Are You Saved? How Do You Know?

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR 1 John 3:14–15 (NIV) We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him. CONSIDER How can you and I know if we’ve crossed over from darkness and entered into life? Can you be assured that you have been delivered from death to life? Is the old hymn lyric true: “You ask me how I know he lives / He lives within my heart”?1 According to John, those lyrics should look more like, “You ask me how I know he lives / I know because I actually love people now.” In all seriousness, people want assurance that their eternal salvation is secured. Many come at this by declaring it as a type of fiat, claiming texts such as Romans 10:9: “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (HCSB). Others come at the notion of the security of one’s salvation through a route of inward assurance from the Holy Spirit. They cite texts such as Romans 8:16: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (ESV). So on the one hand there’s the evidence of the “confession” outlined by Romans 10:9, and on the other there’s the subjective evidence of the inner witness referenced in Romans 8:16. John has a different kind of evidence altogether.  We know we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Because of sin, the default position for all people is death. Salvation means passing from death to life. John does not claim that one passes from death to life because of his or her love for others. He says we can be assured we have passed from death to life because we love each other. In other words, loving one another is not the condition for salvation but the evidence of it. Ephesians 2:8–9 states that there is nothing we can do to earn our salvation: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” In John’s gospel we see something that remarkably resembles today’s text: “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life” (John 5:24). For John, the assurance of one’s salvation or the quality of one’s eternal security is not assessed by the appropriateness of his or her confession of faith, nor can it be determined by his or her inner experience of the Holy Spirit. It can be known only by the inward bearing and outward behavior of one person toward another. Real love is not only right actions. Paul makes it clear that a person can demonstrate nothing short of what appears to be heroic benevolence toward other people and still be bereft of real love. He deems such activity worthless (see 1 Corinthians 13). On the other hand, an inner feeling toward others that finds no outward expression can’t be considered real love either. So maybe the question is not so much, How is it with your soul? but rather, How is it with your relationships? What if the more accurate barometer of faith is not some existential sense of inner peace but rather the shared experience of the peace of Christ in our relationships? PRAY  Lord Jesus, you are the love of God, and it is only your presence in our relationships that can release the love of God among us. You taught us to love one another as you loved us. You taught us that the only way people will know we follow you is by the way we love one another. Wake me up to this truth. Give me the courage to become graciously honest with myself about my relationships with others and what that tells me about my relationship with you. I pray in your name, Jesus. Amen.