Greater Than Our Heart

Most of what is written on this site about salvation is addressed to a man who is too sure of himself. That is the right target, and Scripture aims there constantly. This page is for the other man. He has heard the warnings, he believes they are real, he cannot tell whether they describe him, and he has been told to search his own heart for the answer and has come back from that search with nothing. If you have ever driven home from a service turning that over, this one is for you. It does not soften anything. It puts the question somewhere you can actually answer it.

The warnings are real, and we are not going to move them

Start here, because a comfort built on a hidden warning is not worth having. Scripture warns believers. It does it often, it does it plainly, and it does it in letters written to churches and read aloud to people who had already been baptised. This site has gathered fifty-one of them and quoted them whole, without comment, so nobody has to take our word for what they say (Every Warning, Gathered). "Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall" (1 Corinthians 10:12). That verse is not a misprint and it is not for somebody else.

So this page will not tell you the warnings are only hypothetical, or that they are aimed at people who were never really in, or that they were all discharged two thousand years ago and nothing is asked of you now. Each of those moves has been tried, and each of them costs more than it pays (The Security of Salvation, The Warning and the Way Home).

But look at who they are aimed at

Read the warnings and watch for the posture they describe. Hebrews: "if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth" (Hebrews 10:26). Wilfully. Not stumbling, not failing, not waking at two in the morning afraid you are lost. A few lines later, the same passage: "if any man draw back" (Hebrews 10:38). Drawing back is a direction of travel. Paul's warning is addressed by name to "him that thinketh he standeth." Peter's are for the ones who have returned to what they left. Jesus, in the passage that starts most of this trouble, is looking at men who are entirely confident, who are listing their credentials out loud, and who are astonished to be refused.

Notice what this does not prove. It does not prove that being afraid makes you safe, and any preacher who tells you so has swapped one bad instrument for another. Fear is not evidence of anything. What it means is narrower and more useful: the warnings are about a settled direction a man has chosen, and a frightened conscience is not that. If you are lying awake because you want to be His and cannot tell whether you are, you are not the man in Hebrews 10:26, whatever else may be true of you. That is not flattery. It is reading the sentence.

Faith is the floor, not a feeling you produce

Now the verse that does the work, and where it sits matters as much as what it says. There is no chapter break in the original. The warning about drawing back runs straight on: "But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul. Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 10:39 and Hebrews 11:1).

The definition of faith was written for people who had just been warned. It is not a verse for the untroubled. It was set down immediately after the hardest sentence in the letter, for the readers of that sentence.

And the word behind "substance" is hypostasis, which means the thing that stands underneath: a footing, what bears the weight. The King James "substance" catches it better than the modern "assurance" does, because "assurance" in English sounds like a mood, and this is not a mood. Faith is not something that generates a separate feeling of certainty which you then inspect to see whether you have enough of it. The faith is the floor. There is no second article sitting on top of it for you to go and manufacture.

Which means the whole exercise you have been failing at was the wrong exercise. A man who keeps asking whether he is sure enough that he believes has quietly turned assurance into an object separate from faith, and then gone looking for that object inside himself. Looking down to check whether the floor is there is not how anyone discovers that it is holding him up.

And when the chapter goes on to show what faith looks like, it never once looks inward. It is a list of people who walked. By faith Abel offered, Noah prepared, Abraham obeyed and went out not knowing whither he went, Moses refused and chose and forsook, Rahab received the spies (Faith Is a Verb). Evidence of things not seen, shown by direction of travel. Not by strength of conviction.

John says the heart is not the judge

The clearest answer in Scripture to this exact problem is seven verses long, and it is usually broken up and quoted in pieces. Read whole, 1 John 3:18-24 does something no other passage does: it speaks to the frightened man and the untroubled man in the same breath, without having to choose between them.

It opens with the instruction: "My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth." Then: "And hereby we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before him."

Two things in that sentence. Hereby points backwards, to loving in deed and in truth. And "assure" is, in the Greek, the ordinary word for persuade. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown put it plainly: "assure — literally, 'persuade,' namely, so as to cease to condemn us; satisfy the questionings and doubts of our consciences as to whether we be accepted before God or not." Adam Clarke has "be persuaded in our consciences." Barnes has the same.

