Ask Pastor Mike Live

Pastor Mike: Sharon, you're on the air with Pastor Mike. How can I help?

Guest (Sharon): I am struggling with assurance and I fear God daily. I know who I am and I know I'm a sinner, unworthy. But I don't know how to get past this fear that I have or how to even know if I am saved.

Pastor Mike: Let's talk about it. I think the passage I want you to spend time in when we're done with this phone call is going to be in Luke chapter 18, when Jesus tells a parable. You are the person in this parable that is not feeling worthy because the man in the parable, a tax collector, doesn't feel worthy. He doesn't even feel worthy to look up to God when he prays.

He doesn't even feel worthy to go to church. He's at the Temple Mount, but he doesn't come close. He stands far off and he just stands far away. He can't even look up to the sky. Matter of fact, he beats his chest because he feels like he's so bad and he says, "God, have mercy on me, a sinner." So you're that person in that story.

Now, the other guy, he's the Pharisee. He feels very confident. He says, "God, I'm so glad I'm not like other people—the adulterers and the tax collectors and like this guy over here. I'm glad I'm not like them." Now, Jesus's response in verse 14 is that the man who is saying to God, "Be merciful to me, a sinner," is the one who goes home justified.

That's the one, because he humbled himself, that I will exalt. This is exactly what you need to receive the promise of forgiveness: you need to be humbled right where you're at to say, "I'm unworthy." The only people that get forgiven are the people, Sharon, who feel unworthy. But now what you have to do is to trust God that his promise is true.

Now you have to exercise faith. What you're feeling is the sorrow of repentance. But there are two sides to one coin. You're experiencing the sorrow of repentance; now what you need is to flip the coin over and to exercise the muscle of faith. Faith means I'm going to trust that what God says is true.

I love it when people feel the sorrow of repentance because that means you're just like that man in Luke 18:9-14 who's saying, "I know I don't deserve salvation. I'm a sinner. I deserve hell. I know that's what I deserve." Fantastic. That's real repentance. Now what you have to do is you have to trust God.

The whole condemnation for the Pharisee in that passage is he didn't trust God; he trusted in himself. That's how it all started. Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. That's the problem. You don't trust in yourself that you're righteous. That's why you feel bad. That's exactly where you should be.

It's this tax collector. He did not trust in himself. He knew he was unrighteous. You and I, we know we're unrighteous. That's repentance. Now we say, "Okay, God, I have to trust you." This is where you have to have this muscle of faith to say, "God, I believe what you say: that repentant people know that you have sent your Son to pay the penalty."

If I said to you right now, if you say the word "Rumplestiltskin," I'm going to send you a book that I just wrote about how to bake brownies. If you said the word, and I said, "I'm going to send this to you; it's in the mail," if you believed me because you said that, you'd have to say, "I think Mike Fabarez is an honest guy. I think Mike Fabarez is a good guy. I believe him."

You would have to sit there and say, "I think his character and his promise is worth me sitting back and knowing I'm going to get that book." You wouldn't sit there tonight thinking, "I don't think he's going to send it." I think even me, you would probably trust me to send you that book. All I'm telling you is that God has said this: If you repent of your sins, he is faithful and just to forgive your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness.

At the point of saying, "I confess to you, God, that I'm a sinner," now what you have to do is to trust him. At some point, here's the problem with some people: they repent and they feel the weight of their sin, and they say, "I don't really trust God." At some point, that's offensive to God. At some point, if you keep it up, God's going to go, "Am I not worthy of your trust? What have I done to not earn your trust? How am I not worthy of your trust? I've always kept my promises."

Everything I said about Christ coming into the world in the Old Testament came true in the New Testament. How in the world do you not trust me? So I want you today, Sharon, to start saying about God, "God, I know you're worthy of me believing your promise." Because here's the deal: we're waiting for him to fulfill his promise.

You and I right now, we don't really have the proof of our salvation because we're living just like our non-Christian neighbors. They are living a life just like us. We're all growing older, we're all getting arthritis, and we're all going to die. They're dying, I'm dying. They're getting sick, I'm getting sick. They get cancer, I get cancer.

It seems like they're no better off than I am, and I'm no better off than they are. But we're saying we're saved and they are not. They think they're okay; they trust in themselves that they're righteous. They think they're good. We know we're not good. We're throwing ourselves on the mercy of God. We're saying, "Jesus paid it all for me." We're saying we're saved by grace.

When is this all going to be tested? It's going to be tested when we breathe our last breath on earth and we meet our Maker. It's going to be tested when your neighbor breathes his last breath and meets his Maker. That's when we're going to find out who was saved and who's not. We're going to have to trust that God is going to keep his promise—that there is no condemnation for those in Christ, that we confessed our sins, we've repented, we've trusted in him.

Therefore, he's faithful and righteous to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So what I want you to do is I want you to read these promises in the Bible and say, "God, you are trustworthy, so I will trust you." If you do that, that's what God wants: repentance and faith. God is worthy of our trust. The more you study the Bible, the more you learn he's faithful and can be trusted. Now we have to wait for that.

