As a pastor, I interact with a lot of people who struggle to have confidence in the authenticity of their conversion. To their mind, their sin clings closely and their failings are always at hand. Most of the time, I find that these are faithful brothers and sisters who need comfort and reassurance.
But there's another group of people in many of our churches that are much more worrisome: those with a firm but unfounded belief that they are genuinely converted. Perhaps you know they type. They know the right words. They stay free from scandalous public sin. And they are moral people. But they have no true fruit, no evidence that God's converting Spirit is at work within them. And oftentimes there is an untreated area of secret sin.
Mike McKinley is the senior pastor of Guilford Baptist Church in Sterling, Virginia and is the author, most recently, of Am I Really a Christian? (Crossway, 2011).
