Dear friends, we've considered this afternoon a very difficult and challenging subject, our greatest confidence, namely assurance of faith. And we've looked at why this assurance is important. And then we examined in some depth the three major grounds for assurance. And we saw that the major Foundation of assurance rests in the promises of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. That is, in the Gospel itself. And that as we believe by the grace of God in that Savior as our only hope, that we grow in assurance as the cream of faith coming to the surface and we more and more know that this Gospel is true also for me. We saw that that assurance is buttressed also by the reflect act of faith, when the Holy Spirit enables me to look back in my past life and see marks and fruits of grace that He has worked, that neither Satan would have worked in me, nor I would have been able to give myself. Then we've seen that there's also a third possibility for buttressing assurance namely, a direct testimony to the conscience by the Holy Spirit of the Word of God. And I promised you that this evening we would consider the next two and the final paragraphs of the Westminster Confession of Faith on this glorious doctrine of assurance by looking at how we grow in it and how we lose and regain it. How we grow in it, 18.3, and how we lose and regain it, 18.4. So let's read now from 18.3, the cultivation of assurance, or how we grow in it. This infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it. Yet, being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation, in the right use of ordinary means, attain thereunto. And therefore it is the duty of every one to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure. that thereby his heart may be enlarged in peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, in love and thankfulness to God, and in strength and cheerfulness in the duties of obedience, the proper fruits of this assurance. So far is it from inclining men to looseness." Now basically what you have here as Anthony Burgess Remember, we're looking through his writings, using the Westminster Confession as a grid. What you have here, as Anthony Burgess points out, is four items that help us learn how to cultivate assurance. The first issue is the time involved in attaining assurance, he says. A believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties. Second is the means of attaining assurance. Third, the duty to pursue it. And fourth, the fruits produced by it. So we want to look at each of those for a bit this evening. First of all, concerning the issue of time, Anthony Burgess says that God is free and sovereign. is able to plant assurance at the same time as he plants faith. And indeed, sometimes he does. He says that God doth to new converts also many times discover the love of his espousals to them, because they are most tender and need it, being much oppressed with sin. He goes on to explain that just how a parent is sometimes very tender to the youngest child and reassures the very youngest and neediest child of His love, so God sometimes gives great measures of assurance temporarily to the very youngest in the flock, reassuring them. Now often, later on, that young child grows up a bit and will lose some of that assurance before he or she regains it in additional depth. But generally speaking, Generally speaking, the Westminster divines say, assurance takes time. God works it by degrees, so that the believer's doubts about his own salvation diminish in a parallel fashion as he grows in grace. The more he learns to rest on Christ, the more his heart goes out to the Gospel, the more he sees that Jesus is all and in all The more joyful he is, not only, but also the more assured he is. And the more the doubts will decrease. Now, the beautiful thing here about the Westminster Assembly is that they said God's normal way to increase appreciation of Jesus and assurance is to use conflict. Isn't that interesting? Not a smooth path, but conflict. A believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it. So as Burgess points out, God's normal way, God is of course free, but God's normal way is to bring a believer into conflict and doubt and trial to mature his faith. It is to say, Assurance usually follows on the heels of intense spiritual warfare. Assurance wears battle scars, as one divine put it. It engages. It's the fruit of engaging in spiritual warfare. Burgess writes, this privilege of assurance is given to those who have been a long time acquainted with God, much exercised in His ways, and have endured much for Him. There's a seasoning process that goes on, you see, in which I get seasoned in faith. It doesn't mean I have to be old to have assurance. That's Roman Catholic doctrine. No, you can be seasoned and mature as a pretty young person in the ways of grace. Age is not the critical factor. But as we grow in experience of the Gospel, and as God brings us through trials, and we learn in the midst of trials, More than we do in the midst of prosperity, don't we? We learn to trust in Christ alone. We learn that only in Jesus is our strength. We grow in assurance. So think of it this way. If you are a believer, look back in your past life and ask yourself this question. Where would I be without any problems, disappointments, Trials are impossibilities. Sicknesses. Cross providences. Let's put it another way. Where would I be if everything in my life went my way? As soon as I prayed, I got an answer. All the time. You would be a spiritual infant. And probably a spoiled one at that. You see, it's a little child, six months old, that cries for mommy and mommy comes. It's the one-year-old that can't handle it if mommy has to go to the store and wails and weeps because mommy's out of sight for a few hours. He's afraid mommy will never come back. What would you think of a ten-year-old who every time his mother walked out of the house would weep and wail and carry on? Something's wrong with this child. He's not acting his age. You see, it's like that in spiritual life. We begin as infants, and as infants, you see, we live