jesus has been condemned for your sins and has paid the debts, that means there’s no debt left to pay.
Listen, if someone paid off my mortgage to the mortgage company, it would be unjust of the mortgage company to keep charging me every month, where I have to make that payment, because the debt would be paid. It’s paid for. The house is mine. The gospel tells us that because of what Jesus did in his sin-bearing death on the cross, that the debt is paid.
That’s why Wesley, in that great hymn we sang a couple of weeks ago, could say,
“No condemnation now I dread;
Jesus and all in him is mine.
Alive in him, my living head
And clothed in righteousness divine!
Bold, I approach the eternal throne
And claim the crown
Through Christ, my own.”
Where does that boldness come from? It comes from the gospel applied to our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
Listen, this is the truth that will help us both with past sins and with the question of not being able to pinpoint when you first became a Christian. This will help you with those past sins, whatever the sin is. If you want to be forgiven, and if you ask God to forgive you through Jesus Christ, you trust in his finished work on the cross, the promise of the gospel is, “He who comes to me I will never cast away,” and, “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ.” “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”
It’s for you. It’s for you. Whatever the sin is—I don’t care if it’s adultery or murder or whatever it is—that sin can be forgiven through the blood of Jesus Christ, not because of your works, but because of what Jesus Christ has done. There is forgiveness in Christ; no condemnation. This will help us with that burden of past sin.
Listen, if you don’t know exactly when you became a Christian, this will help you as well. The question for you is not can you pinpoint the time when you first believed, the question is, do you believe right now? Do you believe right now? Do you believe this message right now? Are you trusting in Jesus Christ right now? If you trust in the finished work of Jesus Christ, then there’s no condemnation for you. That’s a sign of life.
New birth is a mysterious thing. Jesus says in John 3 that the wind blows where it wills. You can’t tell where it comes from or where it’s going; and so is everyone who is born of the Spirit of God. You can’t always pinpoint the moment of new birth. But listen, I don’t remember the moment when I was born physically, but I’m alive! And you may not know the moment when you were born spiritually, but if you’re trusting in Jesus Christ, you are alive in Him, and if you are alive in Him, there is no condemnation for you in Jesus Christ.
(2) Number two, the Spirit assures us by giving us a new mindset. This is worth a whole sermon—Romans 8:5-8. In fact, let me just read verse 5. Notice there’s a contrast here. “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.”
There’s a contrast here, two different kinds of people: some people who live in the flesh, some people who live in the Spirit. And they have a different outlook, a different orientation, a different mindset.
The word that’s used there, it’s a single Greek word, and it actually carries the idea of both the thoughts and the affections. This is not just about beliefs, it’s about desires. It’s your whole outlook. It’s your whole orientation of heart.
Paul here is not even commanding something; he’s just describing. He’s just saying that the one who lives according to the Spirit sets their minds on the things of the Spirit, and to set the mind on the things of the Spirit is life and peace.
Now, in another passage, a parallel passage, Colossians 3, we do get the exhortation, where Paul says, “Set your minds,” or your affections, “on things above.”
How do you do that? Again, this needs a whole sermon, and all I can do is just give you kind of some hints of application here. We’ll talk a little more about this next week, but the Scriptures are central to this, because this book is the Spirit-breathed word of God. So to set the mind on the things of the Spirit is to set your mind on the word of the Spirit. These are the thoughts of the Spirit. These are the things of the Spirit. That means that if you want to grow in assurance and certainty and life and peace and this kind of life that is so characterized by joy in God, you need the Bible, and you need a lot more of the Bible than you’re currently getting.
Almost all of us, myself included, we need more Bible. You need to be reading it. You need to be studying it. You need to be learning it. You need to be meditating on it. You need to be feeding on the word of God. You need a rich and deep devotional life, where these words are like food for your soul, like water to quench your thirst. As you feed on the word of God, there will be a deepening assurance, because you will be setting your mind on the things of the Spirit.
(3) Number three, the Spirit assures us by leading us and empowering us to kill sin. Look at Romans 8:12-14.
“So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”
Now notice the connection to verse 14, which follows.
“For [he’s giving a reason here] all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.”
