How Can I Be Sure of my Faith?

How can I be sure of my faith?

I want to talk about faith. What is faith? What does it mean to have faith? How can you know that you have faith?

I have an aunt who wouldn’t call herself a Christian, I don’t think – but she once said to my Mum (who is a Christian): “I wish I had the kind of faith that you have!” I think that she thought that faith was somehow inherited in your genes. Are some people born with faith in God, while others are destined to a life of cynicism and mistrust?

Tonight, I want us to look at the how we can be sure of our faith. We all go through times when we doubt God. Not necessarily just whether he exists or not, but maybe we doubt His love for each one of us. Maybe we doubt whether God is actually interested in us, Maybe we doubt that God will do anything in the situations we find ourselves in.

In 2 Corinthians 5:17 it says “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.”

If we take what the Bible says at it’s word, it says that becoming a Christian is about starting your life again! I don’t know if you have come across someone, whose completely changed when they became a Christian. I know quite a few. I know people who had drink problems, people with drug problems, people who were addicted to hating other people, who when they became a Christian their whole life completely changed. Their lives took a dramatic turn around and they started a new life that headed in a completely different direction.

But experiences vary. Some immediately know the difference in their lives, while others change very gradually. I was born in a Christian family, so my experience was very gradual. In fact, I don’t honestly remember not being a Christian. My brother converted me when I was five! Looking back on it now, I think my brother (who was only ten, himself) was just playing a game, but I took him very seriously at that age. I can remember having a real relationship with Jesus – praying that He would keep me safe, listening out to what He would say to me and so on.

The Bible says: “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” (John 1:12). Everyone has the right to become a child of God, and start living this new life, if they have consciously chosen to receive Jesus and believe in Him. Faith is not inherited. The Christian faith is something we choose into.

God wants us to be sure about it. In 1 John 5:13 it says: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know you have eternal life.” This is from a letter that one of Jesus’ disciples, John, wrote to young Christians just as the Christian church was beginning. Notice it addresses those people who believe – John obviously felt that they knew who they were – and he says “these things” to them so that they would know that they had eternal life. If we have chosen to believe in Jesus and what He does, then God wants us to know that we have eternal life.

If you’re anything like me, sometimes I am full of hope and other times I can get quite depressed about things. One thing I have learnt, though, is that to have faith in God is not about feeling hopeful about the future, because sometimes you are up and sometimes you are down. Having faith in God is about choosing to believe the word of God, even when you don’t feel very hopeful at all.

Let’s look at some of the things that the Word of God says:

In Revelation 3:20, Jesus says: “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.”

In Matthew 28:20, Jesus says: “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

In John 10:27-28, Jesus says: “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand.”

So then, the Christian faith is about taking God’s promises and deliberately choosing to believe them, even when sometimes we might not feel like it is true. It’s a choice – it’s not a feeling.

Secondly, God’s forgiveness is not something that we deserve. It has been made available to us because of what Jesus has done: The Work of Jesus

Jesus accepted the punishment for everything that we have done wrong, when he died for us on the cross, so that we might be able to begin having a proper relationship with God, Our Father.

John 3:16 says: “For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Eternal life is a gift from God that comes to us if we take God at his word, and receive it into lives.

Isaiah 53:6: “We all like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

You know the phrase: “Well, nobody’s perfect!” I’ve used it a few times, myself, as an excuse for something I have done wrong. But this excuse is saying exactly what the great man of God, Isaiah, said in the Old Testament: “We all like sheep have gone astray”. The work of Jesus, then, was to pay the price for things that all of us have done wrong. If you think about all the wrong things that you and I do, let alone the rest of the world – it must have been a pretty hefty price!
In 2 Corinthians 5:21 it says: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

It’s pretty strong stuff, isn’t it? Through the work that Jesus did 2,000 years ago, we are able to become the righteousness of God! Everything that is right about God we can be a part of that! That is something to think about!

So we can be sure of our Faith in God, because it’s not something that we deserve. It is something that Jesus deserves – if you like. We can have faith because Jesus has made it freely available to each one of us.

Practically, though the work of Jesus continues with us today. When the bible says that Jesus saves, it’s not just in a spiritual sense, it is a physical thing as well. Jesus doesn’t always save us from every danger that comes our way but there are times when I know He has saved me in very practical terms.

A few years ago, I used to live a few doors away from where Damilola got stabbed on the North Peckham Estate. Damilola was the young boy whose death astounded the nation just recently. We were being chucked out of the housing we were living in at the time and the only place they could find for us was on the North Peckham Estate. So I lived there for a couple of years. I remember being quite concerned about the prospect of living there, and one person from this Church gave me Psalm 91 as a message from God. It read:
“You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at you right hand.”

And over the two years that I stayed in that flat (it’s now been demolished by the way), that message came true. On one side of us an old lady got beaten up and left for dead on her own doorstep, and on the other – the woman got stabbed a few yards away from her door. And yet the Lord took complete care of us. That’s what it means to have faith. When you see Jesus doing things, physically, that is all part of His great plan of salvation for us all.

Thirdly, We can be sure of our faith because of the Witness of the Spirit within us.
What I mean by that is that although emotions can be up and down, and we can’t always trust what we feel. There is a part of us that let’s us know whether something is true or not. When someone becomes a Christian, God’s Holy Spirit comes to live inside us Romans 8:9 says: “You, however, are controlled not by your sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you.”

Your spirit is the part of you that sets the direction of your life. It draws you towards the things that you want. So, if God’s Holy Spirit lives inside us, we begin to be drawn towards a right relationship with God.

The Holy Spirit transforms us from within.
In Galations 5:22, it says “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

If the Spirit of God begins to live inside us, this will have an impact, not only on our character but also in our relationships.

Which of the following attitudes have you already experienced in your life?

A new love for God
A desire to read the Bible
A sense of forgiveness
A new concern for others
An enjoyment of worshipping God
A desire to meet with other Christians
All these attitudes are things that draw us towards a deeper relationship with others and also with God. It’s solid evidence of the Spirit of God within us.

So although we shouldn’t rely on our emotions, there is a deep sense of personal conviction that tells us that we are God’s children. I knew a preacher who had a near-death experience. I think he was actually clinically dead for about 8 minutes, but he came back to life again. But he used to have this phrase when talked about something with a deep sense of conviction (and having gone through this experience he was a man of deep conviction). He said that “He knew that he knew that he knew that” … God was with him or whatever he felt God was saying to him at the time.

Romans 8: 15-16 says this: “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave to fear, but received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry Abba, Father. The Spirit himself testifies that we are God’s children.”

To recap then:
1) Faith is something that we choose to have. We are not born with it, but it is available to everyone who is prepared to believe the Word of God.
2) To have faith means that we are relying on the Works of Jesus. It is not something we can achieve, but rather it is something that we receive.
3) We can be sure of our faith because there is a deep personal conviction that comes with Spirit of God that begins to live inside us. There is the Witness of the Spirit.