by sight. And as soon as God is absent for a moment in our consciousness, in our feelings, We begin to weep and wail spiritually that we've lost God, that we're not a believer after all. And one day we feel a little closer to God. We have hope. The next day we don't. And we don't have hope. And we go up and down and up and down. But as we grow up a little bit, we learn to walk more by faith and less by sight. And the way God teaches us to do that is He brings us into difficulty and trials where we can't see Him. We can't see His hand helping us. We can't feel the answers to His prayers. When I was nine years old, my dad took me on a trip from Michigan all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean to pick up my grandfather who was coming from the Netherlands on the boat. And we went through Pennsylvania. which I didn't know at the time, through the Appalachian Mountains, has some very long tunnels. I'd never been in a long tunnel in my life, and we got in this tunnel and it was just completely dark, and I couldn't see the end on either side. And I said to my dad, Dad, is this tunnel ever going to end? Oh yes, he said, son. In a little while, you're going to see a pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel. As we get closer, the light will get bigger and bigger, and then we're going to break out into sunshine. And, of course, that's what happened. Now, what God does is He brings us into these dark tunnels, where we can't see the sunshine of His grace, where He seems to be pushing us away with one hand. But as He does so, with the other hand, as Peter says, He's silently strengthening us with strength in the innermost soul, and He's drawing us. And it's a mystery to us. We can't explain it. But in the midst of darkness, in the midst of tunnel, in the midst of conflict, in the midst of cross-provenances when things don't go our way, somehow we cling to Him more than we ever did before. And we learn to walk by faith when we can't feel His hand, we can't feel His touch. We learn to trust Him the more. And then the day comes when He delivers us from the trial. And we break out into the sunshine of His grace. And we look back and we understand then that we have grown spiritually. That we've learned to put our confidence more in God and less in ourselves. And in that very process, you see, we're beginning to grow in assurance as we grow in faith. But then comes another tunnel. And we hadn't expected it. Just like in the Appalachian Mountains. When we got through the first tunnel, I said to my dad, that was a very long tunnel. I hope we don't have to go through another one like that. Before I knew it, there we were, into another tunnel. And another long one. But we came out again. And another one, and again we came out, and another one, and again we came out. Nine tunnels, long tunnels. But every time we came out, by the end of the ninth one, I was quite confident when we went into a tunnel, we would come out. I had more confidence, more assurance that it was okay to be in the tunnel. And you see what God does. He brings us in tunnel after tunnel after tunnel until we lose all our righteousness and all our possibility. And we learn to lean more and more on God in the midst of darkness. And we learn the beauty of that wonderful text. I think it's in Psalm 139. Darkness and light are both alike unto Thee, O Lord. And the end result is we grow. We grow in assurance through trouble. and through trial. Well, that's what the Westminster, I believe, has in mind when it says, we conflict with many difficulties before we be partaker of it. Secondly, 18.3 speaks about the means of grace. Not only the timing, but the means of grace pursued to reach greater degrees of assurance. God doesn't only use difficulties. and tunnels, so to speak, but he also has means that he provides us, that we must be diligent to use, that Westminster divines say, that help us strengthen faith and thereby grow in assurance. Now, there was a point in my life where I learned a lot from a single statement of John Owen, the great prince of the Puritans. At one point in his writing, Owen says this, Wouldst thou enlarge thy degree of assurance? And my heart said, Yes, Lord. Then Owen said something that astonished me. I expected him to say, Well, enlarge thy experiences. But he didn't say that. He said, Enlarge thy ordinary use. rather than the extraordinary experiences of the means of grace. Do you understand what he's saying? If you want to grow in assurance, he's saying take the ordinary means of grace, like studying the Bible. Study it more. Study it diligently. Put time into the ordinary means of grace. Put time into prayer. Put time into meditation. Think on the things of God. Use the ordinary means of grace. And you see, that's what 18.3 says as well. It is the duty of everyone to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure. By the ordinary means, you see. In the right use of ordinary means, without extraordinary revelation, you may attain thereto. Well, that was a real eye-opener for me, because I had been trained that assurance came by extraordinary revelation. And I didn't know when I was young that that's actually what the Roman Catholics believed. That you need some kind of extraordinary revelation as you get old, and then you will get assurance. But the Westminster divines, the Puritans, say no. And in our tradition, the Dutch tradition, the Canons of Dort also say no. Head 5, Article 12, states plainly that you get assurance through the ordinary means of grace and not through extraordinary special revelation. And in both cases, both here in Westminster and in the Kansas door, the reason why they add that phrase, not by extraordinary revelation, is to say the Roman Catholics are wrong. God assures his people, friends, through this book, the Bible, after something added to it. So, what are you to do? You are to use the ordinary means of grace thoughtfully, prayerfully, diligently. What does that mean in practice? Well, it means, for one thing, that you must be in the Scriptures. You see, you're not going to grow much in assurance, maybe temporary