What the sermons leave unsaid about coming to Christ and the assurance of faith, evaluated against the Three Forms of Unity
Anyone familiar with the Dutch Reformed Experiential churches knows the pattern of the preaching. It is weighty and searching, honest about sin, and careful not to hand out cheap comfort. These are real strengths. The people who preach this way are in earnest about the souls in front of them, and they would rather a hearer be troubled and safe than comfortable and lost.
The question is not whether these sermons say true things. It is what they consistently leave unsaid. I transcribed and analyzed a large body of sermons from the Reformed Congregations in North America (RCNA) and its larger Dutch sister body, the Gereformeerde Gemeenten in Nederland (GGiN), alongside the Reformers (Calvin and Luther), the early Church Fathers (Chrysostom, Augustine, Ambrose), a group of eighteenth-century Scottish preachers known as the Marrow men (Thomas Boston and the Erskine brothers; more on them below), and the tradition’s own older Dutch fathers (à Brakel, Smytegelt, Comrie). Each sermon was scored against a fixed checklist of the things the Three Forms of Unity lead us to expect in gospel preaching.
The RCNA and the GGiN are one church denomination in two countries, sharing a confession and preaching tradition and beliefs. Most of the sermons I was able to gather and analyze are GGiN sermons preached in Dutch, simply because that is where most of these congregations are. So that the post does not keep switching between two abbreviations for the same thing, it speaks of “the RCNA” throughout, even where a sermon quoted below was first preached in Dutch in the Netherlands. Two absences appear again and again in this preaching, and together they help explain why so many sincere hearers feel stuck.
This is not a verdict on experiential preaching as such. Its weight and its honesty about sin are real gifts, but other Reformed churches in the same study, experiential ones included, do not fence the gospel offer the way these sermons do. Even the older Dutch writers this tradition reveres, Comrie and à Brakel among them, held the offer out more freely than the RCNA does now. The concern is narrower, and more painful than any complaint about style: on these two points the RCNA has drawn the line tighter than its own confession and its own fathers ever did.
A note on method
Using AI and automation, the sermons were analyzed with the same list of questions, the kind of things the Three Forms of Unity would have us listen for: does the preacher call his hearers to believe in Christ, and does he treat assurance as something an ordinary believer may have? For each question, we marked the answer present, partial, or absent, and wrote down the words from the sermon that backed the rating. The figures below are the share of sermons in which an item was clearly present, out of about 130 RCNA sermons. “Absent” means the thing was not preached in that sermon, not that the preacher would deny it if asked. A pattern across 130 sermons tells us something real even though individual sermons vary. Sometimes the analysis came out too negative or positive: sometimes the positives were ranked well, even though the preacher later in the sermon gated and withdrew the open invitation.
The pattern, in numbers
| Criteria | RCNA | Reformers | Church Fathers | Dutch fathers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direct command to unbelievers to believe in Christ | 2% | 0% | 7% | 16% |
| Christ presented as offered to every hearer | 2% | 38% | 29% | 20% |
| An inner-experience threshold gating the invitation | 75% | 0% | 0% | 28% |
| Marks of grace described | 98% | 6% | 21% | 80% |
| Assurance as the ordinary fruit of faith | 0% | 50% | 0% | 4% |
| Full assurance attainable in this life | 2% | 38% | 0% | 12% |
| Assurance as a believer’s daily inheritance | 2% | 56% | 0% | 0% |
| Calling hearers to examine themselves for marks | 63% | 0% | 0% | 68% |
The RCNA column is about 130 sermons. The Reformers are Calvin and Luther (16 sermons); the Church Fathers are Chrysostom, Augustine, Ambrose and others (14); the Dutch fathers are à Brakel, Smytegelt, van der Groe and Comrie (25), the pre-1800 forebearers that RCNA respects. These comparison columns are much smaller than the RCNA sample, so read their percentages as direction, not precision. The Church Fathers also wrote before assurance was framed as a confessional question, so on the assurance lines many of their sermons could not be scored either way, which holds those figures down.
