To know for sure that you're saved is a growing process with most Christians.

As they exercise three things, first of all, a greater trust in the promises of God.

That's your bedrock of assurance.

The second thing is by the inward evidences of grace or the marks or fruits of grace in your life.

And then the third is a direct testimony of the Holy Spirit that he speaks directly to your soul through the word.

I am disalvation or bring some other promise to play into your life in such a way that you can't deny that he is assuring you that you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to you.

You take those three things, the promises of God, evidences of grace, testimony of the Holy Spirit, and then put over them all, God's faithful track record over the years.

And God's people can have full infallible assurance of faith.

Assurance of faith by Joel Beakey. Visit liganyear.org slash teaching series to learn more.

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind.

If you said to me, where would you find the reformed faith? I would say, well, you can find it two places. You can find it in the Bible, or you can look at the confessions that appear in church history that try to give a summary of the reformed doctrine.

Does that mean our faith is based on two sources, the Bible and the confessions? Certainly not, as Dr. R. C. Sproul will explain today.

The confessions just summarize what we find in the Bible. But other traditions do place authority in sources outside Scripture.

Today we return to the series, what is reformed theology? And we'll concentrate on the Protestant distinctive of Scripture alone.

The Bible says that all men are liars, and I'm afraid that I verified the truth of that, at least in terms of its application to myself in our last session, because I concluded our last session by saying, from now on, we were going to only consider the distinctly different ways of life.

Consider the distinctives of reformed theology. In the next two sessions, we're going to be studying the doctrine of Soloscriptura and Solofide, which I've already told you, are critical doctrines held in common by the evangelicals in their traditions.

I lied, but I didn't lie intentionally, but I was mistaken. I don't want to leave you with the impression that the doctrine of Soloscriptura is a distinctly or uniquely reformed theological principle.

It is part of that body of truth that we share in common with historical evangelicalism. But having said that, let's look then, at this principle, that historians call the formal principle of the word,

of the Protestant Reformation, Soloscriptura. In one sense, this concept was born publicly in Luther's famous confrontation with the rulers of the state and the church at the Diet of Vorms, where upon Luther was called to recant of his teaching,

and you recall on that occasion when he stood at this solemn place, he said, unless I am convinced by sacred scripture or by evident reason, I cannot recant for my conscience is held captive by the word of God.

And to act against conscience, said Luther, is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, God helped me. Now that's been memorialized in motion, picture, lore, and in the history books and so on.

But though this was the public debut in a historic sense at Vorms, it was not a new concept with Luther. Luther had been more or less forced to say this in earlier debates with some of the theologians that were trying to persuade him to change his views, where he earlier had said that it was possible for popes to err, to make mistakes.

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