increases, but you will retain those levels of assurance if you're not in the Scriptures. Now, Sabbath, church attendance, of course, can help a great deal. But the Sabbath day is one day in seven. And the Sabbath can do a great deal for us. The Puritans actually called it the market day of the soul. It's like going to market. You store goods for the week. So, you go to church, you listen well, you store goods. So, church attendance is a very important means, too, for growing in assurance. But, if you really want to grow in great measures of assurance, you need to buttress church attendance with a habitual usage of the Word of God. And the Puritans were fond of writing sometimes entire treatises on how to read the Scriptures. Richard Greenham, one of the early Puritans, has a whole treatise on how to read the Bible. He says you are to read it diligently. You are to be like a man, he says, that digs for his treasure. Treasure in the Bible. Diligence, he said, makes rough places plain, the difficult easy, and the unsavory tasty. So you're reading. You're looking. You're searching. You come across a promise. You plead that promise. You read it slowly. You read it prayerfully. You don't have to read it as if you're reading it publicly. Read one verse. Pray your way through that verse. Read another verse. Pray your way through that verse. And the man and the woman who stays close to the Scriptures, generally speaking, ordinarily the divine say, will grow in assurance. Now, what so many of God's people do, unfortunately, is they just turn to their favorite spot. How quick we are to turn to the Psalms. How quick we are to turn to a few of Paul's epistles. Or maybe the Gospel. Maybe you have a favorite Old Testament prophet. But you see, God gave us, as J.C. Ryle said, God gave us a whole Bible to make a whole Christian. And those usually grow, most in assurance, who use the whole Bible, who read it systematically and immerse themselves in it and study it. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. Now, when we read the Bible, We need to approach it with reverential fear. We need to approach it with a sincere desire to learn about God. We need to approach it with a presuppositional faith, as it were, in the Lord Jesus Christ. Coming with an attitude that God is going to speak to me today. This is God's living Book. And when I open it, I am to understand that God is speaking to me. That's an awesome thing. But you know, the Reformers and the Puritans talk, both when you read the Bible at home and when you hear it preached in church, insofar as the minister is faithful to the Word of God, God Himself is speaking to you. You know, Kelvin put it so beautifully. Kelvin said, in every sermon there are really two ministers. He said, there's an external minister who stands behind on the podium, behind the pulpit and speaks to you. But the internal minister is the Holy Spirit who takes the word and like a hunter shooting a bow, he takes the arrow and as the words go out, the arrow goes directly to that heart to which the Holy Spirit designs it. And that's why the Word of God, if you're a believer, you know that experience. Sometimes it's just as if Well, as if you're the only one in church and the minister is just speaking to you. That somehow God designed that sermon just for you. Well, that's the double ministry in effect. The earthly minister and the spiritual minister coming together. Well, so it is in reading the Bible, you see. You are the reader, but as you read, the Holy Spirit, not all the time with equal power, but the Holy Spirit As you diligently, prayerfully study the Scriptures, He'll speak to you. He'll guide you into truth. He'll teach you the things of Jesus. He'll help you grow in assurance. Now, what some people do is they say, well, I wish I had assurance. And you say to them, well, are you in the Word? They say, no. It doesn't make sense. It's like me saying to you, if you said to me, I want to get wet. And I'd say, well, go stand in the rain. And you'd look outside and say, oh yeah, I suppose that would make me wet, but I think I'll stand. I wish I were wet. I'd say, go stand out in the rain. If you want assurance, you read the Word of God prayerfully, diligently. This is the book through which God gives it. Secondly, we don't only need to read the Scriptures, we need to be meditating about the Scriptures. Meditation is the greatest lost spiritual art of all the means of grace today. I won't trouble you with this because I don't have time tonight to go into much detail, but I have written an entire article in my book, Puritan Reformed Spirituality and the Puritan Art of Meditation. What I concluded was, I had 61 books around me by the time I was done with the article, all written by Puritans about just about how to meditate. Teaching people in the pew how to meditate on the Word of God. It's the last time you heard a sermon on how to meditate. We've lost that art. We're so busy. And then we wonder why we don't have assurance when we're so busy running here and there with all kinds of things. We'd be far better off if we wanted to grow in assurance, cutting out non-essentials in our lives and giving more time to meditation. And basically how the Puritans did this, just very, very briefly, is they would go to prayer, first of all, then they would open the Scriptures, they'd read a chapter, and they would pick out a subject from the chapter they read, and they'd focus that subject on their minds, And then they'd memorize that verse. And then they'd maybe sing a psalm or two in relationship to that verse. Then they'd begin to meditate about the sermons they heard about that verse, or books they've read about that verse, or how that verse relates to the experience of their lives. Maybe it's one attribute of God. Maybe it's the subject of providence. Maybe it's the subject of death. They'd pick out different subjects and meditate and bring everything they could think of in their mind to bear on that subject. And then they would ask How can I use that subject in my daily life to be more godly, more spiritual? And they would think