Do you keep having trouble with sin?  If you do, does this mean you aren’t saved? If you don’t – are you being honest with yourself?

This kind of thinking almost caused me to lose my faith in my early twenties, because the fact was I wasn’t having any consistent victory over sin. There is a fundamental problem with many answers on how to know you are saved that are based on self-assessment of how good we are doing: one may either believe themselves to be doing good enough (and thus fall into self-justification), or not good enough to claim to be a Christian (and thus fall into self-condemnation).

In a Master’s College/University video (here) which is our ‘foil’ for this video, we assess how they present some ultimately harmful ideas about where our confidence can be found – and then we briefly explain where our confidence really is, and how the fruits of righteousness are manifested in our lives. Sadly, the Master’s College video never once mentions the Holy Spirit’s work or our yielding to His presence as a basis for manifesting the fruit of the Spirit.

One person commented on the Master’s College original video, unfortunately saying,

“This is also the whole reason why I don’t identify as Christian but agnostic. But just so everyone knows, what I love about Jesus is that he had 2 rules… To love God and to love everyone else. Those rare the rules he help highest. Crazy how difficult it is for people to do those.”

Indeed – it’s impossible to truly have love for others in a deep, spiritual sense, except for if the Holy Spirit is creating that miracle in you.And that can only happen if we are really surrendering to Him in an amazing way. As I like to say, “there is no resurrection power without Gethsemane surrender.”  However, our lack of perfection in this matter is no reason to be ashamed of calling ourselves Christian – we serve a mighty Savior, but “we are but unprofitable servants” whom our Lord nonetheless takes pleasure in.

– Micah C.