How Do I Know If I’m Actually Saved?

I wish I could say that because I believe in Jesus Christ, I never question whether I am actually saved.

That would make this article much easier to write.

The truth is that my confidence can be weak, particularly when I have fallen back into the same areas of sin that I have struggled with before. For me, anger and lust are two of those areas. I can make progress, recognize temptation earlier, resist something that once would have controlled me, and then fall again. It is often after those failures that the question enters my mind.

What if I’m not actually saved?

That question also seems to come when I already feel far from Christ. There are times when my relationship with Him feels close and I recognize the Holy Spirit working in my life. Then there are periods when that normal connection with my Lord does not seem as strong. Combine that distance with repeated sin and suddenly I can begin questioning something far bigger than the sin itself.

I believe the devil can exploit those moments of weakness. Scripture calls Satan an accuser, and I have noticed that these thoughts rarely seem to leave me wanting to run toward Jesus. They make me want to question whether I belong to Him at all.

But Scripture also tells Christians to examine themselves, so I don't think the answer is simply to dismiss every uncomfortable question about our salvation as an attack from the enemy. There is a difference between examining whether I am genuinely following Christ and becoming so consumed with my own failures that I forget who my salvation depends upon.

That distinction is something I am still learning.

What Am I Actually Putting My Faith In?

When doubt comes, I have to return to what I actually believe about Jesus.

I believe Jesus Christ was both God and man. I believe He descended from Heaven and was born into this world, lived the sinless life that none of us could live, and willingly went to the cross on our behalf. I believe the perfect man took upon Himself what I could never pay for myself. I believe He died, was buried, and rose from the dead three days later because death could not hold Him.

Outside of life itself, I cannot think of a greater gift we have ever been given.

My relationship with belief has changed considerably over the course of my life. When I was younger, I was exposed to the secular argument that the Bible was essentially mythology—a collection of ancient stories that intelligent modern people had outgrown. As a younger and weaker man, my thinking could be challenged by that fairly easily because I didn't know enough to challenge it back.

A few years ago, when my faith became rattled, something changed. Instead of simply accepting what other people said about Christianity, I started investigating it for myself. I began studying the Bible more seriously. I started looking into the people, places and events it describes. I looked at historical and physical evidence surrounding biblical claims and began paying much closer attention to biblical prophecy and what I believed I could see unfolding around me.

Apparently, there is an auditor somewhere inside me that wasn't satisfied with being told to believe something simply because I was supposed to.

The more I investigated, the more convinced I became.

That is why I sometimes struggle with the word faith when it is used to mean believing something despite having no evidence for it. I don't feel as though I am blindly hoping Jesus was a real man who walked this earth. His existence is not something I personally question. And after examining the evidence surrounding the claims of Christianity, I have become convinced of His death and resurrection as well.

But I still like another way of describing what changed:

My faith is no longer blind.

There are still things I cannot physically see. I cannot look into the Book of Life and find my name written there. I cannot see Heaven from where I am sitting. I still have to trust the promises of Christ and rely upon Him for something I cannot accomplish for myself.

And that is where my struggle with assurance actually begins.

What If Jesus Says He Never Knew Me?

There is a passage in Matthew 7 that frightens me more than almost any other passage concerning salvation.

Jesus warns that not everyone who calls Him “Lord” will enter the kingdom of Heaven. Some will point to the things they did in His name, and He will tell them that He never knew them.

That terrifies me.

The thought of reaching the end of my life, standing before Jesus and discovering that I had deceived myself is difficult to even contemplate. I don't want to simply wear the label of Christian. I don't want to spend my life convincing myself that I belong to Christ if I never truly belonged to Him.

That fear creates an uncomfortable tension when I look at my own life.

If salvation is through Christ and not something I earn through good behaviour, then my works cannot save me. Ephesians 2 makes that clear: we are saved by grace through faith, not by works so that nobody can boast. Yet the passage immediately continues by saying that we were created in Christ Jesus for good works.

James is even more uncomfortable. He says that faith without works is dead.

So which is it?

I think the problem comes when I treat works as if they have only one possible purpose. There is a tremendous difference between works being the price of salvation and works being the fruit of salvation.