that through. And then they would pray over it again. Pray for application. And then they would sing again before they would leave their time of meditation. Sing aloud to themselves something that was suitable to that particular subject. Well, meditation, you see, helps make a believer strong. fiber into a spiritual diet. It helps us have a disciplined mind. It helps prevent vain and sinful thoughts. It provides inner resources on which to draw. You know, one thing that often has struck me about these books of prayers that our forefathers sometimes wrote, when I read those sometimes, I just sit meditatively and read them because I love to see how our forefathers had such a gift at prayer. And what I notice, whether it's Spurgeon prayers, or William Jay prayers, or Benjamin Jencks prayers, or Edward Bickerstaff's prayers, I notice that their prayers are almost entirely an interweaving of Scripture. They've learned to think so scripturally that when they pray, they naturally link one text to another. They bring back God's Word to him. And God's Word is sure and certain, you see. And it gives assurance. in the soul, when we can come with the Word of God, with authority. And you get that through meditation and memorization of the Word. The Spirit has to bless it, of course, but that's what He normally does when we focus on the Word. So those Christians who learn to meditate, who are mature in meditation, often find relief in afflictions because they're prepared for afflictions. They know how to meditate. in relation to afflictions. And they also glorify God more than the non-meditative Christian. Because they think deeper. They give God the glory. They see a primary cause behind everything that happens, lying in God, rather than secondary causes in circumstances around us. You see a mature, assured Christian, when something happens to him, the first thing he says is, I wonder what God is saying through this to me. It's God. It's the Lord speaking. So there's that quiet confidence in relationship to everything that happens, that God is the primary cause. Well, you don't just get that one day and wake up with that. That comes through months and years of being immersed in the Scriptures and meditating and letting the Scriptures fill your mind and your heart and direct your thoughts and your actions and your words. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. So we need to be better meditators on the Word of God. Another important means that is mentioned here is the sacraments. The sacraments. You know, sometimes when we form circles, we underestimate the sacraments. Rome, of course, exaggerates them. We need to understand, of course, in the sacraments that we don't get a different gospel than we get in preaching, do we? We get the same gospel in the sacraments. But Robert Bruce put it this way so helpfully. While we do not get a better Christ in the sacraments than in the Word, sometimes we get Christ better. Because the sacraments have a peculiar design to them. The Word preached is to Plant faith and strengthen faith. But the sacraments have only one purpose. To strengthen faith. To seal faith home. And so when God hands us the bread through the hand of the minister, He's saying to us, as surely as this body of My Son is broken for you, all your sins are forgiven. I do this for you, that you might remember Me. and the forgiveness of your sins in my broken body." So the sacraments are intensely Christ-centered, aren't they? The water in baptism symbolizes the blood of Christ. The bread, broken bread, symbolizes His body offered as a sacrifice. The wine symbolizes His bloodshed. So we focus on Jesus in the sacrament. And as we focus on Jesus, our assurance grows because the Lord uses the sacraments to assure us. As surely as He went to the cross, so surely that poor trembling sinner who comes, who trembles at the Word of God, who fears the Lord, he shall gain an assurance as he sits at the sacrament and as he receives that truth in his heart, sees it visually. As surely as I eat this bread, so surely He has died for me. That's a wonderful thing. In fact, our forefathers, many of the Puritans, called this sacramental assurance. It's not a different kind of assurance. It's not different than the kinds we talked about this afternoon. But it's just they gave it its own name because it's so common for God to assure His saints in the sacrament so that they grow in conviction that He is theirs and they are His. Then another means, of course, is important in growing an assurance is prayer. And you expected me to say that, of course, because it's not only God talking to us that is important for assurance, but also us talking to God. If you have a relationship with someone and they do all the talking, your relationship can only grow so far. Isn't that true? You need to respond. Well, God comes to us. It's a two-way communication. He comes to us through the Word, the Word preached, the Word taught, the Word read, and we go back to Him in prayer. And we bring back in prayer, as I mentioned a moment ago, His own handwriting. And God is tender of His own handwriting. It's sweet to Him to read and to hear His own handwriting. And God uses that to help us in this two-way communication. to help us be more assured that He is really speaking to us and we are speaking to Him. Now that doesn't mean it's easy work. Sometimes prayer is very hard work. You know that. Sometimes it's sweating work and you get nowhere. And you get off your knees and then you go back on your knees again and you try again and you don't seem to have contact. And you get up again and maybe you go back a third time and finally it seems that you get some contact. It seems that your prayer finally goes above the ceiling. And then you press on in prayer. I'm speaking now of secret prayer. And finally, there are times, aren't there, where it seems that you do establish contact in a very real way, that you say, I have reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. And you have communion with Him. And how reassuring that is. Oh, how sweet it is to be able to unbosom your whole heart to the