The worrying late-night question
It rarely comes during worship. It comes on a regular night after you snapped at your kids, skipped your Bible reading for the ninth day in a row, and found yourself back in the same sin you swore off last month. You’ve followed Jesus for years. You’ve served and given and prayed. And then a question sneaks in the side door of your mind. What if none of it’s real? What if I’m not actually saved?
I’ve had this conversation a lot over thirty years of ministry. I’ve had it with myself too. I’ll tell you about that in a minute. Over the years I’ve noticed a pattern. The people most tormented by this question are rarely the ones who need to worry. The people who never ask it sometimes should. And the answers the church has often turned to don’t help either group very much.
Why our usual answers make it worse
When someone wonders whether they’re really saved, they tend to find the answer in one of three ways.
The first is to pray the prayer salvation prayer again, just to be sure. Pastor J.D. Greear has written about doing exactly that. He figures he asked Jesus into his heart around five thousand times before he turned eighteen, and he was baptized four times. He jokes that he was at the baptistry so often he should have had his own locker. Every prayer brought a little relief, then the doubt came back, and he went looking for a better prayer. A ritual meant to settle the question became the thing that kept the question open.
The second is to remember the date of your salvation. That might work if you have one. A lot of people who grew up in church can’t point to a day, and the missing date leaves them wondering if they missed the moment altogether.
The third is to consult your good-deeds checklist. When it comes to evaluating spiritual fruit there’s some biblical basis for this, and I’ll come back to it. But hand a checklist to an already anxious heart and it becomes an audit that piles on guilt and not assurance.
I know because I ran that audit. During my 2015 sabbatical I sat with my spiritual director and admitted I’d been questioning whether I was really a child of God. Not because I was living in some scandal. I just couldn’t feel God’s love anymore, and I couldn’t feel much of anything toward the people closest to me. So, I did what pastors do. I opened 1 John, which says love for others is a mark of real faith, and I made a list of the ways I was failing to love. Not reading and praying with my kids. Not caring about my staff’s personal lives. My first instinct, when someone in the church called with a need, was to find someone else to handle it. And my favorite entry: thinking the answer to all of this was to organize better systems.
The list didn’t give me assurance. It gave me a longer list. My director listened, said he admired my honesty, and then told me plainly that he believed the voice pushing that question came from the evil one. Conviction from the Holy Spirit sends you toward Jesus. Accusation keeps you staring at yourself.
All three answers share the same flaw. They send you looking inside yourself for something that was never located there.
The blood was on the outside of the door
We’ve been walking through Exodus at Grace this fall, and the Passover night in chapter 12 speaks right into this.
Picture a Hebrew home in Goshen. The lamb has been killed. Someone has dipped a bundle of hyssop in the basin and smeared blood on the lintel and both doorposts. Hyssop was a scrubby weed that grew out of cracks in walls, so the job was probably messy. Then God gave one more instruction: “None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning” (12:22). The family sat inside, in the dark, with the door shut.
That means nobody inside could see the blood. They couldn’t crack the door at midnight to make sure it was still there. And the promise never asked them to. God said, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you” (12:13). He was the one looking at the door. Whatever the family felt in that dark room, confident or terrified or numb, had no effect on what God saw on the doorframe.
When we try to settle our salvation by looking inward, we’re doing what no Israelite was allowed to do that night. We’re opening the door to check. The New Testament is clear about where to look instead. “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7).
Greear eventually found his way out of the doubt loop through a pair of images I’ve found helpful. In the sacrificial system, the worshiper laid his hand on the head of the animal before it died, a picture of his guilt passing onto the sacrifice (Leviticus 1:4). Saving faith is like that. There was a first moment when you put your hand there, and the hand is meant to stay there. So when the doubt comes, ask where your hand is resting right now.
He also points to Luther’s reading of Romans 4:25: Jesus “was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” Two facts. He died to pay for your sin, and he rose to show the payment was accepted. They’re true on your best day and your worst one. Assurance comes from resting your weight on them.
