“FOREVER.” “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Psalm 23:6. The 23rd Psalm ends with a “period” not an “asterisk”. A period says “done.” An asterisk says, “see below”, and what’s written below in parentheses in small letters sort of qualifies what was written, adds criteria, deflates the certainty with a “however…”, or an “except when…”, or “but…”. Psalm 23 has no such asterisk; it ends with a “period”. Is that how you read it? Do you read, “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” * (except if I fall back into that sin that is my nemesis) Or (But, often I don’t feel it, so I wonder if it’s true) Or, (Well…someone said I may think I am a Christian and get to heaven and hear “I don’t know you”.)? In short, you may be thinking, “I don’t always feel saved, so how can I be sure?” When we struggle with being sure of our status with God, we’re wrestling in the deepest recesses of our hearts with whether or not we’re truly Christians. We look at our feelings about God and recognize that they are all over the place (hot, cold, up down, present, absent – all within 10 minutes sometimes), we look at our hearts and see a mixture of darkness and light, we evaluate our thoughts and watch how we intend to focus on Our Father all day only to be distracted by life and forget until tomorrow, we look at our obedience to God’s instruction and see that it’s spotty at best. When I “pop the hood” on my life to see whether I’m right with God, I’d have to say I’m on shaky ground. And when it comes to the most important question in life, “on shaky ground” is not good. Here's our problem. What we’re doing is looking inside ourselves for something that can’t be found there. We’re “naval gazing”. Looking for assurance inside ourselves. Stop doing that. Ingest this… · You are made right with God (justified) by God’s grace. “…having been justified by grace, we become heirs…” (Titus 3:7). “By grace you have been saved…” (Ephesians 2:5). How is grace applied to you? · Grace is applied to you through faith. “For by grace you have been saved through faith…” (Ephesians 2:8a). (So, do I apply faith like sunscreen, rub it all over, daily, or what? Nope.) Faith is applied to you by One outside yourself. · Faith is a gift from God. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). But didn’t I make a decision to follow Christ? “The truth is, we did decide to trust Christ, but the reason we made that decision is that God had made us spiritually alive. This is part of the good news, God comes to us when we are spiritually dead when we don’t even realize our condition, and gives us the spiritual ability to see our plight and to see in Christ the solution. God doesn’t just come partway to meet us in our needs. He comes all the way. ‘When we were dead, He made us alive in Christ Jesus’ (Eph. 2:5)” (Jerry Bridges, The Gospel for Real Life, p. 119). Why go so deep right here? Because if faith is something “you do”, then it is something “you can undo”. And that’s what you’re afraid of. If faith is the gift of God and God never changes and always keeps His promises, then it is there “Forever” (period). And your status with God doesn’t depend on the monkey cage of feelings, emotions, thoughts, intentions, and directions that exist inside of you – always shifting and changing like a sand dune. Your status with God depends on Him, and He is a Rock. The key to “assurance of faith” is in the Latin phrase extra nos (“outside ourselves”). This is silly but, extra nos sounds kind of like “extra nose”. When struggling with your status with God, don’t “naval gaze”, but look to Christ and let your nose point to the Rock of your assurance. We struggle to be “sure” of our “forever”. But “faith” is the gift of God and He is our Rock. So “in Him” we find our assurance.