There’s where the note of assurance comes. If you’re led by the Spirit of God, you are a son of God. By extension, you can say son or daughter of God. You are a child of God if you are led by the Spirit of God.
But what does he mean, led by the Spirit of God? He’s not talking about personal guidance in the sense of, you know, which job to take or which school to go to or whatever. He’s talking about being led in this way of holiness. The Spirit leads us to put to death the deeds of the body, to put to death sin.
So this addresses that third problem, that third hindrance to assurance, a struggle with ongoing sin. Some of you are lacking assurance because of ongoing sin issues in your life. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not a Christian. You can be a Christian and still struggle with ongoing sin, but you are not going to have a deep and abiding assurance, and you’re not going to enjoy the joy of salvation until you deal with that sin.
You deal with that sin by putting it to death, and essentially what it means is you have to go after it. You have to attack it. Jonathan Edwards, New England Puritan of the Great Awakening, in his marvelous book The Religious Affections, says, “It is not God’s design that men should obtain assurance in any other way than by mortifying corruption and increasing in grace and obtaining lively exercises of it. Assurance is not to be obtained so much by self-examination as by action.”
So this is what this means. Let’s make this practical for a minute. If you are struggling with a porn addiction or an addiction to alcohol or chronic discontentment and unhappiness and anxiety and worry; if you are frequently flaring up in fits of anger and you’re hurting relationships in your family; if you have a gossip problem that is wreaking havoc in your work life, your professional life, in your personal life; if you find yourself unhappy because you’re constantly comparing with others and you live in envy of other people who seem to have it better than you do, and so you’re discontent with what God has given you; if you are living in ongoing neglect of all the things that you know you should do but you just you just don’t do—you know you should read your Bible, you’re just not doing it—that’s a sin, that’s a sin of neglect. You know you should pray, you’re just not praying. It’s a sin of neglect.
If you’re struggling with any of those things, this is what you need: you need a battle plan. You need to attack those sins. You need to go to war and exercise holy violence against sin in your life.
In that obedience, as by the Spirit, as we depend on the Spirit and prayerfully, by God’s grace, begin putting those sins to death in our lives, making progress, slow by slow, inch by inch—I mean, this is hard, grueling business, but this is where the Christian life gets really practical. I’m not content to stay the way I am; I want to be what God has created me to be, what God has made me to be, redeemed me to be. By God’s grace, I’m going to pursue that. Even if I’m defeated, I’m going to pick myself up and I’m going to keep going. I’m not going to give up. That’s where it gets real and where it gets practical in following Jesus.
If that’s entirely missing in your life, and if you are able to live in sin, happy, content, don’t really care, “I’ve got my fire insurance card,” that’s actually a really alarming cause for concern. You may not be a Christian. But if you find yourself tormented by these sins, and you want to defeat them, and you want to grow, it’s time to get really practical and tackle those things in your life.
(4) Number four, the Spirit assures us by dwelling and bearing witness in our hearts.
We’re almost out of time, but verses 9 and 11 talk all about the Spirit dwelling in us. But let me just read Romans 8:15-17—such beautiful verses. Paul says,
“For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.”
He’s in our hearts, and it’s by him that we cry out, “Abba! Father.” This is an experiential reality, and I think this addresses the hindrance related to emotions. You and I should not be overly dependent on emotions in our lives. Sometimes they’re there, sometimes they’re not. But there is an emotional dimension to the Christian life. It is the work of the Holy Spirit, who is working in our hearts to bring a deeper intimacy with God.
I love the way the old Puritan Thomas Goodwin describes this. I’ll paraphrase him. Martyn Lloyd-Jones talked about this in his sermons. He said it’s like a father and this father’s child, and they’re walking along the road together. So picture a dad with his five- or six-year-old daughter, and they’re walking along the road together. The daughter knows that the father loves her. But there comes a moment when this father, overwhelmed with love for his daughter, picks her up, and he holds her close to him, and he whispers in her ear, “I love you so much. You’re precious to me. I’m so glad you’re part of my family. You are my daughter, and I want you to know that nothing can ever make me not love you.” And he puts her back down and they continue to walk.
At that moment, she has a deeper sense of the love of the Father, because there’s been an experience of closeness that communicates that. And Lloyd-Jones said that this is possible. This is what the Spirit can do in our lives.
