Assurance

Assurance is the confidence a believer has that God’s promise of salvation will hold, not because of anything unstable in the believer, but because of what is unshakable in God. Scripture never grounds assurance in a feeling generated from within. It grounds assurance in who God is and what he has said.

How can I know I am truly saved?

The writer of Hebrews shows how far God went to secure this confidence for his people: “God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, He guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we… would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us” (Hebrews 6:17-18). God’s promise and God’s oath are both unchangeable, and both stand behind the believer’s hope. Assurance rests on God’s word, not on the strength or consistency of the believer’s own feelings about it.

Why is assurance described as an anchor?

This is why the same passage calls that hope “an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast” (Hebrews 6:19), fixed in the true sanctuary where Christ himself has entered. An anchor holds a ship steady precisely because it is fastened to something outside the ship itself. Assurance does not float on subjective certainty. It is anchored outside the believer, in the God who cannot lie and the Christ who has already gone within the veil. The articles below trace this theme through several key passages.