Assurance of God's love

Romans 5:1-8

Evidence of Eternal Security- Part 04

Assurance of God’s Love

Romans 5:1-8, Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; 4 and perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. 6 For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

• The message of chapter 5 is Justification.
• The message of Chapter 6 and 7 is Justification embraces sanctification.
• The message of chapter 8 is Justification embraces glorification.

Paul presents six great links in the chain that ties the Christian eternally to the Saviour. Six great truths inherent in salvation, which constitute its eternal character, its eternal nature and therefore, the divine guarantee.

They are six components that define salvation. 1. Peace with God, 2. Standing in grace, 3. Hope of glory, 4. Assurance of love,

5. Certainty of deliverance, and

6. Joy in God. These are the six articles in the guarantee of your eternal salvation, so we need to learn them well.

1. Peace with God

V1, “Therefore, having been justified by faith,”

• God is the enemy of the sinner, and
• The sinner is the enemy of God.  God is at war with the sinner, and  The sinner is at war with God.

The unregenerate hate the Bible.

Psalm 7:11, “God is angry with the wicked every day.” Every day. Since we have been justified by faith, the first one, we have peace with God. Justification, reconciliation, they are indistinguishable.

They are distinguishable as terms, but they are indistinguishable in terms of reality. 2. Standing in grace, V 2, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

This is one of the great statements in all the Bible.

We have access by faith into this Grace. You have access into a sphere of grace. It's in this grace in which we stand. Histmi in the Greek meaning Abide. We live in this Spirit. When you became a Christian, wonderful reality is that you entered into intimate access to God.

Histmi means to stand firm, to abide. We are firmly fixed in a state of grace. This is the comforting reality.

What is grace? God's unmerited favour and forgiveness to sinners.

Ephesians 2:8-9, For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.

• Your peace is established with God, purely on the merits of Christ's work.
• Your grace, your access into this sphere of grace is purely on the merit of Christ's work on the cross.
• You stand before God in a relationship of peace.
• You stand before God in an environment of grace.

All because of what Christ has done. 3. Hope of glory, V 2, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Glory of God. We have taken this as our focus for this year and beyond for our lives.

That was the most life-changing discovery I ever made in all my Christian life when I discovered the reality of the meaning of the glory of God. The Greatest theme is the Glory of God. Tribulation is not a problem for Christians.

For one thing it's an honour to suffer for Christ. For another thing it is a joy to learn to experience His sustaining power in the middle of suffering.

We are not moaning and groaning here with all the struggle and hoping for that heaven. No matter also what those trials bring, and do, one thing they will never do is take away your future hope because that is secure. The greater my spiritual character the greater my hope, and the greater my rejoicing for what God has for me in the future.

4. Assurance of God’s love

V 5, Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. God has begun a love relationship that stretches through all eternity. We have become the possessors of love.

The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the resident Holy Spirit who is given unto us. When you become a Christian, God deposits in you the Holy Spirit.

Ephesians 1:13-14, In Him you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also,

having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, 14 who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory. Paul the apostle calls Holy Spirit the earnest, or the arrabn. It means engagement ring, or down payment, or guarantee.

When you become a Christian, you are given a guarantee, and that is the guarantee of your ultimate glory, the guarantee of your ultimate salvation, the guarantee of heaven, the guarantee of your perseverance, your security. That guarantee is none other than the indwelling Holy Spirit given to every Christian.

The Holy Spirit, then, produces in us an awareness of the love of God. The most overwhelming concept in all of Christianity is that God loves us! Let the Holy Spirit to speak it to you in words that I can't speak. But what it speaks of a personal, internal, intimate ministry of God through the Holy Spirit which takes security out of the cognitive area. It takes security out of the mind and plunges it into the heart.

It is not intellectual. It is emotional. It is not objective but subjective now. God is assuring our hearts that we belong to Him by pouring out love.

Romans 8:14-15, For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. 15 For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.” Have you ever been led by the Spirit of God? If you have ever been led to do anything for the glory of God, it was the Spirit of God leading you.

• If you have ever been led to a righteous behaviour,
• If you have ever been led to an intense and faithful study of the Word of God,
• If you have ever been led into prayer,
• If you have ever been led to worship the Lord Jesus Christ with all your heart,
• If you have ever been led to any of these things,

It has been the Holy Spirit leading. If we have sensed the Holy Spirit's leading, then we know we are the sons of God.

If we have sensed intimacy with God, that is an internal subjective assurance of salvation. The unbeliever feels none of that. The unregenerate individual senses,

• no affinity,
• no intimacy,
• no communication with God.

But for those of us who know Jesus Christ, God has put His Spirit in us and His Spirit in us draws us into an intimate love relationship with the living God Himself. So, listen carefully now. Security in our salvation comes not only from outside revelation but from inside revelation, not only from the mind, the cognitive process, but from the heart.

V 5, Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. This is not talking about our love for God. This is talking about God's love for us.

How do we know that? Because the rest of the passage makes that point.