Your salvation vs. your assurance of it
Most of the panic I see comes from treating two different things as one. Your salvation is what God has done for you. Your assurance of salvation is your experience of it. The first is fixed. The second moves.
For years I’ve described this as the difference between positional and relational forgiveness. When you turn to Jesus in repentance and faith, your position before God changes once and for all. You move from death to life, from condemned to adopted, forgiven past, present and future (Romans 10:9-10). You don’t have to keep asking for that. Your new position as a child of God is completely settled.
But at the same time, you’re also in a living relationship with God, and sin blocks intimacy the way it does in any relationship. That part needs ongoing confession and repair. The Puritans had a tidy way to say it: union with Christ is the foundation, and communion with Christ is the experience.
Assurance of salvation lives on the communion side. That’s why it can ebb and flow. Christians have understood this for a long time. In the 1640s a group of pastors wrote the Westminster Confession, and they had sat with plenty of people asking this exact question. They said a true believer’s assurance can be shaken, weakened, and sometimes lost for a while. They named the usual reasons: getting careless, falling into a sin that wounds your conscience, a sudden temptation, or a season when God feels far away. But they also said a real believer never completely loses the life of faith God planted in them. You can lose the feeling for a while. You don’t lose the life. The Confession even says a true believer “may wait long” before assurance comes at all.
Derek Thomas puts the distinction precisely. The certainty of salvation rests on the finished work of Christ. The certainty of assurance rests on God’s promises and on discovering those promises at work in us. He calls one the direct act of faith, believing Christ can save me, and the other the reflexive act, believing that I have believed. Plenty of sincere Christians are doing the first while struggling with the second.
Obedience matters here, and I don’t want to soften that. Sin you’re hiding will drain your assurance, and that’s a mercy. Think of a teenager who has been lying to her parents for weeks. Dinner gets quiet. She avoids eye contact. She doesn’t feel much like a beloved daughter. But her last name hasn’t changed and her place at the table is still set. When she finally comes clean, nobody re-adopts her. She gets back the warmth that was hers all along. David understood this after his worst failure. He prayed, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation” (Psalm 51:12). He asked for the joy back. He knew the salvation was still securely in God’s hands.
So, treat a diminishing in assurance of your salvation like the warning light on your dashboard. Don’t smash it, and don’t assume the car is destroyed forever. Look under the hood. Sometimes it’s unconfessed sin. Sometimes it’s exhaustion, grief or depression. Sometimes it’s a dry season God is using to deepen you. None of those change what’s on the door. As John puts it, “whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart” (1 John 3:20).
Charles Spurgeon gave anxious believers great advice: “It is not thy hold of Christ that saves thee; it is Christ… look not so much to thy hand with which thou art grasping Christ, as to Christ.” Joel Beeke, who has written one of the most thorough modern treatments of assurance, follows the Westminster pastors in naming three grounds for it: the promises of God, the evidence of grace in your life, and the Spirit’s witness that you’re God’s child (Romans 8:16). Notice which one comes first. Start with the promise. Then you’re in a healthy place to look at the fruit.
So does fruit matter?
Yes. Jesus said a tree is known by its fruit, and 1 John was written “so that you may know that you have eternal life” (5:13). This has to cut both ways, because some of us have used grace as a reason to stop asking questions altogether.
Exodus helps us read fruit the right way. The people who walked out of Egypt were a mess. Three days past the Red Sea they were grumbling about the water (15:24). A month later they were reminiscing about Egypt’s pots of meat (16:3). God didn’t send them back to Pharaoh. In Exodus, freedom is a change of owner. “Let my people go, that they may serve me” (9:1). The evidence that you’ve been rescued is which master you now belong to and which way you’re walking, stumbles and all.