The pattern is unmistakable. The sermons describe the marks of those already converted, and almost never turn to the hearer and say, plainly and boldly, “Come to Christ and believe.” Set the columns side by side and the contrast is plain: the Reformers hold an ordinary, attainable assurance out to about half their hearers where the RCNA almost never does, and the Church Fathers offer Christ to every hearer many times more often. The tradition’s own Dutch fathers fall in between. They are markedly freer than the RCNA in offering Christ and pressing the command to believe. On assurance, they share the RCNA’s method, distinguishing assurance from faith itself and seeking it through self-examination and the marks of grace. Yet, unlike the RCNA, they still held that full assurance is ordinarily attainable through the means of grace.
The first absence: the door is barred
The most striking sermons are not the ones that forget the free offer. They are the ones that consciously refuse it. In one such sermon, on John 21, the preacher says:
Oh, I know, love for Jesus cannot be commanded. Love for him must arise from another heart than you and I possess by nature. And therefore I can only show you the way to come to love Jesus for yourself. And this is none other than the knowledge of your sin and your deep misery.
A sermon on John 21:15-17; translated from the Dutch.
The command is replaced by a prerequisite. Before you may come, you must first have “the knowledge of your sin and your deep misery.” Another preacher names the free call only to reject it as fleshly:
You must just believe in Jesus. You must just accept the Lord Jesus. And you know, we find such preaching pleasant too, don’t we? Pleasant, because yes, it is flesh-pleasing preaching where you yourself can still do something about it, isn’t it? But then you still remain with everything outside the only physician.
A sermon on Matthew 9:12; translated from the Dutch.
And where Christ is offered, the offer is fenced. The warm invitation goes out, but only to those who already bear the marks:
Hear, you who are oppressed, hear, you who are weary, hear, you who are burdened and you who tremble at his word. Hear, here is help.
A sermon on Matthew 26; translated from the Dutch.
A recent RCNA sermon on 1 Peter 2, preached in English at Chilliwack on May 24, 2026, follows the same logic in a gentler key. Christ is precious, the preacher says, to “those who have tasted that the Lord is gracious,” to “those who are poor,” to “those who have nothing of themselves” and “were driven out.” The hearer who has none of that yet is left to wonder whether the door is open to him at all.
This is exactly what Dr. Gert van den Brink names in his 2023 book Hyperdordt: Belijden zonder te geloven (“Confessing Without Believing”) and its companion Dordt zoals je Dordt niet kende (“Dort As You Never Knew It”), both growing out of his 2022 lecture Het evangelie zonder kleine lettertjes (“The Gospel Without the Fine Print”). Van den Brink is no outsider to the tradition: a Dutch Reformed theologian, formerly of the Gereformeerde Gemeenten for nearly thirty years, and an editor of the critical edition of the Synod of Dort’s own Acta. His charge is that this preaching attaches conditions to the gospel offer that the Canons of Dort never impose, the kleine lettertjes or fine print, so the hearer leaves thinking “Voor mij kan het zomaar niet, God neemt mij niet aan,” it simply cannot be for me, God will not accept me. He coined the term Hyperdordt for a position that goes beyond Dort by allowing only the already-awakened to close with Christ, when half the Canons insist the call go to all.
He is right about the confession. The Canons of Dort say the gospel promise, “together with the command to repent and believe, ought to be declared and published to all nations, and to all persons promiscuously and without distinction” (II.5), and that those called are “unfeignedly called,” because God “hath most earnestly and truly declared in His Word” that they should come (III/IV.8).
The Canons are only articulating what Scripture presses very plainly. The offer is well-meant because it rests on God’s own stated desire toward the sinner he addresses: “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezekiel 33:11). It goes out as a free invitation without price: “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters… without money and without price” (Isaiah 55:1); “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28); “whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17). And it is pressed in the present tense through the preacher’s own mouth: “we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20). Some of these the sermons do quote, including Ezekiel’s “why will ye die,” yet the half that makes the call well-meant, God’s declared pleasure that the wicked turn and live, is the half most often left unspoken; and Isaiah’s water without money and the “whosoever will” of Revelation are rarely mentioned.
The clearest answer to the preparation gate was written three centuries ago, in the Marrow controversy that Sinclair Ferguson revisits in The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance (2016). Ferguson retells how the Church of Scotland in the 1720s split over a single question: must a sinner first feel a qualifying measure of conviction before he is entitled to come to Christ? The Marrow men, Thomas Boston and the Erskine brothers, defending the old Puritan handbook The Marrow of Modern Divinity, said no. Boston put it directly to the very soul the RCNA preacher addresses:
Many bar the doors of the gospel-promise with bars of their own making, and then they cry out and complain that they cannot enter in by them. O! say some, if I had so much love, repentance, and brokenness of heart, then I could believe. But I advise you to believe, that ye may get these things, Zech 12:10; Acts 5:31.
