The guys pointedly answer the question posed by John Piper's article, "How often should you question your salvation?"
MEMBERS Podcast Transcripts
Jon Moffitt: Welcome to the members' podcast. It was a lively one. It feels like they all are that way, and have always been like that, and they're always going to keep going that way. We are turning things up in 2021; that is not a lie. We are going to graciously go after what we think is going to cause the most confusion and the most clutter on the gospel. Our goal is to—with patience, kindness, mercy, and speaking the truth in love—remove it.
Speaking of love, kindness, and mercy, Jimmy dropped a theological bomb in our lap. Give us an answer. You said bomb—it was more like a poof.
Jimmy Buehler: The title of the article, and it's written by John Piper, is How Often Should I Question My Salvation? John is a brother in the Lord. I believe that John Piper does trust in Christ. Do I think that he has some categories confused? Absolutely. I'm going to be kind here and say that I think one area that John Piper has tremendously helped me in is the sovereignty of God in suffering. When I was part of his church, he gave me some very good, clear, and distinct categories amongst those things.
But when I think it comes to this area, this is where I deviate a lot. The question is how often should I question my salvation? I think I would change the question. It's not how often, it's when—when should I do this? Justin gave us the category, and you used the term "mechanism" for that.
Here's the thing. If I'm part of a church, if I'm committed and covenanted to a local assembly of believers, a communion of saints, where the gospel is heralded, where the gospel is preached and the sacraments are duly administered, and I lovingly submit myself to the authority and elders and offices of the church, and these men were to come to me, in love and in grace, and according to Scripture, and they were to point out some things in my life where I was not walking in line with the truth of the gospel—and these men were, as Justin said, exercising loving church discipline—I think, in that moment, there is an appropriate level... if they were to say, "Jimmy, you're walking in some very high-handed sin here, and we are concerned for the state of your soul," I think, in that moment, within the context of love and grace of an assembly of believers, particularly the offices of elder, where they are coming to me and they are pointing out some sins in my life, I think then it's appropriate to say, "Hey, we've got some questions. We want to look at the state of your soul and the state of your heart."
I think the original title of the article—how often—a lot of people want to do this exercise, and they want to do it by themselves. And that is what I'm saying is not helpful.
John does say, in the article, to surround yourself with people. I think that's really helpful. So, when people want to say, "How often should I question my salvation?" I will say this: never do it in a dark room by yourself because you will always be led to despair.
Justin Perdue: I'm going to say something similar and just kind of frame it in my own way. I could not agree with you more. I'm going to front-load what I'm about to say with this qualification, that when I talk about church discipline here in a second, I am assuming that it is a regular church of the Lord Jesus Christ that rightly preaches the Word, and rightly administers the sacraments, and who is led by elders who have been set apart by God to do this work. That's my assumption.
My answer to the question, "How often should I question my salvation?" Whenever you are facing church discipline. Period.
I'm meaning, again, a faithful church: Word rightly preached, sacraments rightly administered by godly pastors, where they're not going to be disciplining somebody for something silly. Church discipline is practiced with patience, with grace, with charity. It's an instrument that is wielded with precision. It's not some blunt instrument that the pastor's bludgeoning people with, or threatening them with. It is only done when there is clear, longstanding, demonstrable, unrepentant, hard-hearted sin. I would say that whenever you face church discipline in the context that we're describing, you ought to question your salvation. But I would contend that it is only then that you ought to question whether or not you are in Christ Jesus.
Jimmy, another thing I want to pick up on that you said that is exactly right. This is a problem for evangelicals in pretty much every area of the Christian life: this individual versus corporate dynamic. We tend to individualize everything like how we do doctrine and theology. We do it individually, not corporately, as we look through the history of the church. We do it here; when it comes to examination, we don't do that corporately under the authority of godly pastors in the context of a loving church community. But we do it, like you said, in our prayer closet, by ourselves. We get hyper-introspective. We are never appropriate evaluators of ourselves in any way, whether it comes to this or whatever spiritual gifts you think you have. The saints will help you see these things. I think this is a great conversation that we're having right now. In some ways, I wish we had said this in the regular portion of the podcast.