Here's another passage I want you to study: Romans chapter 8. Along with Luke 18, Romans chapter 8. That's a great chapter that continues to remind these Romans—who, by the way, were starting to run into the catacombs underneath Rome because they were being persecuted. By the mid-60s, Nero was going to be throwing these people in prison and killing them.

As a matter of fact, the historians tell us he was starting to stick them on sticks, dip them in tar, and burn them in his gardens. He blamed the fire in Rome on the Christians and persecuted them. They were going into intense persecution, and Paul knew this. Matter of fact, he says in that passage, "You're like sheep that are turned over to the slaughter."

But the whole passage is about the fact that you can trust God. It says in verse 18 that all the sufferings of this present age are not worthy to be compared to what is going to be revealed to us. He says if Christianity was all about stuff that we see now, it wouldn't be a religion that's based on hope. Real Christianity is based on hope. It's not what we have right in front of us.

You and I go through all the same things non-Christians go through. We're going to get sick, we're going to die, and we're going to suffer. But we are trusting that God is going to keep his promise. When we breathe our last, we're going to go into the presence of God. It'll be weird—we'll be disembodied and won't have our bodies with us.

But as 2 Corinthians 5 says, one day we'll get our bodies back in perfect form just like Jesus's resurrected body. We will inhabit, as 2 Peter 3 says, a new earth where righteousness dwells. He's going to remake this place for us, and we're going to live with him in a perfect place.

Non-Christians who didn't trust in him, like the Pharisee who trusted that he himself was righteous enough—which is exactly what your neighbor would say if you said, "Are you going to heaven?" He'd say, "Of course, I'm a good person." He trusts in himself that he is righteous. We don't trust in ourselves that we're righteous. We know we're unrighteous. We know we're sinners. That's why you feel bad and why you doubt.

We have to doubt. Of course we should doubt. We should be absolutely convinced that we're unrighteous. But now we trust in Christ. We trust that he keeps his promise. As we trust in him, we're going to trust that he's going to save us. So Romans 8, Luke 18, and we're going to trust this God who's made this promise. We're going to absolutely believe it.

Therefore, we don't have to sit around wondering if God keeps his promise. We're going to start to prove that we trust him by how we act. That's what I want for you, Sharon. You've got to get there. You've got half the coin; now you've got to flip it. You've got the repentance part; now you've got to flip the coin to the side of faith.

Repentance and faith, repentance and faith. I need the faith side now to be shined up. It's all tarnished. It's got to be shined up. Faith. I trust God. He's a promise-keeper. He's made the promise; now we have to trust him. Romans 8 is going to help you a lot in this, Sharon. Go read it right after we hang up. Okay?

Guest (Sharon): I will. Thank you.

Pastor Mike: All right. Keep listening. Call me back tomorrow, okay? Hang in there. 1-877-913-5357. You don't know how many times I've had that conversation. In a sense, I love the fact that the repentance is there because I've had the other conversation, which I just hate: a presumption on God, which is exactly what's going on in Luke 18.

There is a presumption on God that people are righteous. They think they're righteous and fine. That's what the Pharisees were all about. They thought, "I'm fine." They trust in themselves that they are righteous. He ends that parable by saying, "I tell you, this man, the tax collector, went home justified rather than the other."

The one who exalts himself is going to end up being debased and humbled. He'll end up actually going into outer darkness where there's weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, just like every person that tells you, "Of course I'm going to heaven. I'm a good person." That's what they tell you every single time.

How many people say, "Yeah, I believe in God, I believe in Christ," but they never have gone through that portal of repentance? Sharon's got that. But now she's got to trust God and she's got to trust in Christ. I've had that conversation so many times. 1-877-913-5357.

I'll push this just for a second because I just came back. You heard Holden asking me earlier about this conference. I was just up in Idaho, and it was so gratifying to see so many people involved in something I wrote called "Partners." The first chapter of that partners manual is something we put into a stand-alone chapter called "Exploring the Gospel."

It's all about trying to help people understand what repentance is because it's so often left out. But it's what Sharon is just putting on clear display. She's understood that. That's what the Pharisees missed. They weren't repentant. They said they had all kinds of faith, but they didn't have any repentance.

I had a lot of people that I'd never met before talking about how that partners manual we put out has changed their lives because they started to understand what repentance was. If you want to learn what that's all about, you can go to pastormike.com, look down at "Books," and you can either get the partners manual or, if you just want to look at that first chapter, there's a workbook called "Exploring the Gospel."

If you said, "Repentance? I don't know, I just prayed a prayer," or, "I repeated a prayer one day after getting a tract," please get this book. It's cheap. If you can't afford it, just write us and we'll send you one anyway. This book will help you understand what repentance is and why you've got to have the two sides of one response to the gospel.

There are two distinguishable aspects of the response to the gospel: repentance and faith. That's why it's continually talked about throughout the New Testament together. It's all through the Old Testament as well. If you want to explore that in a deeper way, there's another book I wrote called "Getting It Right."

I give a whole chapter exploring repentance in the Old Testament and the New Testament and a whole chapter on what faith is as well. That might help you sort that out. That's called "Getting It Right." You'll find that there; it's a very affordable little book. Again, I never want money to stand in the way of you getting all that figured out.