Lord. That too fosters assurance. I love what Octavius Winslow said, or rather, his mother said to Octavius Winslow. She said, son, when you go to pray in private, tell the Lord everything about you as if He knows nothing about you, yet knowing at the same time that He knows everything about you. Unboose Him your whole self. Tell Him everything. Tell Him your sins. Tell Him your need. Tell Him your desire. Tell Him that you lack assurance. Ask Him. Praise Him. Thank Him. Confess to Him. Supplicate to Him. Now that doesn't mean you need terribly long prayers. But it does mean, if you want to grow in assurance, that you can't just have a prayer of one or two minutes a day. That's not God's way of communication. I wonder what my wife would think of me if I said, you know, I want to be a really good husband to you and I'm going to spend one and a half minutes with you a day. She'd say, what kind of a husband are you? What kind of communication are you affording me? If we can just get by with talking to God minimum amount, what does that say about our spiritual life? No wonder we lose assurance. And Martin Luther, who normally prayed two hours a day, had a very busy day coming up. He said to his right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon, he said, Philip, I have so much to do tomorrow. I need to pray an extra hour. And what happens to us when we're very, very, very busy? Our prayer time goes like an accordion. It goes down. And you know why? Well, because we view prayer as an appendix to our lives. But the Reformers and Puritans viewed prayer as their life. This was their life. John Bunyan put it this way. He said, you can't do more than pray until you pray. You can do more than pray after you pray. But you can't do more than pray until you pray. Prayer is foundational if you want to grow in assurance. Prayer is a valuable thing. I once visited one of my parishioners. I visited her many, many times in the hospital. She had all kinds of sicknesses. And one time she was in great pain, great pain. I prayed with her. I was about to leave and I shook her hand and I said, I just wish I could do something more for you. And she said, Pastor, I must rebuke you. She said, you just did more for me than the doctor could do for me. You prayed for me. You see, part of our problem of lack of assurance is that when we get down on our knees, we don't believe we're really praying to the living God. If we really prayed in our prayers, we'd have less trouble with assurance. The King James Version has that so beautifully in James 5 in the marginal notes. It says, Elijah prayed in his prayer. You know, we have so many prayers where we don't pray. Not really pray. But when you truly pray, you pour out your heart to God. With your bad grammar, your stumbling words, that's alright. The Lord knows the sincerity. You come with the words you have. You pour out your heart to God. How do you feel when you're done praying, if you can really pour out your heart to God? You feel closer to the Lord, don't you? And you have a greater level of assurance, don't you? Because you had contact. So, men ought always to pray and not to faint. Well, there are more. means as well. And let me just mention one or two quickly in passing, then we'll move on. One other important means, I believe, is to read and listen to good sermons. Either sermons written in the books by the Puritans and others, or tapes or something, but to feed your soul throughout the week on the precious truths of the Word of God. You have to know your own heart there. If you get a lot more out of sermon tapes than you do out of reading books, well, put on sermon tapes. If you're like me and you get a lot more out of reading books, it's better to read a book. And what I try to do is I try to look at that area of my life that I feel is suffering the most. It's my conscience, for example, becoming desensitized to sin. Well, then I might pick up The Plague of Plagues by Ralph Venning or The Mischief of Sin by Thomas Watson. I need a fresh dosage on my conscience of the heinousness and the insanity of sin. Or perhaps sometimes it seems that my love to Christ might be waning a bit. Well, I pull out The Suffering Savior by Krumacher or Thomas Goodman's Christ Our Mediator or Isaac Ambrose's Looking Unto Jesus and I focus on that. And as I come across these Christ-centered texts they quote, I look up the text in the Bible. Take my time reading. And let the Scriptures about Christ sink into my soul. And I regain some of my assurance. Yes, this precious Savior is precious indeed. And the more precious I feel Him to be, usually the more my assurance will grow in Him as well. If I feel afflicted and downcast, I read Samuel Rutherford's letters. If I'm buffeted with temptation, I read Olin's Temptation and Sin. If I want to grow in holiness, I read Flavel's Keeping the Heart. If I'm lacking assurance, I read Ryle's Book on Assurance or Thomas Brooks' Heaven on Earth. You see, you have to be a little bit, you know, a little bit, you have to be a doctor, a doctor of your own soul, a physician. I say, where's the sore spot? Remember, the sore spot is you go to use means to take medicine for that disease. Be it a book, be it a sermon, or be it those chapters of the Bible. If you're suffering from lack of assurance, you'd want to go study Romans 8, wouldn't you? Of course you would. And you ask the Lord to make it as medicine for your soul. You see, too often people look at assurance and they say, Oh, well, I don't have it. It's too bad. I feel so bad I don't have it. But they don't do anything about it. And you see, 18.3 says, therefore, it is the duty of everyone to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure. And you do that by using the means. The ordinary means, 18.3 says. Two or three more briefly. Fellowship with believers. Many of God's people grow by leaps and bounds in assurance. If they go to what we call in our churches, mothers and fathers in Israel, exercised, experienced children of God, and sit at their feet and say, tell me, how did you find assurance? How did you grow? And get advice from