Jon Moffitt: Where most people struggle is they struggle with ongoing sin, besetting sin. That's where they examine themselves. They think, "I keep struggling with the same thing over and over and over. I think I do need to examine myself." It's vital, to what Justin said, that examination is a theological issue. Let's just use Justin as an example. Let's say Justin is cheating on his wife, he's in my church, and I confront him, and I say, "Hey buddy, you need to repent. This is everything that you know is wrong." And he says, "No, I don't want to repent." So, we give him some time, pray for him, then go back to them and say, "Justin, you need to repent. You need to repent of this. You may not be able to be restored to your wife, but you need to seek restitution in this and repent of this blatant sin." "No, I don't want to." The third time: "Justin, do you understand this as a sin?" "I don't care if this is a sin. I don't want to stop this. This is what I'm doing." "All right. Well, Justin, what you are saying is you are denying the need before a sovereign God to repent of something that is offensive." Now we have to start treating you as if you're an unbeliever. We need you to examine your heart, my friend.
Justin Perdue: Exactly. This is what Paul writes so clearly about in 1 Corinthians 5. It's the purpose of church discipline. You need to actually remove the unrepentant sinner from your midst, from the Table, so that he might be restored. Implication. This is a means of the Lord's discipline that He would use in the lives of His people to unsettle them, legitimately unsettle them, and cause them to question everything that they might be brought back to the fold. It's a situation where they're being jarred and shaken awake because they've lost their senses, they've gone off the rails, and they need to be brought back in.
Jon Moffitt: There's a second scenario. Jimmy walks into the office and he goes, "Jon, I've been struggling with whatever for as long as I can remember. I don't know if I'm a Christian because I keep struggling with the same thing." I ask, "Jimmy, do you know that it's wrong?" "Of course. I know it's wrong. I hate it. I don't want to do it." Well, brother, that should encourage you. If you hate your sin and you know you shouldn't do it, you should find great comfort in the fact that the Holy Spirit is convicting you and drawing you into Christ.
This is where Theocast is going to take on a big mission this year. We've already talked about it as a team. We have to learn how to, as Christians, bear each other's burdens and struggle for the rest of our lives. The Christian life is one of struggle because we don't live in a world where sin doesn't exist; we live in a world where sin does exist, which means for the rest of your life, you will struggle, fumble, falter, and fall, but you must always look to Christ and repent. We repent daily because we need to; because we fall daily.
My encouragement is to the person who has the ongoing sin. I'll tell you right now, Jimmy, Justin, and I—we all struggle against sin. We fight it every single day. Every day we wake up and go, "I'm tired of sin. I'm tired of it." And we look to Christ.
What people are hearing is, "Well, you should question your salvation. You should be over that sin by now. How is it you can be a Christian this long and struggle with that sin?" And that is just not biblical. Go read Romans 7.
Jimmy Buehler: I know we've said this in one of our very first podcasts where it's like, "If you've been looking at porn for 30 years, how can you be a Christian?" And you ask him, "Well, brother, what do you struggle with?" "Well, I struggle with pride."
Jon Moffitt: Can you be a christian for 30 years and struggle with pride?
Justin Perdue: You're telling me that you've been a Christian for 30 years and you're still just as prideful as you were on day one?
Jimmy Buehler: The important category of distinction we want to make is the tool—because I will say it's a tool. Calling somebody's absolution into question is a tool in the tool belt, but that tool is not to be used in an isolated sense.
Jon Moffitt: It's like the paddles that you put on someone and kick their heart. You don't just do that if someone's got a cold.
Jimmy Buehler: You don't give yourself CPR. You don't do heart surgery on yourself because that's extremely foolish and dangerous.
You talk about the keys of the Kingdom that are given to the church. This is something that was given to the pastors, the elders, and the shepherds of the church to utilize. To go to your prayer closet and say, "Am I a Christian?" You're going to come out of that closet just wrecked.
Jon Moffitt: Or you could have false confidence because you're trusting in the wrong things.
Justin Perdue: That's what I mean. You're a terrible evaluator of yourself.
Two thoughts, Jimmy. Even the illustration of church discipline being a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, let's say, but a scalpel is a tool that is utilized for a particular purpose, in a particular context, in a particular situation. This is dire and we need to operate. It ought not just be used to do other stuff with.
