Perhaps because I struggled with assurance of salvation in my early 20s, I have had occasion to counsel a number of similarly afflicted persons during my ministry. They, like I, have tended to make the mistake John Calvin addresses in 3.24.4 of his Institutes.
Rare indeed is the mind that is not repeatedly struck with this thought: whence comes your salvation but from God's election? Now, what revelation do you have of your election? This thought, if it has impressed itself upon him, either continually strikes him in his misery with harsh torments or utterly overwhelms him. Truly, I should desire no surer argment to confirm how basely persons of this sort imagine predestination than that very experience, because the mind could not be infected with a more pestilential error than that which overwhelms and unsettles the conscience from its peace and tranquillity toward God. Consequently, if we fear shipwreck, we must carefully avoid this rock, against whcih no one is ever dashed without destruction. Even though discussion about predestination is likened to a dangerous sea, still, in traversing it, one finds safe and calm–I also add pleasant–sailing unless he willfully desire to endanger himself. For just as those engulf themselves in a deadly abyss who, to make their election more certain, investigate God's eternal plan apart from his Word, so those who rightly and duly examine it as it is contained in his Word reap the inestimable fruit of comfort. Let this, therefore, be the way of our inquiry: to begin with God's call, and to end with it.
In other words (as the broader context of Institutes 3.24.1-5 makes plain), those who have responded to God's call in the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ should realize this is because they were chosen by God to do so: from one's experience of calling comes certainty of election.
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