His first e-mail to me was a simple question. He asI want to take you this morning to Mark 9:24. This text contains one of my favorite statements in all of Scripture, and it touches on the doctrine of assurance. What first brought me to this text last year was that I reviewed all the sermons I have ever preached in the past 15 years at Grace church, and I realized I had never done a message devoted entirely to the subject of assurance. That's a pretty significant oversight, if you ask me, so I ended up preaching a long series on assurance in order to correct the imbalance.
What brought that particular subject and this specific verse to mind a year ago was that I got an e-mail from a man in the Middle East who had been listening to some of my sermons on the Internet, and he was writing to ask for help with doubts about his salvation. I'll read you just a few excerpts without violating his anonymity, but I want to share some of our correspondence with you because frankly, the questions he raises are the very same questions lots of Christians ask all the time. These e-mails could easily be echoed by thousands upon thousands of Christians who struggle with the very same fears that have assaulted this man's faith. Here is what he wrote.
His first e-mail to me was a simple question. He asks, "Should I say: 'As of now I believe I'll be in Heaven,' or 'I know I'll be in Heaven'? . . . I don't know if any believer has a right to say . . . "I know for sure that I will never be like Demas."
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Phil Johnson is Executive Director of Grace to You, the media ministry of John MacArthur. Phil is also an elder at Grace Community Church, where he pastors the GraceLife fellowship group. He is probably best known for his websites, which include The Spurgeon Archive and The Hall...
#47 - Top Played Sermon (48-Hours) on 2/17/2011