Secondly, you talked about the keys to the Kingdom from Matthew 16. In Matthew 18, when Jesus talks also about church discipline there, he uses that phrase that is so often just ridiculously abused and ripped out of context: "where two or three are gathered". People need to understand that that's actually spoken by the Lord Jesus Christ in the context of church discipline. What's the point being made there? This is something that needs to be done corporately, not individually. This is something that the Lord will do in our midst as we are together. This is why, just to reinforce what I said earlier, when should you question your salvation? Whenever you're facing the discipline of the church. Because this is an exercise, not just of one person saying you need to repent, this is an exercise where the entire congregation under the leadership of the pastors is looking to you saying you need to repent, and it ought to cause you to question yourself, your faith, what you believe, what you're doing. But it's a unique context, and this is not the ongoing normal experience.
To John Piper's credit, he does say in his article that he doesn't think that people should live every day of their lives questioning their salvation.
Jon Moffitt: The hard part is that it's a theme. The thing that bothers me is the emphasis: we're emphasizing the constant examination of our salvation. When you look at the New Testament, the constant examination is on whether Christ is sufficient, and if he is, then live in light of that. If Christ hasn't risen from the grave, then we should all just party, go do whatever we're going to do.
Justin Perdue: One last thought from me, and this is sort of a shift in gears, but we talked about history a little bit in the regular episode. History always matters because nothing happens in a vacuum. I think that we have a tremendously bad tendency to read our modern American evangelical context on top of the New Testament. We read it into the text, whether we would admit that we do it or not. We do live in an age that has been heavily influenced. The American evangelical church hails from revivalism and pietism. In hailing from revivalism, it hails from this decisionism and conversionism stuff that was rampant in our country for a long time. That produced a lot of bad fruit, that really bad theology of thinking that men can just make a decision for Christ, and men can do this, and people just need to transform their own lives. That really crappy theology produced a lot of really bad fruit in the church.
But then, what you don't do is you don't then take our context of nominalism, or easy believism, or whatever has been produced by bad theology, and then correct that with a bunch of Law. It can't be done. You can't assume that the apostles are dealing with the same contextual issues that we are. They're not. Not at all. When people shoot at us and say, "You guys are not interpreting this on its face," we say, "No, we are taking a plain reading of the text in its context, understanding what in the world the author was even writing to in the first place."
Jon Moffitt: All three of these guys would say this: as pastors, our number one goal and mission, as it's been handed to us from the apostle Paul and the New Testament writers, is to help the weary Christian who is new to the faith, or abused because of wrong teaching in the faith. We want to have them healthy and resting in Christ, because if they're healthy and resting, then they have the energy to do what is required of them, which is to love other sinners, which is a really complicated and hard thing to do. The only thing that helps people become healthy and rested is the sufficiency of Christ. It's to get their eyes off of themselves, to get their eyes off of their own sin, and their own performance, and fully on Christ. Once they're there, and they realize, "Okay, I am sufficient in Christ. All of what I need is here. I'm not lacking anything. I don't have to perform anymore. I don't have to approve anymore." It's at that point I can say, now take that truth that you love and rest in it. Now go give it to your neighbor sitting next to you at church, or your neighbor across the street.
What I hate about what happens in these articles is it immediately creates this introspection, and it creates people that are weak and anemic, and they're exhausted. I meet so many Christians who are exhausted. You tell them to go love someone, and it's overwhelming. It is way too much. "No way. I can barely love myself. I don't like myself. I hate myself. You want me to go love someone else?" Then you go talk to a Christian who's rested up in Christ, who feels the sufficiency of it, loves their community, and you say, "Hey, bring someone else into the community." They're saying, "Who are we rescuing next? Who are we bringing in?" I hate these types of articles because it just creates anxiety in people. It's just sad.
Justin Perdue: It creates inwardly-focused, not outwardly-focused Christians.
Jon Moffitt: Thank you all for listening. Give us your feedback in the Facebook group, send us a message, an email, or whatever. We read them all, and we try to respond to most of them. We just want to let you know that we want to interact with you, we want to encourage you. Be in prayer for us pastors, there's a lot going on for us this year. We love Theocast, but we are pastors, and we shepherd. We always want to see God's church grow, and so if this is encouraging to you, as a pastor, let us know. If you're not in a good church, trust the Word of God. Go find a good church. You will find rest there. You may have to move. I'll just leave that there.
See you next week.
