ANNOUNCER: What do Arminians and Free Grace people say about how assurance of salvation is gained? Should the faithfulness of a believer or his unfaithfulness have anything to do with it? You’ve tuned into Grace in Focus. This is the Grace Evangelical Society’s radio broadcast and podcast ministry. The Grace Evangelical Society is a Free Grace organization located in North Texas. You can find out more at our website, faithalone.org. We have thousands of articles there and we’d love you to go there when you need to do some theological research. There are literally hundreds of articles that we’ve written and collected over the years and they’re like a library, they’re free for you to read and research. Hope you’ll take advantage of that at faithalone.org.

Now with part four of our assurance of salvation series, here are Bob Wilkin and Bob Vacendak. 

BOB W: Last time, Bob, we were talking about how assurance is gained by Calvinists and we were going to talk about Arminians and Focused Free Grace people but we really didn’t get to that. So let’s begin by talking about how an Arminian would get an assurance. The Calvinists gets assurance by looking at the objective promises in the Bible, looking at their subjective works and looking at their feelings, they call it the inner witness of the spirit, the feelings they have and that leads to them not knowing where they’re going. They don’t have assurance of their salvation. 

Now the Arminians are essentially the same but some Arminians, they have different kind of works they look at, like if they’re an Arminian who is let’s say from the Catholic persuasion, well then they’re going to have lots of works they look at that the Protestant wouldn’t, like for example, going to the priest and confessing their sins, that’s not something Protestant does or doing works of penance. You grew up Catholic isn’t marriage even a sacrament in the Catholic Church? So getting married and being a faithful spouse is part of the way you work your way toward heaven? And of course you don’t get to go immediately. You have to go through purgatory unless you have one of the college super works or something? 

BOB V: Well, an Arminian theologian, in fact we’ve been referencing Scott McKnight, he argued this, he said, “Assurance accompanies faithfulness for both the Calvinist and the Arminian. God’s own faithfulness summons us to trust and long obedience. That is that God expects us to respond in constant faithfulness to him just as He is faithful to us.” So for him assurances based on this constant faithfulness or perseverance, being an Arminian though he believes that a born-again person can apostatize and lose this probationary salvation, because they don’t believe that a person can be born again, their idea of being born again doesn’t include having assurance obviously. 

BOB W: Right, no that’s right. So for the Arminian their view of assurance is pretty close to the Calvinist even though they may have some different set of works. They’re still probably going to rely on feelings to some extent and of course they believe they can lose their salvation and so as a result they might say well how am I doing right now in terms of my works, in terms of my feelings and you know some people have mistakenly said, they’ve joked that well the Calvinist doesn’t know if he’s saved now and he doesn’t know if he’ll be saved when he dies, but the Arminian has the advantage of knowing he’s saved now, but he doesn’t know if he’s going to keep it. But that’s not really true is it? 

BOB V: But they’re deceiving themselves because they haven’t believed the promise.

BOB W: Right and not only that there’s no way on earth that an Arminian can be certain that they are good enough to have kept their salvation, right? What if they’ve committed some sin that’s big enough that they’ve lost their salvation? How could they possibly know? 

BOB V: No, they can’t and that’s why we put them under the category of this partial assurance. 

BOB W: You quoted McKnight. What did he call it, “constant faithfulness?” Well what Arminian knows he has constant faithfulness?

BOB V: None. 

BOB W: And you also talked, McKnight said long obedience and by the way you said constant faithfulness just as He is faithful to us, isn’t that strange? In other words God’s faithfulness to us depends on our faithfulness to Him. He’s not faithful to some blanket promise if you believe in Jesus you have everlasting life and you’re never going to perish John 3:16 or all the “nevers,” you deal with those in your dissertation. In fact let’s get to the focused Free Grace position, because that’s where you get into all the “nevers” right? How does a focused Free Grace person have assurance? How do they tell people how to have assurance? 

BOB V: Well, Free Grace theology contends that people have 100% certainty of salvation at the moment of faith in Christ for eternal life. In other words, assurance is of the essence of saving faith. It’s a necessary part. It’s part and parcel of saving faith. And so it’s an inseparable element of the salvation experience, assurance is. 

BOB W: Okay, so if a person’s never been sure, they’ve never been born again. I remember this came up at our 2006 conference. Half of the conferees said they were born again before they had assurance. Well, now how they could know that, was it based on some feeling they had, based on some change in their life that they experienced? Well that sounds a lot like the Westminster Confession of Faith right? They weren’t looking to Christ promise alone because they were saying oh I didn’t have certainty of my salvation at that point. Only later did I get certainty but looking back I’d say I was saved then because of X, Y, and Z. Well that’s a kind of a bizarre approach but it seems to me that the focused Free Grace position is that assurance comes when we believe the promise and not before. 

