Believers should review their lives, confess their backsliding, and humbly cast themselves upon their covenant-keeping God and his gracious promises in Christ, being sure to engage continually in fresh acts of ongoing conversion through faith and repentance. If Job and David recovered from their loss of assurance (Job 19:25–27; Psalms 42:5–8; 51:12), why shouldn’t the believer today? The loss here is only for a short time; soon we will have perfect assurance and perfect enjoyment of God forever in the eternal Celestial City.

With regard to Christian doctrines, the Puritans were not, for the most part, great innovators, but they were great appliers. Generally speaking, they were thoroughly Reformed and intentional in their theology. As with their theological forbears, the Reformers, the Puritans resolved to be thoroughly scriptural and happily stood on the shoulders of the Reformers and taught the same biblical doctrines to their generation. But they did so with a great deal more emphasis on application.
This ought not be surprising. The Reformers were occupied largely with hammering out great cardinal doctrines such as justification by faith alone, how to worship God publicly, God’s irresistible free grace versus human free will, and more — much of which is summarized in their five major solas: sola Scriptura, sola fide, solus Christus, sola gratia, and soli Deo gloria. Thus, the Puritans, having the luxury of the Reformers’ biblical treatises before them, could afford the time to address the “how-to” questions of application: How does Bible doctrine apply to daily life? How can I live soli Deo Gloria as a godly husband, a godly wife, a godly child?
Hence, the Puritans wrote at least thirty books on how to live to God’s glory in marriage and family life. They wrote at least forty books on how to meditate. They added more volumes on how to do our daily work to God’s glory, how to live a godly life in our secular professions, and how to live zealously for the glory of God in every area of life.
How Can I Find Assurance?
The Puritans also wrote extensively on the practicalities of living by faith, practicalities that boiled down to this: How can I live so fully by faith that I may know with certainty that I have saving faith — that is to say, how can I be assured in the depths of my soul that, in union with Christ, I have been regenerated and adopted into God’s family, and will be with Christ forever in heaven? Hence, they wrote dozens of books on faith and assurance, and called their hearers to practice self-examination to “make their calling and election sure” (2 Peter 1:10).
The Puritans did not write extensively on assurance of faith because they wanted to be excessively introspective or “navel-gazers,” as they have been accused by some who have, for the most part, not read their books. Rather, they wanted to trace out in detail the Holy Spirit’s saving work in their own souls in order to (1) give glory to the triune God for his mighty and miraculous work of salvation in them, (2) do good to their own souls by building up their convictions about God and their own salvation, and (3) assist weak believers who needed pastoral advice and assistance to grow in their knowledge and assurance of Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and Lord, and through this precious Mediator, to grow in their knowledge of each divine person of the Trinity.
Look with me especially at this third point as we address the question, How did the Puritan pastors use their doctrine of personal assurance of salvation to assist believers in living the Christian life? And what lessons can we learn today from their pastoral specialization in the vast field of experiential Christianity connected with the assurance of salvation?
An exhaustive article on this subject would certainly turn into a book, as there are scores of areas that could be discussed. Rather than skate over the surface, I want to address twelve of the most important pastoral ways that Puritan pastors, as physicians of souls, assisted the members of their flocks, helping them to gain robust measures of full assurance of faith. We find the most important confessional chapter ever written on the subject in the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 18, “Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation.” I will provide three pastoral helps from each of these four paragraphs (hereafter: WCF 18.1–4).
WCF 18.1: Hope of Assurance
Although hypocrites, and other unregenerate men, may vainly deceive themselves with false hopes and carnal presumptions of being in the favour of God, and estate of salvation (which hope of theirs shall perish): yet such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus and love Him in sincerity, endeavouring to walk in all good conscience before Him, may, in this life, be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace, and may rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, which hope shall never make them ashamed.
Pastoral Help 1: An important distinction exists between the false hopes and carnal presumptions of the unbeliever on the one hand, and the true assurance and well-grounded hope of the believer on the other.
To make this distinction clear, Puritan pastors distinguished for their church members the difference between what they called historical and temporary faith on the one hand, and saving faith on the other. The former ultimately rests on self-confidence born merely out of intellectual convictions (historical faith) or emotional joy (temporary faith) — as, for example, in the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:20–21) — while the latter humbles us before God and teaches us to rely wholly on the righteousness of Christ alone for salvation.
Pastoral Help 2: Some degree of assurance of salvation is biblical and normative in the lives of God’s people.