V 8, But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. It's talking about God's love for us. so the truth is that God's love for us has been deposited in our hearts by the presence of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit gives the believer the sense that God loves Him. We are emotional beings. We are beings who feel and respond to the moving of the Spirit of God. We can know in our minds that we have peace with God, that because there was a divine transaction on the cross in which God's wrath was poured out and now, He can make peace with sinners.

We can know in our minds that we stand in grace, and we can have a sense of that standing cognitively. It is logical, that's reasonable. We can know in our minds that we have been redeemed for future glory. But God goes beyond that and says, not only do I want you to know that factually and by revelation, I want you to feel that in your heart. So, God sheds abroad in our hearts His love through the Holy Spirit.

You will forfeit the sense of assurance that comes by the Spirit ministering to you that God loves you. You will forfeit that if you live in disobedience.

How do we know that?

Galatians 5:22-23, But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. If in your life, by disobedience you quench the Spirit, if in your life by unrighteousness, by unconfessed sin, by disobedience you grieve the Spirit, you will cause the Spirit to bear no fruit. You will hinder that operation.

What you will lose is the sense of love. The fruit of the Spirit has to do with love and so forth, perhaps in the fullest dimension. But I am convinced that it has to do just as well with the sense of God loving you because it talks so much about a very private internal reality which is the second one named, peace, and another very private internal reality, joy.

So, we have to recognize that though God has shed abroad His love in our hearts by the Holy Spirit if we are not walking in the Spirit and we are not going to experience that assurance. Ephesians chapter 3 is very practical.

Ephesians 3:14-19, For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— 19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Paul says, I am praying for you that you would know the full strength of the Spirit, that you would know the full power of the operation of the Holy Spirit, that you would really know the Spirit moving in your life.

Why? If you are going to really see the Spirit operating in full power in your life then you must get rid of the sin, the disobedience, the flesh, the selfishness, and all of that. When that is gone, and the Spirit of God is operating in full strength and Christ is to settle down and be at home. When you are controlled by the Spirit then Christ is at home in your heart.

You will be rooted and grounded in love.

Whose love? Not your love for God. You will be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, length, depth, and heigh, and to know the love of Christ. What does he want us to experience the love of Christ? Exactly what it says in Romans 5 He shed abroad in our hearts.

If it is shed abroad in our hearts, why does he pray that we might know it? Because, if it's shed abroad on our hearts, it is shed abroad through the Holy Spirit, who is given unto us and here we learn that if we are not strengthened with might by His Spirit, we will not fully comprehend His love. That is why, beloved, Christians who walk in disobedience, Christians who walk in sinful patterns, Christians who are unrighteous, do not have the sense of being secure in their salvation because all they have got to lean on is that cognitive stuff.

They may say we have peace with God. Oh yes, we stand in grace. Oh yes, we have hope of glory. But they do not know that internal subjective ministry of God's Spirit affirming to their soul at its deepest point that they belong to God.

So, there must be that obedience to walk in the Spirit so that we may be able to comprehend to grasp, to make one's own. The Lord has given us an internal witness. We need to seize it and make it our own. So, when you ask me if I know I am saved and secure?

I am secure because of the transaction that made peace, grace, and hope a reality. I am also going to tell you that I know that I belong to Jesus Christ because the Holy Spirit witnesses with my spirit that I am a child of God.

Romans 8. The Holy Spirit causes me in the depths of my heart to cry out to God, “Abba, Father,” a term of intimacy, “Daddy,” and have a sense in my heart that I have every right to say that to Him. “shed abroad/poured out”

The word carries the idea of profuse pouring out, of lavishly pouring out, of copiously pouring out. It's not that God's up there with an eyedropper. God is not like us! He lavishly profusely, copiously pours it out.

John 7:37-38, On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. 38 He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”

God never does anything in the drops. He always does it in the rivers. God's love is not dripped on us one drop at a time, it is profusely poured out. So, our hearts are filled with the sense of His love as the Spirit of God confirms it to us.

V 5, Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. The Holy Spirit is the agent by which God works in the life of the believer. He is the gift of God's love.

The Holy Spirit lives in a believer is in itself a massive testimony to the love of God. Would God give you His Spirit if He didn't love you? Would God plant His Spirit, the third member of the Trinity, within the life of a believer if He didn't love that believer?

The very fact that the Spirit of God is there in residence in your heart is the great testimony of the love of God.

2 Corinthians 1:22, who also has sealed us and given us the Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.

It is the down payment. Is the engagement ring that proves once and for all that the final salvation will indeed come to pass? In Ephesians 1:13 it says we are sealed by the Spirit, sealed with the stamp of God, never to be broken or opened by anyone else.

Romans 8:35-39, Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36 As it is written: “For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” 37 Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. 38 For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

What shall separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword, can that separate us? No!

What shall separate us from the love of Christ? Nothing! If you still wonder whether you are secure in the Lord, you ought to read that again. Nothing! But the assurance of that in our hearts comes by the ministry of the blessed gift of God, the Holy Spirit Himself, who is given to us to confirm that reality to us.