them. Now, one caution there. Don't ever, ever, ever say, well, if they experience it this way, I have to experience it that way too. Then you just put yourself in more darkness. God is free. And He doesn't lead any two of His children exactly alike. But you can learn a lot from other believers. Thomas Watson said, association begets assimilation. If you want to be more holy, you go spend time with holy people, don't you? You learn from them. So fellowship with believers is very important. A Christian who tries to live in isolation from other believers will become defective. God didn't make us to be lone rangers. God made us to believe in the communion of saints. And then, of course, you have this whole thing that the Puritans called Sabbath-keeping, sanctifying the Lord's Day, spending the whole day in worship one way or another with the Lord, refusing to allow the world to enter and having a concentrated period of time for worship and reading good books and searching the Scriptures and visiting God's people. Oh, what a wonderful boon this can be for assurance. The Sabbath. And then one more thing. The Puritans made a great deal of journaling. That's an optional means of grace, of course. The Bible nowhere requires it. But what they would often do is they would talk to the Lord. with their pen. You have the problem along with me, I think sometimes, don't you? That you get down on your knees and you cry out to God and suddenly you find your thoughts are 3,000 miles away. And you're ashamed and embarrassed and you start over. You say, Lord, forgive me. And you start your prayer over. Well, if you write your prayer out, you see, you can concentrate better. Maybe that could help you. Other Puritans suggested that when you go out to pray, you go outside and you walk in the open air, in nature. You feel closer to God. This morning we took in some beautiful sights in nature with Pastor Murray and well, we both felt the same thing. We felt much closer to God out there in this wonderful beauty. We prayed together. It was spontaneous. You can hardly not pray. Use these means to Draw closer to God. And the closer you draw to God, usually the more assurance you will have. Now, if all this fails, as it sometimes does, the thing to do is to get up, get in your car, and go visit someone and talk to them about the Lord. You who need advice, go give advice to someone else. and you'll find yourself saying the things that you yourself need. That's a great blessing as a pastor. Sometimes I can hardly believe it. I say, now the thing I just told that lady is exactly what I need. Or the thing she just told me in response to what I told her is exactly what I need. And so sometimes evangelizing or serving others can help us, strengthen us in our weak assurance. So if the devil is harassing you, And He's got you by the hair, as it were. And He's hanging you over the pit of hell. And He's saying, you're not a child of God. And you can't get out of it. And your thoughts are compounded. Don't just sit there and be a victim. Get up and go out and serve others. And you might be surprised how you might be delivered from that kind of bondage. Well, then the fourth and final thing about 18.3 is the emphasis at the end, that assurance bears fruit. Assurance bears fruit. The wonderful thing about assurance, you see, is it gives me energy. It produces spiritual peace and joyful love and humble gratitude and cheerful obedience. It makes me active in the things of God. That's wonderful. You see what happens is when I'm always searching for assurance and I can never get it. I'm like, I'm active of course. I'm actually like Bunyan's pilgrim. I've lost my role and I'm going backward looking for my role constantly. I'm spending a lot of energy but I'm not serving God or His kingdom in any way because it's all self-absorbed energy. Real assurance gets us working for God. Thomas Goodwin said, A man who has assurance does ten times more for the Lord than the man who does not. Because the love of Christ constrains us. Now, if you look at the men of God of past ages who did so much for God, if you look at Luther and Calvin and Owen and Perkins and Knox and other men, well, they weren't men who every morning got up and said, I wonder if I'm a child of God. Were they? No, they were men with assurance. And sure, they had their doubts. Sometimes they were thrown into depression and cast down and had to cry out with David, O my soul, why art thou cast down within me? But for the main, you see, they were busy in the work of the Lord and they knew they belonged to the Lord and the Lord was theirs and so they went forward with energy and zeal, loving God, because they were loved by Him. That was their dynamo. That was what kept them going. Some of them, actually never doubted their salvation. Andrew Bonar said, The Lord has enabled me to lean upon Christ day by day for sixty years now and has never left me once in darkness as to my interest in Him all that time. Now that's unusual. But you must not think it's a mark of grace or that somehow it's good to be doubting the Lord's love to you when you cast yourself upon Him as a poor, needy sinner. God promises poor, needy sinners, those who come to Me I will in no wise cast out, and He is honored when we believe and embrace His promises. And so, we ought to look for this fruit, this God-glorifying fruit. Anthony Burgess writes, Assurance helps us keep up excellent fellowship with God. It will work within us an evangelical frame of heart. It will give us the humble disposition of sons, so that hereby we are carried out to do Him service with pure intentions and motives. It will support us, although we be in the midst of outward misery and trouble. Assurance will inflame our prayers. It will make a man walk with tenderness against sin. It will make us impatient and earnest until Christ comes again. You see, assurance brings all these wonderful fruits. It doesn't make a man loose. Roman Catholicism is wrong. Assurance is so dangerous because it's going to make a man loose in his life. Careless. Because he has everything. He has assurance. And you could better