Assurance of Salvation

Pastor Martin addresses the origin of the fear of God, demonstrating that it is a distinct blessing of the new covenant, not something that grows on natural Adamic soil. He expounds Jeremiah 32:38-40 to show that God pledges to put His fear into the hearts of His people, then traces how the three ingredients of the fear of God correspond to the three blessings promised in Jeremiah 31:31-34. He culminates with Psalm 130:4 — 'There is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest be feared' — showing that the discovery of forgiveness through the blood of Christ is the very thing that produces true, covenant-rooted fear of God.

Pastor Martin draws out the individual implications of Christ's prophetic office. From the Father's command at the Transfiguration — 'Hear ye him' — he shows that hearing must be the hearing of disciples (not beasts or mere rational creatures) in three spheres: personal safety (receiving Christ's hard teachings on the heart, new birth, narrow gate, exclusive claims), personal assurance (John 8:47 — he that is of God heareth the words of God), and personal direction in duty (Manton on swallowing what Christ teaches without dissecting). Preached during Christmas season.

Pastor Martin examines the continuous, ongoing effects of regeneration as distinct from the immediate effects of repentance and faith. Following an outline drawn from Robert Law on 1 John, he sets forth three inevitable, abiding marks of the regenerate: a doctrinal or theological confession of Jesus as true God, true man, and Messiah; a moral or ethical practice of righteousness and obedience; and a social love for the brethren. Where these three are absent, claims to the new birth are exposed as empty.

Pastor Martin establishes that justification is an act of God, not a process - one is either wholly justified or wholly condemned, with no degrees and no growing into it. From Romans 5:1, Romans 8:1, Luke 18:14, and John 5:24 he demonstrates the once-for-all character of justification, then applies the distinction practically: the believer must take indwelling sin seriously like Paul in Romans 7 yet rest in 'no condemnation' like Paul in Romans 8. He closes with the debtor's prison illustration introducing pardon and acceptance.

Concluding eleven weeks on justification by faith alone, Pastor Martin turns to the second front of the devil's attack: the error that justifying faith can stand alone, devoid of works. He expounds James 2:14-26 as a carefully developed argument that saving faith is never a dead or merely notional faith but a living principle that produces self-denying obedience, using Robert Johnstone's illustration of Paul and James as two armies firing from opposite flanks at a common enemy. He closes by pressing searching questions on both the antinomian and the legalist, urging hearers to embrace Paul with one arm and James with the other.

Pastor Martin opens a second appendix to his series on justification, confronting how a believer honors both the once-for-all justifying act of God and the reality of indwelling and actual sin. After surveying the false solutions of antinomianism and sinless perfectionism, he expounds two of four principles: sin in a justified person must always be acknowledged as sin, and sin in a justified person must never be allowed to bring him into legal bondage. He draws heavily on Romans 7-8, 1 John 1-2, Psalm 51, and Psalm 130 to show how believers are to be both honest with their sin and anchored in the finished work of Christ.