Thomas Boston (the Marrow Men); written originally in English.
Believe, that you may get these things. That single sentence reverses the order imposed by the experiential RCNA sermon. Ferguson’s way of putting it is that no one needs to qualify himself to come, because there is no qualification for Christ except sin and need: faith “is for lost, helpless, condemned sinners casting themselves on Christ for salvation.” So Boston could do what the sermons above will not: “Come in, ye profane wretches, that are far from righteousness: come, ye hypocritical professors, that are not far from the kingdom of God: come, ye trembling souls, that are hard at it, and yet dare not come in.”
The second absence: assurance withheld
The same caution that fences the offer also withholds comfort from those who already believe. In RCNA preaching, assurance is regularly severed from faith and pushed into the distance. In a sermon for the Lord’s Supper, one preacher casts a settled assurance as something most who claim it do not really have:
Many present themselves as a confirmed Christian. But often it appears that it ends so very low.
A Lord’s Supper sermon; translated from Dutch.
Another lowers the expectation until full assurance disappears over the horizon:
We must also beware of always reaching for very extraordinary things. The old fathers, and also our predecessors, always say, it is already so great if one may experience something of the peace.
A sermon; translated from Dutch.
And when assurance does appear, it is often a deathbed scene, an old woman crying out that nothing lies between her and glory any more, rather than the daily possession of an ordinary believer. That same May 24 sermon says it plainly: there are “true children of the Lord who will not dare to with liberty say, I know my sins are forgiven,” who must wait for a moment when, as with the disciples, “the Lord spoke to their hearts, Peace be unto you.”
Van den Brink’s fourth critique continues here. Original Reformed spirituality, he argues, treats zekerheid des geloofs, the assurance of faith, as the shape of believing itself, while this tradition has made assurance the introspective endpoint reached after long examination of one’s marks. He calls that historically backwards, against Luther, against à Brakel, against the Canons themselves. The statistical analysis agrees: assurance as the ordinary fruit of faith showed up in none of the RCNA sermons.
Again, the confession says otherwise. The Heidelberg Catechism defines true faith as including “an assured confidence, which the Holy Ghost works by the gospel, that not only to others, but to me also, remission of sin is freely given” (Q&A 21). The Canons say believers “may and do obtain assurance” that they will continue “true and living members” of the church (V.9), and that this assurance is “not produced by any peculiar revelation” but “springs from faith in God’s promises” (V.10).
And so does Scripture, which treats a settled knowledge of salvation as ordinary Christian ground. John wrote his first epistle for exactly this end: “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). Paul says plainly, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him” (2 Timothy 1:12), and “I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life… shall be able to separate us from the love of God” (Romans 8:38-39). Hebrews calls every believer to “draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Hebrews 10:22). These are not the texts of an elite. Yet 1 John 5:13, the one verse whose stated purpose is that believers may know, did not surface once in the roughly 130 RCNA sermons we analyzed for assurance; and where the witness of the Spirit and the cry of “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15-16) are preached, they are cast as a rare visitation rather than the believer’s ordinary breath.
Boston held this same broad ground out to all:
Behold here a broad and firm foundation of faith for all and every one of you; that you may come to Christ, whatever your case is, and claim his righteousness and his whole salvation for yourselves.
Thomas Boston, on 1 John 4:14.
This is the heart of Ferguson’s argument in The Whole Christ: a withheld assurance and a fenced offer are twin symptoms of the same mistake, detaching the benefits of Christ from the person of Christ himself. Where the whole Christ is freely offered, assurance is not a distant reward for the few; it is bound up with looking to Him in the first place.
Why this leaves people passive
Put the two absences side by side and consider what a hearer is actually asked to do. He is rarely commanded to believe. He is told Christ becomes precious to those already brought low. He is told assurance is a rare gift to be awaited. The natural response is not action. It is waiting: waiting to be sufficiently humbled, waiting to be drawn, waiting for a felt declaration that will never come, or will likely never come, because the one command that would end the waiting, simply to believe on Christ, is the command he is never pressed to obey. Self-examination fills the place where a call to faith would stand. Van den Brink names the result geestelijke ademnood, a spiritual breathlessness, in which lifelong unconvertedness becomes the congregation’s normal and accepted state. His remedy is a slogan worth repeating: onbekeerd zijn moet onaanvaardbaar worden, being unconverted must become unacceptable, something to be acted on tonight rather than endured for a lifetime.
