All across this country, every single day, Christians ask themselves difficult questions. Some are born out of anger, others from fear or frustration. In many cases, those kinds of gut check questions can be crippling. Of all these questions, none causes more ulcers than this one, our final question in this series:

When you look over your life and consider

the problems that won't go away

or the spiritual lethargy you constantly struggle against,

do you sometimes ask yourself,

Am I truly saved?

Some gut check questions move from the gut and over the lips to be shared with others. I suspect this one stays buried down deep, rotting away. Questioning one's salvation isn't discussed in polite Christian company unless one wants to send that polite company screaming away into the night.

So people suffer under it.

I can't speak about your salvation. Unless we've fellowshipped in person, I don't really know you. Only God knows you.

But I will say this: people who struggle with this gut check question are typically not the ones who need to worry. People who aren't saved don't typically wander through the day burdened by the question. Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test!
—2 Corinthians 13:5 ESV

In context, this is to the people who question his ministry, the spiritually smug and complacent. But people who aren't spiritually smug, the very people who go around gut checking themselves on this question, aren't the ones to whom it is addressed.

Believe in Jesus Christ. Be baptized. Live out—no matter how imperfectly at this point in time—what the Lord reveals to you from the Scriptures and by His Holy Spirit in your life's journey. (Living it out is what separates real Christians from the demons, the ones who also believe, but don't live it—James 2:19, right?)  Be at rest on your security, but always desire more of Him. Every runner in the race struggles, some more than others, but all that matters is finishing the race.

We can't test ourselves in each second. Just as you can't look at your son or daughter and see that they've grown since yesterday, so it's not possible to see spiritual progress in one slice of one minute of one day. Your life does not consist of just this one moment in time, and yet we often try to compare it against the entirety of time, especially if we are using another person as our gauge. We might think that Charles Spurgeon's life was so much more fulfilling, but none of us was considering him on that one Tuesday as he lit up a favorite brand of cigar in his private den and kicked back his heels.

If you're questioning your faith, then confess it, have faith in Christ, and pray that He will strengthen you more thoroughly tomorrow. He will honor that prayer. Even if you pray it every day. Especially if you pray it every day. Then one day, you'll look back down the road and see how far you've come. And curiously enough, this particular gut check may have vanished along the way.

Be blessed. 

Other posts in this series: