Is that the message you'ld preach to the despairing?
We absolutely can have assurance that Christ died for us and payed for all our sins, past, present and future.
To the lost, to the despairing, I tell them that Jesus has shown the true face of God, who is love. Jesus definitively proved that God exists (since knowing this is the first step of faith, reversing Adam's effective denial of God's godhood), that God is infinitely trustworthy, good, and true (reversing the "distorted image of God", as its been put, that man conceived of at the Fall), that God is infinitely patient, merciful, and forgiving-
even self-sacrificing. God's nature is basically described in 1 Cor 13. IOW, goodness and love are foundational to the universe we live in. And the eternal life that Jesus taught and gave witness to via His resurrection means that this love and the existence it gave us is eternal as well. We simply need to respond to it, to want it, to want
Him. That's faith.
The word is preached, and our response is required, and the exact dynamics of how that all works is contested, but the point is that always our response is required. And that's not guaranteed. The
will is actually the prize. This was so with Adam-and it's still the case now. We're to choose: between life and death, good and evil, God or no God.
Faith is the beginning of our justification. What we do with it from there on, also with the help of grace, determines our salvation. People aren't dumb-we already know this intuitively. We must continue to
walk justly even as He works in us, doing the justifying. God wants, God loves, God covets our cooperation. That's essentially the message of the Parable of the Talents. He wants us to grow up, to do our investing; He wants big things for us. He knows better than ourselves what we are capable of, what we're made of and made for. He wants us to be pure of heart, in order to enter heaven, in order to even be
capable of seeing Him, that divine vision being what makes heaven what it is.
Humans are obligated to
do the right thing-this has always been the case. We cannot shirk that obligation. And that obligation is most concisely defined by the Greatest Commandments. Love, as we know, excludes sin by its nature. Love of God and neighbor is how the New Covenant prophecy of Jer 31:34 is fulfilled in us. Love is the image of God we're to be transformed into. Love is the basis of the "righteousness of God", which is to be
our righteousness. That's the justice God wants in us, and that we must cooperate with in achieving. Faith, alone, doesn't guarantee entrance into heaven. Love does. "...if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am
nothing."
And I believe there are even people outside the fold who nonetheless receive and respond to grace without ever hearing or knowing the word, and who therefore love, and who therefore treat the "least of these" with compassion, as the
sheep in Matt 25:31-46 do. "At the evening of life we shall be judged on our love." John of the Cross. Love is Good News; it makes the world right and makes life worth living. People need to know. They need to know that there's an alternative to this world's values. So that they can hunger and thirst for it, for righteousness, for God. We're obligated to it-but God won't force it, won't force Himself, upon us. Scripture makes that clear with all of its admonitions- to believers.
Anyway, we can't rest on our self-assessed level of faith; fruit, born of love, must be there. And it's by that fruit, combined with the knowledge of God and His love, that we can know that we, ourselves, are His. But human weakness, limitations, and sin should and will always give pause for humility and less than perfect certainty; God is true while we're the wildcard. People also know this intuitively. So our level of assurance is strong, just not perfect until that time when we fully know and are fully known.
