ASSURANCE is an essential ingredient of personal Christian faith. Faith is the kind of knowledge of God in Christ that carries within it an absolute confidence that what it knows is surely true, and therefore, completely trustworthy and reliable. Paul knew whom he had believed, and was therefore persuaded that Christ was able to keep what Paul had committed to Him, against the day of destruction (2 Tim 1:12).

Because the content of the assured knowledge of faith is good news, assurance is a profound sense of relief and a buoyant sense of joyous freedom. Faith is confident of the good news that God in Christ has once and for all, and in a manner that cannot be undone, overcome sin, death, judgment and hell, and provided a freedom from the past that justifies and forgives and opens up the future to eternal life. The believer, therefore, experiences a joyful sense of liberation. Assurance is the quiet joy and joyous cry that nothing can separate the believer from the love of God in Christ. Knowledge without assurance is a contradiction in terms, as faith without certainty would be spiritual torture. The Christian who believes that faith is a risk, a leap in the dark, a decision made against the odds, is of all men most miserable, for it is then himself, his life and his future which is at stake, being suspended on a hairline of uncertainty between heaven and hell, life and destruction. Nor does faith, understood as a human decision, carry the needed assurance, for the assurance is then grounded merely in a human action.

The assurance that characterizes Christian faith derives not from the believer, nor from his believing action, but from the object in which it believes. Nor does assurance rest on extra-Biblical evidence. The certainty and absolute confidence that adheres in faith derives rather from the nature of that Word of God, to which the Holy Spirit bears witness. The Word of God imparts to faith its knowledge, and no less that Word imparts the quality of its own assured inherent certainty and truthfulness. There is no adequate external evidence to support faith. Faith rests upon that internal evidence of the Word of God which gives rise to faith, and by which the knowledge and assurance of faith is shaped and informed. It is the Word which creates faith, and it creates faith in its own image.

In actual life, the believer is often anxious, vacillating between faith and doubt. The joyous, liberating assurance of faith is often lacking in the true believer’s life. He is often caught between storms without and doubts within. This lack of assurance does not flow, however, from the nature of faith, but from his disbelief and faithlessness. With the disciples he often must have cried—“I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). But being a believer he lives by faith not by sight, by faith in God’s history in Jesus Christ and not by his own internal or external experiences. Though the night of struggle be long, he knows that joy will come in the morning. Even when the judgment of God is upon him, he cries—“Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (Job 13:15, KJV) as did Christ Himself on the cross.