Blessed Assurance!

1 Timothy 3:13
Those who have served well gain an excellent standing and great assurance in their faith in Christ Jesus.

Hebrews 10:22
let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.


Assurance is a quality that we take lightly at times. Maybe we lack the faith necessary to fully appreciate true assurance. Notice how in the passage above from Hebrews, the writer points out that our relationship to God is made stronger with "full assurance." I suppose it’s like a good marriage made rich with the assurance of trust and faithfulness. Without those elements, the relationship is greatly damaged. But assurance from the Father can take many forms, and come from many avenues to reach us. One Sunday morning a few years ago, assurance came to me in a most unexpected way.

We live less than five minutes from our church. On this particular Sunday morning we arrived at the church building only to discover we’d left the grocery contribution we were donating for the newly hired pastor and his family. I dropped my wife off at the front door and headed back for the sack of canned goods, still having plenty of time to get to our Sunday School class. I went in the house, retrieved the bag and headed back for the church.

As I neared a stop sign to turn right toward our church, I witnessed a car veering off the four lane road I was approaching. Given that the car was completely off the road and heading straight for a small grove of trees and brush, it was traveling extremely fast. The car slammed into the cluster of trees and came to an immediate halt. Several drivers and I immediately jumped from our vehicles and ran up to the wrecked car. Inside we saw a middle aged woman, and from her dilated, fixed eyes, she was, to the untrained eye, dead. There was the slightest moment of pause as we looked upon the poor woman, no doubt shock at what we’d witnessed, then someone said, "We have to get her out of there."

Her car doors being locked, we broke the back seat window behind her with a tire tool, reached in and unlocked her door. Several of us pulled her limp body from the wreckage onto the ground. Instinctively, we administered CPR and within minutes, paramedics arrived. Neither our efforts nor theirs could revive the woman. Police officers were quickly on the scene, taking statements from several of the witnesses.

I stood beside her car, feeling empty inside, wondering who this woman was. I thought about her loved ones, of the news they had awaiting them. I hurt for them as well as her. Then, out of the blue a police officer standing next to me looking inside her car, said to me, "Stupid airbags didn’t even deploy!" It was the kind of thing that he was probably trained to look for, but I really hadn’t noticed.

But his statement served a different purpose for me. When he said it, I naturally looked into the vehicle. On the front seat, alongside the woman was her Bible. I looked closer at it laying there and it was evident that it was a well worn Bible. I looked back at the woman and noticed for the first time a tiny gold cross hanging around her neck. It dawned on me then that like me, she was on her way to her own church, that this was a sister in Christ. A peaceful assurance came over me, with the knowledge that she was now in the loving arms of Jesus. That police officer’s comment was meant to bring me to that assurance.

I can’t tell you the make, model, or color of that woman’s car that morning. Nor could I identify any of the other witnesses, police officers, or paramedics. I couldn’t describe the weather that day, or tell you anything that was said, sung, or preached in church later that morning. But there is one memory I took away from that whole ordeal. I remember exactly what that well worn Bible looked like laying there in the front seat. I can describe it to a tee. But more importantly, I remember the Blessed Assurance it delivered.