So here are a few marks worth looking for, gently, and preferably with someone else’s help. Ask yourself:
- Does my sin bother me? Think about the last time you lost your temper, lied, or did something you knew was wrong. What happened next? If it bothered you enough to confess it to God, or to apologize to the person you hurt, the Spirit is working on your conscience. If you shrugged it off or explained it away, pay attention to that. And if you’re losing sleep over whether you’re saved, that worry is itself a sign. As my spiritual director told me, even the desire for God comes from God.
- Am I trusting Jesus to save me? Finish this sentence: “God should accept me because…” If your answer starts with “I,” as in I’m a decent person, I go to church, or I prayed a prayer once, you’re trusting yourself. If your answer is “because Jesus died for my sins and rose again,” you’re trusting him. There’s a second test. When you fail, do you try to clean yourself up before you come back to God, or do you come back right away and ask for forgiveness? Coming straight back shows you’re relying on what Jesus did, not on your track record.
- Do I keep following Jesus? Name one or two things in your life that have changed because you follow him. It could be a habit you quit, a relationship you repaired, a grudge you let go, or how you spend your money or time. Then look at what happens when you drift. Do you eventually come back? Eugene Peterson called this “a long obedience in the same direction.” If nothing in your life has changed since you decided to follow Jesus, take that seriously.
- Is the fruit of the Spirit is growing in me? Paul lists it in Galatians 5:22-23: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Pick two or three and compare yourself with a few years ago in real situations. How do you react when your plans fall apart, when someone criticizes you, or when your kids push back? Are you slower to anger and quicker to forgive? You’ll rarely see this clearly in yourself, so ask your spouse or a close friend. They usually see it first.
None of that fruit grows by accident. I once heard D.A. Carson say, “People don’t drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.” Nobody wakes up fluent in Spanish because they wanted it badly enough the night before, or decides to run the Boston Marathon the morning-of. Following Jesus takes real effort, and Paul tells us to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).
The question is what’s fueling the effort. Some effort is fueled by striving, or by achievement to attain acceptance by God. Some effort is driven by fear, which says, I need to do this so God won’t punish me.
Grace-driven effort says, I’m already accepted because of the blood of Jesus, so I get to fight sin and pursue holiness as someone who belongs to him. Paul holds both God’s grace and our effort in the same breath. Right after he says to work out your salvation, he adds, “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). You can tell which fuel you’re running on by what you do when you fail. Fear-driven effort runs from God and starts another audit. Grace-driven effort runs toward him, confesses, and gets back up. Israel walked out of Egypt already free, and every step through the wilderness came after the rescue.
There’s a sober edge to this too. Hebrews 3 looks back at that same generation and says many of them never entered the land “because of unbelief” (3:19). What kept them out was hearts that kept turning back toward Egypt. If you’re leaning on a decision you made at a camp twenty years ago, with no interest in following Jesus now, that’s the moment the question deserves your full attention.
Fruit is how you read your life after the rescue. Your confidence still rests on the blood.
Point to the door
If you’re the one lying awake, here’s something to do this week. Take an index card and write Romans 4:25 on it: “He was delivered up for my trespasses and raised for my justification.” Tape it to the frame of your bedroom door. Israel marked their doorposts the night they were rescued, and later God told them to write his words on their doorposts, so they’d never forget (Deuteronomy 6:9).
The next time that accusatory voice starts listing everything you’ve done wrong, don’t argue with it and don’t start another audit. Get up and read the card. And if you have reached the end of this blog post and realize that you rarely think about any of this, your step looks different. Get a baseline by taking a quick inventory. Ask one person who knows you well, a spouse or a close friend, this question: “Am I more patient and more loving than I was a year ago?” Then listen without defending yourself.
Here’s how that Passover night in Goshen ended. Before dawn, Pharaoh sent word to go. The families who had spent the night in the dark opened their doors, grabbed their bread before it had time to rise, and walked out of Egypt (Exodus 12:31-34). Some of them had spent the night calm. Some had spent it terrified. All of them walked out, because the blood was on the door. If your hope is resting on Jesus, the same is true for you. The voice at 2 a.m. doesn’t get the last word. Morning comes, the door opens, and you walk out free.