Pastorally, this helped Puritan pastors maintain in their people the conviction that though full, robust assurance of salvation may not be common to all believers, some degree of assurance is (even if it is only in seed form) and is always inseparable from saving faith in Christ. Every part of WCF 18.1 is connected with Jesus: believe in him; love him; walk before him. By maintaining this conviction, Puritan pastors sought to avoid the problem of a two-tier Christianity in which few in the first tier ever make it to the second. This emphasis also encouraged believers, whatever degree of assurance they may have possessed, always to strive for more, so that they might grow in the grace and knowledge of their Savior.
Pastoral Help 3: Assurance of salvation is not essential for salvation or for the being or existence of saving faith, though it is essential for the well-being of faith.
The Puritans made this distinction so that weak believers or newly saved believers would not despair if they did not yet possess full assurance of salvation, but also that they would not rest content without full assurance of salvation. This kept believers biblically balanced in recognizing that though it is possible to be saved without assurance, it is scarcely possible to be a healthy Christian without assurance.
In Puritan thinking, this also implies that believers may possess saving faith without the joy and full assurance that they possess it. This helped Puritan pastors deal with the reality that some believers seem to possess a great deal more faith and assurance than they realize, whereas other believers seem to more easily become fully conscious of possessing a full assurance of faith. In this, the Puritans followed Calvin, who said in his Commentary on John 20:3 that the disciples seem to have had saving faith without awareness that they had it as they approached the empty tomb.
WCF 18.2: Grounds of Assurance
This certainty is not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope; but an infallible assurance of faith founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God, which Spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.
Pastoral Help 4: Assurance of salvation is grounded in the promises of God and buttressed by personal sanctification and the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit.
The proper starting point for all true assurance of salvation is “the divine truth of the promises of salvation” set forth in Holy Scripture, “the promises of God” sealed with God’s own “yea and amen” in his Son, Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 1:19–20). Puritan pastors taught their hearers that though self-examination is important, they should nevertheless take ten looks to Christ for every look they take to their inner spiritual condition. They taught that as assurance grows, God’s promises become increasingly real to the believer personally and experientially, as they experience the truth and power of those promises.
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Pride obscures our relationship with God by treating God as smaller than he actually is, and treating ourselves as greater than we actually are. Pride is a distortion of reality. God can no more work with pride than reason with a lunatic. Pride is a kind of moral madness, where we see ourselves as gods with intrinsic beauty. With pride goes unbelief, which is refusing to accept what God says about us, himself and reality. We can only love and reverence God rightly if we grant to God his true place of firstness in our lives.

At the heart of reverence, or holy love, are six components: otherness, openness, submissiveness, gratefulness, childlikeness, and wholeheartedness. To rescue reverence is to understand these in turn.
What is the fundamental obstacle to knowing and loving God? Self-worship. Pride and unbelief, the two sides of the coin of Self, are at the root of every sin, and therefore at the root of fleeing from God. Stubborn independence, guiltily skulking away, and refusing to find pleasure in his beauty come from the flesh’s desire to rule. Unbelieving pride is the mother of all sins, and the root of all spiritual malfunction.
If we are to worship God by knowing him, the absolute starting point is that we recognise he is God and we are not. Christianity broken down to its first principle is this: only one God exists, and he is not us. He is not a means to our own ends. We have been created to know and love him for who he is. If we are to love God as he is, we must deny ourselves, recognising that our lives do not revolve around ourselves, since we orbit the sun that is God, not the other way around. We must turn from trying to use God, or manipulate God, and come to him to love him as our only God. We must settle on the fact that there will be only one ultimate love in our lives, and it will be God. A failure to give God his place as God is at the root of all our problems.
This foundational attitude of loving God we could call otherness. It understands that the Great Choice of life is to acknowledge God’s claim on us, go out of ourselves, as Augustine put it, and acknowledge God’s claim on us. Our fundamental posture is oriented away from self towards the other: the Great Other Himself.
Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, But to Your name give glory, Because of Your mercy, Because of Your truth. (Psa 115:1)
Otherness is to understand that life is not about self. Life is about going outside of ourselves to God. It is about him. He is God, we are not. He is the source, we are not. He is Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End. This is the starting point of the fear of the Lord.
A biblical word for otherness is humility.