live between hope and fear, Rome said. No, says the Westminster Divines. It will enlarge you in peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, in love and thankfulness to God, in His strength and cheerful in the duties of obedience, The proper fruits of this assurance, so far is it from inclining men to looseness. You see, that part too is against the Roman Catholic Church. We don't become loose, careless Christians when we have Spirit-worked assurance. When you have man-made assurance, you can become a loose Christian. But when the Spirit assures you, and you rest on the promises, and you have a reflex act of faith in what God has done, and the Spirit testifies by the Word to your heart that you are indeed a child of God, and you trust in the faithfulness of God, and you are active for Him, well, you won't become a loose Christian. You will become a stronger Christian. Well, finally now, there is of course 18.4. A Christian can lose his assurance that he already has. He can lose it to some degree. Maybe he has certain measure, and he drops down, or he can lose it altogether for a while. But it can also be revived again. That's the point of 18.4, and it's a beautifully worded statement. Let me read it with you. True believers may have the assurance of their salvation divers ways, that means in different ways, shaken, diminished, and intermitted, as by negligence in preserving of it. or by falling into some special sin which wounds the conscience and grieves the spirit, by some sudden or vehement temptation, by God's withdrawing the light of His confidence and suffering even such as fear Him to walk in darkness and have no light. Yet are they never utterly destitute of that seed of God and life of faith, that love of Christ and the brethren, that sincerity of heart and conscience of duty, out of which, by the operation of the Spirit, this assurance may, in due time, be revived. And by the which, in the meantime, they are supported from utter despair." This statement is one of the most beautiful, I believe, ever written with a human pen, bringing together Reformed theology and Puritan piety. And basically what it says is this. There are two primary reasons for losing assurance. One is to be found, and the main one is to be found, in the believer himself. It includes negligence. Negligence and preserving assurance by exercise. That is to say, I grow sloppy in using the means of grace, and I get more and more distant from God, or I fall into a special sin. If I'm living a life of flirting with some darling sin, and I'm not praying against it anymore, not trying to put a sword through it anymore, if I give up the battle and I yield to it, and I let it mull around in my mind, I will probably lose a certain amount of assurance. Bunyan had a wonderful instruction about this. The Holy Spirit taught him something very special because he had a lot of trouble with blasphemous and lustful thoughts in his mind and then one day the Lord showed him that it's like if someone comes to your front door and knocks on the door and you open the door and let's say that person is a representative of sin or maybe that person is immodestly dressed or something and you see it, you shut the door, you haven't sinned. You haven't sinned because you haven't indulged in it. But if you invite sin into your living room, or your parlor, or whatever you call it, and you sit down with sin, and you mentally play with sin, and you allow it to bounce around in your mind, and you don't resist it, you don't use what Ralph Erskine called the two means to resist sin. Fight or flight. If you don't do either of those, and you play with sin, and you flirt with sin, you will lose your assurance to a great degree, and rightly so. And then, yielding to sudden temptation. How many people have lost their assurance at such times? Job is a good example. Oh, the temptation to curse the day of his birth, and suddenly he loses some of his assurance. Or David at certain times of desertion, felt desertion. He loses a certain measure of his assurance. So the whole point, as Burgess explains, is if we persist in low levels of obedience, we will chase away our assurance, he says. Nothing will darken thy soul more than dull and lazy and negligent walking. So most of the time, then, you see, when we lack assurance, responsibility is ours. No enemy will keep us out of heaven if we are true believers, but we can keep heaven out of our hearts here below by sloppy, careless, sinful walking. Burgess concludes, it is therefore an unworthy thing to speak of doubting and complain of the loss of God's favor and that thou hast no assurance when all thy duties and performances are careless and withered. But now the interesting thing is that confession does not stop there. It also speaks of causes in God, in His sovereignty. Listen to this. By God's withdrawing the light of His confidence, and suffering even such as fear Him to walk in darkness and have no light. Now some people think the confession went too far here. They say, never, never should you attribute any loss of any degree of assurance to anything within God. But Bertis explains why this is true. And he gives us five lessons, five reasons God might at certain times withhold assurance from His people. First, he says that hereby we might taste and see how bitter sin is. When you lose assurance, you learn how terrible sin is, what it costs you. That's a good thing to learn. Secondly, hereby God would keep us low and humble in ourselves. When you always have assurance and you seem to be able to grasp it easily, and you can't hardly relate to people who struggle with it, what happens? Well, sometimes you can become pretty high-minded. You're pretty much a strong Christian in yourself. So sometimes God removes a little bit of it to show you how dependent you are on Him to keep you humble. You know, John Newton has that wonderful sermon where he speaks about the corn, the blade, the ear, and then the full corn in the ear. And he compares that to babes in grace, young men in grace, and fathers in grace. And he explains how the believer grows in grace and grows