“AN OBSERVATION RELATED TO ABRAHAM’S CONVERSION”
Genesis 15.6


Some of you here are lost.  That’s a fact.  If you die you will go to Hell and face the unending fury of God’s wrath.  If you come to Christ He will save you.  And if you get converted your salvation will be a never-changing fact.  But that’s not good enough for some of you.  Some of you want a guarantee from God about how you will feel about your salvation, and that, my friend, is not part of the package.  Assurance of salvation is not a necessary part of being saved.  How you feel about the fact of salvation, should you get saved, is not something you need concern yourself with at this time.  So, the issues are two:  There is salvation and there is assurance of salvation.  There is salvation and there is how you feel about your salvation, to phrase it in a slightly different way.

Let’s look at these two issues in two ways:


1A.  First, CONSIDER PEOPLE WHO HAVE ASSURANCE WITHOUT SALVATION

1B.  False assurance is the assurance of salvation that many unsaved people have.  It is the feeling a person has that everything is just fine between him and God, the feeling that he is truly converted, even though he’s not converted, just like those Jesus mentioned in Matthew 7.22-23.

2B.  A proper assurance of salvation comes to a genuinely converted person in an entirely different manner than false assurance comes.



2A.  NOW CONSIDER A MAN WHO HAD SALVATION WITHOUT ASSURANCE

I speak, of course, of Abraham.  Last night it suddenly came to me, while we were dealing with the lost, that Abraham is never shown in God’s Word to have had assurance that he was saved. Jesus told us of those who had assurance, but who are not saved.  Abraham is a man who was saved, but who had no assurance.  Who is better off?

1B.  Consider Moses’ record of Abraham (Genesis 15.6)

2B.  Now consider Paul’s explanation of Moses’ record (Romans 4; Galatians 3)