Is Endurance and Assurance Incompatible?

Several weeks ago our church was looking at a verse of Scripture which seems to unsettle, if not all out destroy, the concept of assurance. Jesus says in Matthew 10:22 “but it is the one who has endured to the end who will be saved.”

The question of incompatibility goes like this: “How could assurance of eternal life ever be possible if endurance is an evidence of salvation? If endurance to the end can only be seen once you have reached the end, then assurance can’t be had until the moments before death.”

This question is logical and understandable. Not only could a call to endurance throw into question the notion of Christian assurance, it also smacks of a works-based salvation. If you have to keep obeying all the way to your death, doesn’t that mean your works are securing your eternity?

This incompatibility is solved once we understand that there are other evidences of salvation. Such evidences include loving one’s neighbor (1 Jn. 2:10), not loving the world (1 Jn. 2:15), confessing sin and putting it to death (1 Jn. 1:9; Rom. 8:13), bearing the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22), and having true humility (Matt. 5:1-12). Salvation is about transformation brought about by grace. God opened your eyes, you saw the glory of Christ and all that was accomplished on the cross, and you embraced it by faith. At that moment you were made a new creature in Christ. This transformation will have real effects that show up more and more in a person’s life. The crowning effect of this transformative good news is that it never stops producing good fruit. Endurance isn’t just about the end, it is also about the beginning and the middle. No matter the temptation of pleasure or threat of pain, the true Christian will always come back to Christ. He has tasted the true glory of the Son and so he will forever choose Christ over all the world. As Peter said in John 6:68, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.”

Therefore, assurance belongs to a Christian when he knows there is a true work of the Holy Spirit happening in him. He sees the Spirit’s work regularly because he chooses obedience, he hungers and thirsts for righteousness, he loves the glory of God, and he sacrifices for others. The true Christian experiences life in Christ, and this life is eternal. This is the Spirit’s testimony within him (1 John 5:10-11). All of this is imperfect, but it is there and it is slowly growing.

Yet, it is here that we have to wrangle with another possibility. What about when a Christian sins? What if it is a really bad sin? Doesn’t this destroy assurance? The Scripture addresses this constantly. Christians are going to sin. We have it in teachings and we have it in examples. The apostle John explicitly says in 1 John 2:1, “If anyone sins…” John knows that sinning is going to happen. When it does, “…we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” Peter did deny Christ, but he couldn’t deny him for long. His own words became true for him again, “to whom shall we go…” True Christians always come back to Christ, or in other words, they endure to the end.

The real problem is not when a Christian sins, the real problem is when a person sins over and over and over unrepentantly. Now we have a genuine problem. Since a real Christian has a new longing for Christ, he simply cannot tolerate having sin and not Christ. So when a person persists in disobedience, he is starting to show the true nature of his heart. If repentance never manifests itself, assurance disappears and for good reason. He is showing that he never “tasted that the Lord is good” to begin with. It was just a religiously flavored version of some worldly desire. As endurance evaporates away, it is revealed that the person was never standing on the rock to begin with.

Assurance and endurance are not incompatible, they are interdependent. True faith is assured by fruit, and endurance is a major category of fruit. You can’t have one without the other.