I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me. Philippians 3:12 (NLT)
Do you sometimes doubt your salvation? In the test I think that every Christian, perhaps more than once, will find themselves enduring a dark night of the soul where salvation seems to have not taken root in them. Surely we must be a part of the garden choked off by the thorns of this life we tell ourselves as despair clutches hard at our faith. The circumstances we stare down in that dark night are not those of the blessed and joyous Christian we hear as though whispered to us somewhere in the depths of the heart, and we listen too easily to the temptation of doubt.
We know from the scriptures that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Yet, the heart seems to refuse the knowledge and we repent once more of every sin we can recall going back to the dawn of our time on this earth. A preacher from back in the days before cars and airplanes spoke to this in his particular way:
The Holy Spirit makes men penitents long before He makes them divines; and he who believes what he knows, shall soon know more clearly what he believes. Charles H. Spurgeon
What a lovely sentence! And of course the words of the preacher call upon us to remember faith. For it is the believing in Jesus that gave us salvation, not something we did or earned that can be lost, but something He did which can never be taken from us. How did the great preachers become as they were? By seeing the dawn come after that dark night of the soul, perhaps several times, and they through the Holy Spirit came to know more clearly what they believed.
Great and wonderful is our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ!
Bucky
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