Make Your Calling and Election Sure

After the apostle Peter wrote that famous list of marks of grace, or outward manifestations of the new life in the Holy Spirit that we should “add to [our] faith” (2 Peter 1:5-7),¹ he counsels us, “Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall: For so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:10-11).

What all Christians must all do therefore, according to the apostle Peter, is make sure that we are true Christians. We get this assurance of our own calling and election to salvation by God through diligently adding virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness and charity to our faith.

Is Peter warning the Christian, that if he or she fails to make their calling and election sure in this way, then they will abandon their calling from God, negate their election, and fall out of Christ’s and the Father’s hands and become unsaved again, and un-regenerate again? No. God’s election and effectual calling of individual sinners to salvation is not indefinite, tentative, temporary, mutable or reversible. God does not change and his people are therefore secure in his eternal unchangeableness (see Malachi 3:6).

So we all examine our own hearts and ask, am I one of God’s elect? Has God drawn me to Christ by his irresistible grace?

Until we have really begun, as Peter exhorts, to manifest in our lives these evidences of saving grace, then we will be unsure of salvation in those times when we stop and think about it.

Has Your Life Changed in This Way?

Let’s make it personal.

Do it—turn aside from shallow and worldly thinking to really examine your heart and life for virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness and charity.

Where is the evidence that you are saved? Is there, in your soul, genuine Christian spirituality? Then there will be, in your life, genuine Christian practicality. It cannot be any other way.

It is not good enough to merely profess, “I have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.” Please understand what the apostle James says: faith without works is a dead faith; and a dead faith is not the faith of a saved person (See James 2:14-26). Each of these marks of grace are things we must do that show we are the Christians we profess to be—and they enable us to know that we are the Christians we profess to be. They are what you should have and what you should do with your life as a Christian.

Let us not be like those of whom the apostle Paul writes: “They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate” (Titus 1:16).

Let us not be like those about whom Peter warns: “For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them. But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (2 Peter 2:21-22).

We really ought to make our calling and election sure, as though tying it in with a sevenfold knot, or securing it with a seven-layer seal. But we are not being exhorted to save ourselves either by our own faith or by our own works.

Is it the case that if true Christians neglect to make sure, then they will lose their salvation? No, because the distinguishing mark of true Christians is that they do strive to make their calling and election sure, despite many failures.

Or, is it the case that if true Christians neglect to add these things (virtue, etc.) to their faith, then they will fall, losing their salvation? No, because the distinguishing mark of true Christians is that they do add these things to their faith.

True Christians do. The question is, do you?

Are you persevering in these seven marks of grace, in a truly Christian life?

Appendix

George Gillespie, A Treatise of Miscellany Questions, Chapter 21 (in The Presbyterian’s Armoury (i.e. his collected works), Book 3).

It is a right, a safe, a sure way to seek after and to enjoy assurance of our interest in Christ, by the marks and fruits of sanctification…[but] take these three cautions: First, Our best marks can contrinute nothing to our justification but only to our consolation. Gracious marks can prove our justification and peace with God, but cannot be instrumental towards it, that is proper to faith. Faith cannot lodge in the soul alone, and without other graces, yet faith alone justifies before God. Secondly, beware that marks of grace do not lead us from Christ, or make us look upon ourselves at all as anything out of Christ. Thou bearest not the root, but the root bears thee…Thirdly, all thy marks will leave thee in the dark of the Spirit of grace, do not open thine eyes that thou mayest know the things which are freely given thee of God…

Thomas Watson, The One Thing Necessary, a sermon on Philippians 2:12. In Discourses on Important and Interesting Subjects, Volume 1.

Working out salvation is that which will make death and heaven sweet to us.

1. It will sweeten death. He that hath been hard at work all day, how quietly doth he sleep at night? you that hath been working out salvation all your lives, now comfortably may you lay down your head at night in the grave, upon a pillow of dust, in hopes of a glorious resurrection? this will be a death-bed cordial.
2. It will sweeten heaven. The more pains we have taken for heaven, the sweeter will it be when we come there. It is delightful for a man to look over his work and see the fruit appear. When he hath been planting trees in his orchard, or setting flowers, it is pleasant, to behold and review his labours, “the end of our faith, salvation” (1 Peter 1:9), this will make heaven sweeter. The more pains we have taken for heaven, the more welcome it will be; the more sweat, the more sweet. When a man hath been sinning, the pleasure is gone, and the sting remains; but when he hath been repenting, the labour is gone, and the joy remains.