Now, here’s what’s quite interesting. I’m learning this from the journal and the biography of Lloyd-Jones. A year after he wrote that journal entry that I read a portion of at the beginning of the sermon, which included his resolutions to deal with his sins and to read the Bible more and to pray more and all this stuff—almost a year later, he wrote another entry, and it begins in this way. He says, “This date proves that I have failed miserably in the carrying out of what I proposed in the previous pages.”
He’s almost a year further in, and he’s still struggling. But there's a little bit of progress. There’s a little bit of progress, and maybe not even as evident to him then as it is to those of us who can read this in retrospect. By the end of that journal entry, one side of the progress you see is a deeper dependence on Christ. Not so much looking to himself, but depending on Christ.
This is what he says. You can follow this one on the screen.
“I see quite clearly now that the only way to conquer this self is to lose myself in Christ Jesus, my Lord and God. If I but saw him as I ought to, if I but knew him as the saints have always done, if I but loved him as I ought to love him, if I but realized deeply what he has done and suffered for me; oh, then I should love him, and while loving him, I should be safe from all else.”
Well, that kind of dependence on Christ became characteristic in his life. Almost twenty years later—I think it was 1948 or 1949—the biographies tell us (he didn’t talk about this in his sermons), after a time when he was terribly depleted, worn out in ministry, so much so that he was getting medical attention for his physical state, his emotional state; he’s depressed—he spent a week to two weeks, I think, in something like a nursing home, where he’s in convalescence and he’s getting care. And at the end of that time, there comes a moment, unexpected for him, when he just sees the word “glory” in a sermon that he had read. He sees the word “glory,” and all of a sudden he felt like the glory of God filled the room, and he experienced this. He experienced what Thomas Goodwin wrote about. He experienced the love of his father, communicated to him through the Spirit. It was a deep, powerful, emotional experience in his life. This was then repeated again.
It accounts for why, in the 1950s, when he’s preaching through Ephesians, he’s preaching on assurance and addressing these kinds of issues in people’s lives.
I just tell you all this to tell you, if you haven’t experienced the work of the Spirit in your life bringing this profound sense of certainty that you belong to God and intimacy with him and knowing that he loves you and that you belong to him and that you are his and that you have eternal life—if you haven’t experienced that yet, that’s possible. It’s a great privilege. Don’t give up, but be encouraged. Humble yourself before him in honest and humble prayer. Seek to be obedient. Put to death the sins that he brings to your mind. Turn from those sins. Trust in Jesus Christ and cling to him with all you’ve got. And trust that in God’s time, he will bring this deep assurance, this joy unspeakable and full of glory. Let’s pray.
Gracious Father, we thank you this morning for your word. We thank you for the ministry of your Holy Spirit through the Scriptures. We thank you for the testimony of saints who’ve gone before, who have faced the same kinds of doubts and struggles of soul that so many of us face. And they have found that you are a faithful God. We pray this morning that you would show your faithfulness to us, that you would draw near to us in grace, in mercy, the comfort of your Spirit, to bring assurance and hope and confidence and joy and boldness into our lives. Lord, what a difference it would make.
Would you help us this morning to fix our eyes on Jesus and on what he has done for us? Would you make the gospel real to our hearts and our experience? Would you bring change wherever change is needed?
As we come to the Lord’s table this morning, we pray that the table would be for us a means of grace, a time where, as we take the physical, tangible elements of the consecrated bread and juice, they would stir up our minds and our hearts to remember Christ, whose body was broken and whose blood was shed for our sakes. And as we take these elements, may we also feast our hearts on Christ crucified and risen for us.
Lord, would you draw near to us in these moments? Would you do for every individual in this room what they most need? Lord, for those who do not know Christ, would you bring them to saving faith this morning? For those who have been resting in presumption and a false assurance, would you bring a conviction of the real state of their hearts? And then orient their hearts to you to believe in Christ and to trust in him—not in themselves, not in their works, not in religion, but in Jesus Christ himself, and to begin walking with him. To those who are struggling with guilt or ongoing struggles with sin, would you bring the freedom that only the gospel can bring, as your Spirit applies these things to our hearts and to our lives? Would you work in us what is pleasing in your sight, for the glory of Your great name? We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
