February 11, 2008
Coming Home: Part I—The Assurance of Salvation
In my last post, I left off at the point in my life where I had gotten the furthest from the Lord, and surrounded myself in darkness. However, it was also about this time that a friend of mine had become very concerned for me, and had talked to my sister, who, in turn, talked with my mom. The three of them (and, I’m sure, not a few others) began praying for me.
As it happened, the week before my mother finally confronted me about taking drugs, I was sitting on a bus coming back from a band trip to Disney World, and decided, I still don’t know why, that I didn’t want to be like I was anymore. This allowed me to be honest with my mom when she asked me if I was doing drugs, but also allowed me to say that I had already decided to quit.
I began to be more attentive in church, and even started going to a Wednesday night prayer meeting. Slowly, through this, and through the death of a friend of mine while we were swimming (which caused me to realize I had never spoken to him about Christ and didn’t know where he was), God was drawing me back to Himself. However, I still had some sinful habits that, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t let go of.
I knelt in prayer one evening, and was asking God’s help to overcome these sins. I can’t explain exactly what happened, but in my mind I “heard” the words, “I don’t just want your sins; I want all of you.” This was something that, though I knew it was right, I couldn’t do: give all of myself to the Lord. This meant more than just giving up my sins; this meant giving up everything. I prayed for God to help me do this, to make me willing. Finally, one evening, at a mid-week high school service at church, the speaker gave an invitation, and, after some struggle, I responded. As I stood in front of the room (”rededicating my life,” as they called it), I remember feeling freer than I ever had before. In that moment, my life changed drastically. As one of my friends later said it, “You started changing some last summer, but then sometime in the fall, you just went off the deep end.”
Some months, later, however, came my first departure from proper Evangelical Baptist doctrine.
It began with me doubting my salvation. Lacking any sort of real spiritual guide (in the Orthodox Church, a “spiritual father”), I had come to put much faith in the emotion I felt during prayer. One day, for whatever reason, this emotion ceased. My prayer seemed dead. What I understood to be a relationship with God didn’t seem to be there. As a result, I began to doubt my salvation.
Part of this had to do with my belief that the evening I “rededicated my life” was, in actuality, the evening that I had “been saved” (I had even been re-baptized based on this belief). This was based on reading Christ’s saying that those who do not leave all behind are not worthy of Him. However, my understanding, from everything I had heard growing up Baptist, was that you had to “pray the prayer.” I had not prayed that prayer! And so I began to struggle with fears that I might go to Hell. Statements often made in altar calls in my church keep flooding my mind. One such statement was, “Are you 100% sure that, if you died tonight, you would be saved? You say you’re 99% sure, but is that 1% a chance you’d risk eternity on?” I recall one evening that I stayed up as late as I could praying, afraid to go to bed, lest I die that night and go to Hell.
I was also tormented by the statement I had heard at church, “Satan would never make you doubt your salvation, because that would only draw you closer to God.” So, then, that meant I must not be saved? “But how,” I thought, “can I get any more saved?” Remember, I was basing my “assurance of salvation” on emotion. When I finally talked to my mom about this, her response was that Satan was causing me to doubt my salvation to paralyze me so I couldn’t serve the Lord (looking back, I believe she was right). But how could I be sure?
Finally, I came to a breaking point; something had to give. There was only one solution that made any sense. However, this solution flew in the face of everything I had heard about the “assurance of salvation.” Regardless, I decided to stop worrying about it. I would simply serve the Lord as best I could, and trust Him that, if I wasn’t “saved,” He would bring me to that point of salvation in due time.
Because this decision was contrary to the 100% assurance that is taught in Evangelical circles, I did often have periods of time that I revisited this question, and struggled with it. It wasn’t until some years later, when I began reading “dead people” that I found, in both a sermon by Charles Spurgeon and The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence, a similar attitude toward “assurance of salvation.”
I think it was because of this experience that I was never able to fully embrace the Evangelical Gospel: that you need only pray a prayer—sincerely and with faith—and you can be 100% sure that you will go to Heaven. As I have said since, “I was more sure of my salvation before I was saved than I have been since.”
But this was only the beginning of my departure from Evangelicalism.
Written and posted by Matt on February 11, 2008, 8:48 am.
Filed under: Communicant, General Discussion, Looking Back, Orthodoxy, Our Roots, The Journey
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Michael said,
February 11, 2008 @ 10:57 am
Wow! We’ve quite a few similarities, both you and I — the worry and fear of losing your salvation, the “are you 100% sure of your salvation” internal dialog, and even the classic book by Brother Lawrence. Thank you so much for sharing your story!
I look forward to reading more.