Not by virtue of beliefs alone can we have real assurance. A person needs truth plus experience in order to be rest assured.
To say, “Well, a person must believe in something,” is a way of creating assurance.
“Rest assured,” cites Jesus, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”
There is faith and hope. These have to do with some perception, hopefully true, that a person possesses.
Today’s suicide bomber possesses hope and faith in the perception planted in his mind.
Yesterday’s Third Reich was built on the theme that to cleanse the world of Jews would yield a better world, a better place to live.
Actually, the LORD will separate the sheep from the goats; not allow entrance into His heaven to those whose choice it was to remain in their sins rather than receiving divine forgiveness of sin, acknowledging and confessing it, and turning in hope to the Savior from it.
Our educated elite have re-defined sin. Christian values have been ruled by them, outdated and therefore bigoted, judgmental, sometimes a civil crime to even express.
We are each an individual. As such, we can experience faith, hope, and love.
Love, real love, is a permanent thing, beneficial more than a philosophy or a religion. Love transcends religions, infiltrates them when allowed, does not know bigotry.
Love alone can grant us assurance in this world where absolutely we will have only passed through, and where, also assuredly, we will have encountered much difficulty.
With faith and hope we attempt to deal with reality: Love is the Great Reality; but love can be rejected, ignored, even abused.
Shall we consider promises Jesus makes:
• He will never leave or forsake.
• You shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.
Rest assured – take heed, use your faith and place your hope upon this Rock, on “Me” he says, and the truth I have spoken. I go to prepare a place for you that where I am, you may be also. (John 14:3-16:33).
In times like ours, and many times and places in history, to keep silent meant the difference between life and death, punishment and torture and the lack of it.
As it was with Jesus concerning these, it has been to those who have been evangelical; that is, those who invite others to the One who did take away the sins of the world and for so many the addictions to abuses in all forms.
Never has a text been more vividly either challenged or received as the Bible. There we learn not to accept our sinning as normal but as abnormal, destructive, yet as forgiven if we receive what God did for us through His Son. Within the pages we find that life is a gift from God, not a mere biological accident and it is meant for us.
Rest assured, “your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23).
We can run; but we cannot hide. The choice only, is ours; the provisions always were.
So, dear friends, do not rest until you have entered into that “Rest which remains for the people of God.” (Hebrews 4:9)
Do not rest from your search until you find the One who came for you. Do not stop with finding Him. “Be filled with His Spirit” abide in Him who alone can invest His assurance within.
Buddy