Based on this scripture, that no human heart can truly know the love of God unless he has living in him the Holy Spirit. The only people who have the Holy Spirit are Christians. We alone know that God loves us and the Spirit points that to us.

Again, if a Christian goes through a period when he loses this sense of God loving him, it is because he has quenched the ministry of the Spirit of God. V 6, For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.

Paul wants to talk a little more about this love and he wants to define the nature of it. You don't want to lose your train of thought here. Tell us how we can know what kind of love it is. When we are powerless, impotent, without strength to do anything that pleased God.

• Without strength to overcome sin.
• Without strength to overcome Satan.
• Without strength to overcome the world.
• Without strength to overcome death.
• Without strength to overcome hell.
• Without strength period to live a righteous life.
• Without strength to save ourselves when we were literally paralyzed by our sin, and unable to do anything about it.
• We had no moral ability at all, none.
• We were enemies of holy God.

In the flesh we cannot please God. So, we were powerless to overcome our sin, Satan, death, hell, to please God. When God looked at us, all He could see in us was something to make Him be disgusted, to be full of wrath and anger.

Why?

Ungodly, we were the very opposite of God. We were ungodly. So, here are these ungodly, impotent people. Amazing that God, who is absolutely pure, holy, looked at people who were repulsive to His holy nature, who were the very opposite of everything He is, and He loved them.

How much? So much that at the right time, in the fullness of time, at the right season God prescribed, Christ died for the ungodly. If God were to love the good and God were to love the godly and God were to love the pure then it is fine. But the mystery of divine love is that He loved those were the opposite of all of that.

If God loved us because we loved Him, He would love us only so long as we loved Him and on that condition, and then our salvation would depend on the constancy of our treacherous hearts, but as God loved us as sinners, as Christ died for us as ungodly, our salvation depends, not on our loveliness, but on the constancy of God's love.

God doesn't love you because you are so lovely!

God didn't look down on us and say they are irresistible.

Our love is object-oriented, isn't it? Our love is attracted by the nature of the object. We basically love based upon the object that attracts us. Something about that object pulls love out of you. Basically, human love is based on the object, God's love is built into His nature so that if you happen to exist, you get loved.

There was nothing in us to attract Him. If there was nothing in us to attract Him to love us in the first place, what could there be in us to make Him stop loving in the second place? Couldn't be anything. If Christ died for us when we were ungodly, impotent, ugly sinners and God could love us then, is it going to be any problem for Him to love us now?

“Christ died for the ungodly.” Christ died in behalf of the ungodly, or instead of the ungodly, or for the sake of the ungodly. Christ died instead of the ungodly on behalf of. Great truth!

John 11:49-52, And one of them, Caiaphas, being high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all, 50 nor do you consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and not that the whole nation should perish.” 51 Now this he did not say on his own authority; but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, 52 and not for that nation only, but also that He would gather together in one the children of God who were scattered abroad.

Galatians 3:13, Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”), Christ became a curse instead of us on our behalf.

What a wonder that at the proper moment in the fullness of time He appeared once in the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, the consummation of human history. The marvel of it is that He died with such love that He loved the unlovely, unlovable, and godless people.

V 7, For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die.

Men rarely will die for a righteous man. Sometimes in human society, somebody might die for a good person. Somebody might sacrifice his life for the sake of another good person. But the point of verse 7 is nobody is going to die for a bad person, nobody but God.

V 8, But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. This is the contrast, and why divine love is so surpassing. But God commended/demonstrated His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

If this passage doesn't shake you to the foundation of your being, it is because you don't know how God hates sin, or you don't know how sinful we are. Infinitely holy God, who is of purer eyes than to behold evil, cannot look upon iniquity. The God who hates every sin, every evil deed, evil thought, evil word, despises it with the fury of all of heaven, that He could reach out and love ungodly, impotent sinners. That is the surpassing nature of divine love.

God proved the nature of His love, the level of His love, the zenith of His love because while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Now, that is the security of our salvation. If God can love us when we are ungodly, wicked, impotent sinners, if He can love us enough to have His Son die for us to save us when we are godless, will He not love us enough to keep us after we have become His children?

You say but if you sin, you are out. Listen, when we got in, we were wretched sinners, we will never be that bad again. If He was willing to love us into redemption when we were wretched sinners, will He not keep us redeemed when we are less wretched by His grace?

That's Paul's argument. So, what fills the heart of the believer is the love of God.

What kind of love is it? It is the kind of love that reaches out and redeems an impotent, godless sinner.

If it does that, it will hang on to a sometimes-sinning saint. There is no argument against this! The confidence of that love, that forgiving love is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit so that when I sin, I don't duck and expect God to whack me and send me to hell.

I cry out, O Father, by Your love forgive me, because I have the sense of His love. If God gave the greatest gift His love could give, which is His Son, to save us, and then gave the greatest gift He could give, His Spirit, to fill our hearts with love, will He not do less to keep us?

John 17:23, I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.

This is the verse has completely changed my life! His love hasn't changed. He loved us when we were wretched. He still does.

Closing story

Beth combing the hair of an old man in a wheel in the chair in airport departure gate.