If I begin doing Christian things because I think I can accumulate enough points to get through the gates of Heaven, I have misunderstood grace. I cannot outwork my sin. I cannot build a résumé impressive enough that the cross becomes unnecessary. I cannot stand before Christ and demand entrance because I prayed enough, gave enough, served enough or behaved better than the man standing beside me.

But the opposite extreme doesn't make sense either. If I claim to belong to Christ while having absolutely no interest in obeying Him, no concern about my sin, no desire to change and no evidence whatsoever that following Him has affected my life, Scripture gives me reasons to take that seriously.

That is where examining myself becomes uncomfortable.

Am I doing these things because I love Christ, or because I want to prove that I am a good Christian?

Am I obeying because the Holy Spirit is calling me toward something, or because I want to glorify my own effort?

And when I fail, am I interpreting that failure as evidence that Christ has abandoned me, or am I returning to Him in repentance?

I don't always have clean answers.

When My Confidence Is Weak

One of the things that surprised me while looking into assurance of salvation is how directly Scripture speaks about the possibility of knowing that we have eternal life.

First John 5:13 says that John wrote to those who believe in the name of the Son of God so that they may know that they have eternal life.

Not guess.

Not desperately hope.

Know.

That verse matters to me because my confidence is almost always weaker than I think it should be.

Romans 8 gives me another place to look. Paul describes believers as receiving the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out to God as Father, and says that the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.

I have to rely on the Holy Spirit regularly to remind me of who I belong to.

There is something powerful about knowing that you have been chosen by God, but there is another side to that relationship that I don't want to ignore. If the Holy Spirit is calling me toward obedience, then I have to be willing to listen. Grace cannot become an excuse to repeatedly silence conviction because obedience is inconvenient.

This connects directly to my struggle with repeated sin.

When I fall into anger or lust, my instinct can be to look at the failure and ask whether a genuinely saved Christian would have done what I just did. But perhaps I am asking the question in the wrong direction.

Instead of asking whether I have finally become good enough to prove my salvation, perhaps I should ask what my life is actually oriented toward.

Do I believe Jesus Christ is Lord?

Do I trust what He accomplished on the cross rather than what I can accomplish for myself?

When I sin, do I want to remain there, or does something inside me call me back toward repentance?

Am I becoming more sensitive to sin rather than less?

Do I desire to obey Christ even when I fail at doing so?

None of those things make me my own saviour.

They point me back toward the One who is.

My Salvation Cannot Depend on How Confident I Feel Today

I think this is where I have been getting assurance wrong.

If my salvation depends upon how strongly I feel saved on a particular day, then I am going to be in trouble.

My emotions are far too unstable for that responsibility.

There are days when Christ feels incredibly close. There are days when prayer comes naturally and I recognize His direction in my life. There are other days when I am tired, angry, distracted or ashamed of something I have done, and that connection seems distant.

Christ cannot become less trustworthy every time my confidence changes.

That doesn't mean I should never examine myself. Scripture gives me every reason to take my faith seriously. Jesus' warning about those who call Him Lord should never become so familiar that I stop hearing it. I should care about whether my life produces fruit. I should care about obedience. I should care when I repeatedly return to the same sin.

But self-examination has to eventually lead me somewhere other than deeper into myself.

It has to lead me back to Jesus.

When the question “Am I really saved?” comes after another failure, I can spend hours measuring the quality of my Christianity. I can count my sins against my good works. I can examine whether I prayed enough, obeyed enough, changed enough or believed strongly enough.

And at the end of all that examination, I am still looking at myself.

The gospel tells me to look somewhere else.

I believe Jesus Christ came into this world. I believe He lived without sin. I believe He went willingly to the cross for sinners like me. I believe He died and rose again. I believe that salvation is found in Him, and I have placed myself in His hands.

My confidence in myself may be weak.

My confidence in Christ does not have to be.

Maybe that is what I need to remember the next time I fall into the same sin and hear that familiar question again.

I should examine myself honestly. I should repent where repentance is needed. I should listen when the Holy Spirit calls me toward obedience. I should never use grace as permission to live however I please.

But after I have done that, I need to remember where my salvation rests.

Not in the perfection of my obedience.

Not in the strength of my emotions.

Not in how saved I happen to feel that morning.

In Jesus Christ.

And when my assurance is weak, perhaps the answer isn't to convince myself that I am stronger than I think.

Perhaps it is to remember that my Savior is.