in assurance. And he details all three of those stages. And well, after he published the sermon, there was a lady who wrote him a letter and she said, it was such a wonderful sermon, Reverend Newton, and I have the pleasure of letting you know that I'm in the third category. I'm the mature Christian. Oh, Newton wrote a letter back. He said, my dear madam, I'm so sorry I forgot to include one thing in my sermon that you ought to be aware of, that those who are Mature Christians never recognize themselves to be such. You see, God keeps them humble. The more mature, the more humble. What often happens is when we think we're becoming mature, God has to take away some of our assurance to kill that miserable rotten worm of pride that burrows his way into our consciences again. And then thirdly, God may keep some assurance from our knowledge, that so when we have it, we may the more esteem it and the more prize it and take the greater heed how we might lose it again. Isn't that how God dealt with His spouse in the Song of Solomon? She got lazy on her bed and she saw her bridegroom coming, but she just ignored him. And then she wanted him, but he was gone. And she got up and she went about the streets, you see. saw ye Him whom my soul loveth. Fourthly, God doth it that thou mayest demonstrate thy obedience unto Him and give Him the greater honor to Him. You see, when we lose a little assurance, but yet do not stagger in our faith, we actually give more glory to God. And so, God sometimes does this by little bits to show that His people can learn to walk in darkness even in the midst of trials. Even when they're missing things for their own soul, they might honor Him in a rich way. And then fifthly, God withholds a sense of pardon at times that thou mayest be an experienced Christian who is able to comfort others in their distress. Paul says, I comfort others with a comfort wherewith I myself am comforted. of God. Now please bear in mind that these five reasons are just suggestions by Burgess. He's not pretending to make a complete list. We don't know all the reasons why God does what He does in our lives, do we? He's sovereign. He sees all 500 jigsaw puzzle pieces of our lives at one time. We see only one piece at a time. He has wise reasons for doing what He does beyond what we might know. Well, why then did the Puritans even tamper in this area? For this reason. They did it for pastoral comfort. Because sometimes there are children of God who are not backsliding, who are not walking contrary to the Lord, who have diminishings of their assurance. And to encourage them to deal with the experiential and pastoral reality of sincere believers, compassionately, They earnestly sought to show that sometimes God treats His people in this way for wise reasons. And so what must such a believer do? He must just press on using the means of grace. He must do the same things he does when he ever comes to God. He must come with faith and repentance and God will in due time, says our catechism, our confession, restore, revive, Assurance is revived the same way it was obtained the first time. Believers should review their lives, confess any backslidings they see, humbly cast themselves on God, wait on His gracious promises in Christ, use the means of grace, pursue holiness, exercise watchfulness, and take heed they don't grieve or quench the Spirit. And in due time, God will restore assurance again. And so as we live our lives looking to Christ, seeking to rest in Him, we may have some ups and downs, but God overall will so be pleased to increase and increase and increase our levels of assurance of faith so that we learn to cry out with an ever deeper sense of the wonder of the cross When I survey the wondrous cross in which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss and poor contempt on all my pride, where the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small, love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. Amen. Let's pray together. Almighty and gracious God, we pray that Thou will grant Thy people in our midst tonight the consciousness of the spirit of adoption and the spirit who gives assurance of faith. Let us view ourselves, Lord, safe now and forever as believers in the security of our Heavenly Father's eternal love. And do, Grand Lord, that that love may be increasingly solidified in our consciences by assurance of faith, by a resting, a quiet, childlike, confident resting in the promises of God. O come, blessed Triune God, show us, Heavenly Father, Thy eternal love for poor, needy sinners such as we. Show us, dear Elder Brother, Thy meritorious sacrifice and show us Precious Holy Spirit, Thy comforting ministry within us, and so that we may come to know Thee and love Thee more and more as the triune God of our salvation. And Lord, forgive us all our doubting of Thy fatherliness, all our doubting that the cross is for us, all our doubting of the comforting ministry of the Spirit. O God, we confess our sin. Please forgive us. Please forgive all our unbelief, all our doubting, all our waywardness, all our backsliding, all our spiritual sloppiness, and help us to humbly and simply use the means of grace, knowing that they in themselves without Thy Spirit will not help us, but knowing too that it is Thy normal way to have the Spirit accompany those means for our spiritual gain. O Lord, wash away then all lukewarmness and help us to put all sin to death and take us up as thank offerings to be consumed wholly on Thy altar, O God. Save the lost among us. Lord, convict and convert and bless each one according to our soul's need. And now go with us tomorrow as we gather in Thy house and as we hope to expound Thy Word more textually and exegetically, we pray that tomorrow the two portions of Thy Word that we will proclaim may be greatly used by Thee to stir up in Thy people a great joy for so great a salvation. Lord, we look to Thee that our greatest privilege be adoption, our greatest confidence assurance, but also, as we shall hear tomorrow morning, our greatest need, mature faith. O mature us. By Thy Spirit we pray, in Jesus' name, Amen.