Then John turns to the two men. Same verb both times, the ordinary word for a court finding against you:

"For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things" (1 John 3:20). That is the first man. His own heart has returned a verdict against him. John does not tell him the verdict is wrong, and does not tell him to appeal it to himself. He tells him there is a higher court, and that the higher court has more evidence and more mercy than the lower one. Your heart is not the final word about you, and the One who is knows more than it does and is kinder than it is.

"Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God" (1 John 3:21). That is the second man, and it is not a blank cheque, because the condition was set three verses earlier and repeated one verse later: "because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight" (1 John 3:22). A quiet heart that is not loving in deed has not met the terms. John gives the confident man his confidence and tells him what it rests on, in the same paragraph.

That is what a preacher needs and rarely has. Warning and comfort are aimed at two different people, and no one in a room can sort them. John does not sort them either. He tells both where to look, and it is the same direction for both, which is outward.

So where does a man look?

John says "that ye may know" and then, across the letter, says how. Every one of them is checkable from outside your own mood.

• Are you loving anyone in deed? "Let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth" (1 John 3:18). "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren" (1 John 3:14).
• Are you keeping His commandments? "And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments" (1 John 2:3). Not keeping them perfectly. Keeping them.
• Has He given you His Spirit? "Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit" (1 John 4:13), and "hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us" (1 John 3:24). Paul says the same thing as the root of the whole matter: the Spirit "beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God" (Romans 8:16), and see Adoption.
• Are you still following? "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me" (John 10:27). Present tense, and it is the verse immediately before the one everybody quotes.

Not one of those asks how convinced you feel. They ask which way you are walking, and a man can answer that about himself honestly even on a bad night.

The danger in this page, said out loud

"God is greater than our heart" can be misused, and it is only fair to say how. A man can take that sentence and use it to silence a conscience that is telling him the truth. If your heart is condemning you over something specific, something you are doing and intend to keep doing, then the trouble in your chest is not the problem. It is the instrument working correctly, and this verse is not an anaesthetic for it.

John guards his own sentence. The verse before it sends you out to love in deed, and the verse after it makes confidence rest on keeping His commandments. So the test is whether your heart is accusing you of something in particular that you could go and put right, or whether it is simply refusing to give you a verdict at all. The first needs repentance (Repentance). The second is what this page is for. If it is the first, you already know what the next step is, and it is not reassurance.

Both are His hands

The verse this all tends to end on is "neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand" (John 10:28), offered as a safe place. It is a safe place, and the Greek is precise about why: the word is harpazo, to snatch or seize by force, and the subject is always somebody else. The question that verse answers is what a third party can do to you, and the answer is nothing.

It is also true that "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Hebrews 10:31), and that is the same noun, the same hands, in the same letter as the warning. Nobody can take you out of them. Nothing in the sentence says a man cannot walk into them on his own feet. Those are two different claims, and the second is the one Hebrews is about. That seam is worked through properly, with Chrysostom, Wesley and Gill on either side, in No Man Plucks Them.

And David, given three bad choices, went toward the fearful hands on purpose and said why: "let us fall now into the hand of the LORD; for his mercies are great: and let me not fall into the hand of man" (2 Samuel 24:14). He would rather be in the terrifying hands of God than the safe hands of anybody else.

Where this lands

Paul, at the end, did not say he was certain of himself. He said, "I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day" (2 Timothy 1:12). Whom, not what. The object of his knowledge was a Person, and the thing he trusted was that Person's ability to keep, not his own ability to hold on. He wrote that as a man who had also written "lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway" (1 Corinthians 9:27). He held both, in one mind, and was not torn in half by it.

Fear and safety are in the same hands because the judgment that makes them fearful has already fallen there. The hands that hold the sheep are the ones Thomas was told to reach out and touch: "Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands" (John 20:27). That is the only reason one place can be both, and it is why the frightened man and the confident man can be sent to the same place without either being deceived.

So stop taking readings off your own chest. It is not the instrument, and it was never asked to be. Go love somebody in deed and in truth, keep what He told you to keep, and follow the voice you have been following. And when your heart returns a verdict against you anyway, which it will, take it to the higher court, because "God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things," and He is not less merciful than you are frightened.

Related: Every Warning, Gathered, The Warning and the Way Home, The Security of Salvation, No Man Plucks Them, Faith Is a Verb, Adoption, The Conscience, Rest, and Repentance. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple. Greek from the Berean interlinear. Jamieson Fausset & Brown, Adam Clarke and Albert Barnes quoted from the public-domain commentaries in our library.