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If you are in Christ, these are not words of condemnation, since you have been washed and renewed in him. You are now already clean and pure, not because of your own merits, but because of God’s gracious intervention on your behalf. Do you still struggle with sin? So did Peter! In fact, not long after Jesus pronounced him clean and pure, Peter ended up denying Jesus three times. And yet, he was later completely restored. Our right standing before God is found exclusively in Christ.

How should we interpret Mt 5:8 which says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”? This teaching comes from Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount, and it appears in the opening section of that sermon commonly referred to as the Beatitudes (which is an old English way of referring to the state of “sublime blessedness”). But most of the time I’ve interacted with this verse over the decades, I must admit that I’ve often come away feeling condemned rather than blessed, for if only the pure in heart end up seeing God, then what hope is there for someone like me?
What’s odd is that the Bible itself raises this very question in Prov. 20:9 when it asks, “Who can say I have kept my heart pure, that I am clean from sin?” Jeremiah appears to answer this question negatively when he says, “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” (Jer 17:9). So then, how should we interpret Jesus’ words in Mt 5:8?
In the first 8 verses of Matthew chapter 5, we read the following:
Seeing the crowds, [Jesus] went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’
Too often, I think, we read the Beatitudes as if Jesus had told his followers that they would be blessed if they become meek, contrite, or merciful, and insofar as they work hard to purify their hearts, etc. But this isn’t what Jesus is saying in this passage. Unlike Moses, Jesus isn’t promising his followers future rewards on the condition of obedience to his commands. In fact, as you study these words closely, you’ll discover that there aren’t any commands or imperatives to be be found here in the Beatitudes. Commands and imperatives lied at the very heart and center of the Mosaic covenant. Moses, you may recall, told the people they would be blessed if they kept the law, and that they would be cursed if they did not. After hearing the law proclaimed by God himself at Mt. Sinai, the people responded by saying, “All the words Yahweh has spoken we will do” (Ex 24:3).
But Jesus is not a new Moses. Rather than promising future blessing as the reward of obedience, Jesus first blesses his people and calls them to live in the light of this new reality. This is the fulfillment of the “new covenant” prophesied by Jeremiah: “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel…not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke” (Jer 31:31-32). This covenant, according to the prophet, was NOT going to be like the Sinai covenant. Here in Matthew 5, it’s important for us to notice that Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount, not with legal obligations, but gospel blessings. And this becomes even more clear when we consider Jesus’ audience.
At the opening of Matthew 5 we’re told that as Jesus saw the crowds, “he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them…” For most of my Christian life I pictured Jesus standing on the top of a hill as he delivered the Sermon on the Mount and addressed the crowds below. But the words of this passage instead make clear that when the crowds began to follow Jesus on this occasion, he decided to leave them behind as he climbed to the top of a nearby mountain. Then he called for his disciples to join him (Mt 5:1, Mk 3:13, Lk 6:13), and when they arrived, he sat down and began to teach them (Mt 5:2).
Have you ever pictured it this way? Jesus isn’t standing, he’s sitting. And he’s not preaching to the masses, but to a smaller group of disciples who specifically responded to his call. He’s in a remote location, away from the crowds, teaching his followers while he’s in a seated position. In other words, it’s actually a much more intimate setting.1 According to Mark, while Jesus was on the top of the mountain, “he appointed twelve whom he also named apostles” (cf. Lk 6:13). In my thinking, therefore, the Sermon on the Mount was first intended as a kind of ordination sermon at the time the twelve were selected and appointed as apostles.
And yet, who were the men Jesus ended up appointing to this new office? Recall for a moment Peter’s comment when he first saw Jesus perform a miracle. “Depart from me,” he said, “for I am a sinful man” (Lk 5:8). This is the kind of person Jesus selected to become one of his apostles. He didn’t choose super-saints, but ordinary sinners like you and me. But how could Mt 5:8 possibly be received by someone like Peter as good news? If Peter is truly aware of his sin, wouldn’t this statement throw him into despair?
First, I think we need a quick refresher course in the theology of the Old Testament, starting with Psalm 15. This Psalm was penned by David sometime around 1000 BC, and in the first few verses we read the following:
O Lord, who shall sojourn in your tent? Who shall dwell on your holy hill? 2 He who walks blamelessly and does what is right and speaks truth in his heart; 3 who does not slander with his tongue and does no evil to his neighbor, nor takes up a reproach against his friend…”
As numerous other passages make clear, the people of Israel continually failed to live up to this standard, both individually and corporately. No one walked blamelessly and did what was right from the heart.
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