60. How can we be assured of this pardon?
God’s Spirit witnesses with our spirit that we are children of God.
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Assurance that God has forgiven us and made us, who were his enemies, his children ultimately comes not only from theological ideas we hold or theological arguments we make. It is also grounded in experiencing God’s acceptance as we experience the Holy Spirit in our lives and the feelings of being loved, pardoned, and accepted that the Holy Spirit brings. Religious experience was important to Wesley and it continues to be important in the Methodist understanding of the faith.
First, there is the experience of the Holy Spirit here—the experience of encountering God as “other,” as a Being with whom we are in a living relationship in the moment, not merely as a Being about whom we think and speak. God becomes a “you” in our lived experience and is no longer simply a “he” in our thoughts and conversation. Second, there is the impression that the Holy Spirit makes on our emotions. The relief, the peace, the gratitude that we feel is the experiential result of the Spirit’s witness to us that we have indeed been accepted as children of God. Feelings can often lead us astray, but feelings are not always unreliable. God made them a part of our design and, in the presence and by the power of the Holy Spirit, they can communicate vitally important and reliable information.
The genuine experience of the Holy Spirit and of God’s acceptance, of course, leads to further evidence, which Wesley calls “the witness of our own spirit.” One indispensable element of this is the awakening of a deep love for God—our response to the experience of being so loved by God!—and a deep love for other human beings, both those who are now our sisters and brothers in Christ and those who have yet to give themselves to God’s embrace. And this love, in turn, will manifest itself in an earnest desire for holiness of heart and life, to live ever before God as will please him who has pardoned us and to live ever for our neighbor as Christ, who redeemed us, would have us live.
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For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. (Rom. 8:15–17 ESV)
Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir. (Gal. 4:6–7 NIV)
In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory. (Eph. 1:13–14)
See also Gal. 3:26; 2 Tim. 1:7; Heb. 10:15–17; D&D ¶ 102 § 5
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This is an excerpt from Christian Faith and Doctrine: An Annotated Catechism for the Global Methodist Church. Seedbed is pleased to partner with The Global Methodist Church to offer this companion resource to A Catechism of Christian Faith and Doctrine for the Global Methodist Church.
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