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BOB W: The focused Free Grace position is assurance comes when we believe the promise and not before. If a person believes that God the Father sent His Son to die on the cross for our sins and to rise from the dead and that Jesus did die for our sins and did rise from the dead and I believe that but I don’t believe I’m saved forever, well, I’ve not yet believed the promise. I believe some right things about Jesus. I believe he’s the second member of the Trinity. I believe He died in the cross for my sins and He rose again. All of that should lead me to believe the promise He has promised us. But if it doesn’t, I’m not there yet. I’m on the outside looking in. So from a focused Free Grace perspective, the way someone gets assurance, it’s rather simple, isn’t it? 

BOB V: Yes, it’s very simple and you know, it’s interesting, Bob. What you were referencing there, all those things I believed with all my heart as a Catholic. Man, if somebody said, do you believe Jesus is God? Absolutely. Do you believe that he died on the cross and then He was buried and rose from the dead? I’d go to the stake for it. I’d say because I was catechized. I was well taught. But the day I was walking out of the factory and one of my co-workers said, Bob, are you 100% sure that you have eternal life, that you’ll be with God forever when you die? And I said, no, but I’d like to be. And so that was the beginning. God was already working amazingly, I wish I had time to tell the whole story. 

But no, you’re right. There’s a lot of people who believe they’ve had a born-again experience. They believe that they’re children of God and yet, if you were to ask them point blank, hey, are you 100% certain? Are you absolutely sure that you’ll be with God forever and ever? They might say, well, I’m pretty sure and I have a kind of assurance. I think so. But that’s not biblical faith.  And so the gospel of John is, man, I tell you, the promises of John are the answer to everyone doubting their salvation. 

BOB W: Okay. Now we’re going to go there in the next episode when we talk about all of the “nevers” and also forever, sometimes their passage is to say, never, no, never, forever, right? So we’ll get into that in the next one. But the way the focused for a great position would say that we have assurance of everlasting life is simply believing. There’s no works. There’s no feelings. There’s no perseverance. It’s just I believe and it’s not just believing any old fact. It’s believing the promise he has promised us everlasting life. 1 John 2:25 or it’s believing what Jesus called in John 4:10, the gift of God. 

BOB V: Yeah, there are a lot of things that people can believe and be absolutely right about that belief. Because like I said, as a Catholic, I believed a lot of things that were totally biblical. However, I did not believe, as far as eternal life was concerned, I was taught that living a good life and following the tenets of the Catholic Church is the way that you would be with God forever and ever. 

BOB W: And that’s essentially what the Calvinist teaches today, except instead of the tenets of the Catholic Church, it’s the tenets of Reformed theology. The same thing for Protestants who are Arminian. It’s following whatever the Church of Christ says or it’s following whatever the Assemblies of God say or it’s following whatever the Pentecostals or the Charismatics say. And so you’ve got people who are looking to themselves for their assurance. What we say, is if you want to have assurance, you’ve got to look outside yourself, get your eyes off of yourself and put your eyes on Jesus and what the Scriptures call the promise of life or the promise of everlasting life. When we look at that, then it comes down to what the guy asked you at the factory. Are you certain that you’re going to spend eternity with God? No, I’m not, but I’d like to be. Well, how can I be? Let me quote John 3:16. It says, whoever believes in him will not perish but has everlasting life. 

And so then, you know what, most people say, and I’m sure you’ve had this in your experience, you tell somebody this and they go, oh, wait a minute, if that were true, just by believing in Jesus, I’d have everlasting life, right. But if that were true, it would mean bad people could go to heaven, right. But if that were true, it would mean I’m not required to persevere in good works in order to go to heaven, right. And say, but if that’s true, that doesn’t seem fair, right. It’s not fair. It’s a gift. It’s called the gift of God. It’s a free gift. You can’t buy it, you can’t earn it. And if you think you can, then you’ve not yet believed the promise. 

BOB V: That’s right. You know, I have a quote in the dissertation by a professor where he said, every semester, he has to deal with kids that come from evangelical homes and they are just in tears because they can’t figure out whether they’re persevering well enough, whether they’re loving other people well enough, whether they’re making Jesus Lord of their life well enough. 

BOB V: Yeah, exactly. In fact, you wrote an article for our March, April, 2024 issue of the magazine Grace and Focused and you talk about that. Your title is on assurance being of the essence of saving faith. [See article here.] So you all check that out at faithalone.org and it’s sad but true that many, many young people in Christian colleges and seminaries don’t know where they’re going when they die. And unfortunately, a lot of the professors don’t give them the right map. They’re pointing them to themselves and their works and their feelings instead of pointing them to the promise which He has promised us—everlasting life. 

Well, thanks Bob and thank you all and remember, keep grace in focus. 

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In our next episode: we look at assurance of salvation in the Gospel of John. Please join us for that and until then, let’s keep grace in focus.