The same warmth, without the fence
None of this asks the tradition to trade its warmth for freedom. Charles Spurgeon preached with all the heart-searching weight the experiential tradition prizes, but never fenced the cross or withheld assurance. He saw the preparation gate for what it was and named it:
These excellent men had a fear of preaching the Gospel to any except those whom they styled ‘sensible sinners,’ and consequently kept hundreds of their hearers sitting in darkness when they might have rejoiced in the light.
Charles Spurgeon, “The Warrant of Faith”.
He preached the bare command, and made the warrant to believe the command itself, not the hearer’s own experience:
Such an unfailing warrant to belief in Jesus is found in this precious truth, that His gracious commandment, and not my variable experience, is my title to believe on His Son Jesus Christ.
Charles Spurgeon, “The Warrant of Faith”.
And on assurance, he said plainly what the RCNA never does. Preaching on the very verse those sermons rarely reach, 1 John 5:13, he refused to lower it:
I beg their pardon; the text does not say anything of the kind. It is, ‘that you may know that you have eternal life,’ even here, at this present hour.
Charles Spurgeon, “Helps to Full Assurance,” on 1 John 5:13.
What recovery would look like
In fairness, the preaching does not all sound the same, and the raw material for recovery is already there in the some of the denomination’s own pulpits. The free, unconditional call does occassionally get sounded. In a sermon on Micah 5, one minister sets the offer down without a single condition:
The door of the ark of preservation is still open. The market of free grace is still open. And the most precious and costly goods of free grace are given freely on that market to poor sinners. Nothing is required from you, fortunate hearer. Nothing may be added and nothing can be added.
A sermon on Micah 5; translated from Dutch.
And in a sermon on Matthew 28, another minister presses the risen Lord’s universal call on every hearer:
Then it also sounds today, repent ye, repent ye, for why will ye die? Then it is, turn ye unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.
A sermon on Matthew 28:20; translated from the Dutch.
The trouble is that in the same sermons the door is narrowed almost as soon as it is opened. The Micah 5 sermon that has just said nothing is required, then goes on to test the hearer, “Who among you can honestly say that he is looking out for the coming of Christ in his soul,” reserving the expectation for those who have “received a promise for it from the Word, applied by God’s Spirit.”
The Matthew 28 sermon that just cried “turn ye and be saved” at once turns the command into a petition to be waited on: “Fall then on your knee, say to God, I am unconverted. Convert me, then I shall be converted.” The open door is shown, and then drawn back, in the same breath. To the hearer this never looks like disobedience. Kneeling and pleading to be converted is exactly what he believes he has been commanded to do, and he leaves counting it as obedience. What he has not been shown is that the gospel’s own command is simpler and more pressing, to believe on Christ now, and that this believing is itself the instrument God uses to convert, not a reward handed down after enough pleading.
The tradition’s most-read father held the same door open and did not draw it back. In his chapter on the gospel call, the volume that sits on many RCNA shelves, Wilhelmus à Brakel offers Christ to everyone who hears, asking no prior qualification:
Christ offers you all His merits, and therefore eternal salvation. He calls and invites everyone: “Turn unto Me and be saved, receive Me, surrender to Me, enter into a covenant with Me, and you will not perish but have everlasting life.”
Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, vol. 2, ch. 30 (“The External and Internal Call”), pp. 191-197; translated from Dutch (Reformation Heritage Books).
So the free, unconditional call is not a strange concept to be smuggled in. It is already the tradition’s own words, sounded by its own ministers and then qualified out of reach. The settled assurance these same sermons withhold is not a strange idea either; it is the plain teaching of their own Heidelberg Catechism and Canons of Dort. Recovery does not mean preaching a new gospel. It means letting the unconditional call stand without the “fine print” the next breath so often adds, and letting the confession’s assurance be preached as the confession states it.
What is missing, then, is not soundness or seriousness. It is the plain, present, unconditional word that Boston and Ferguson and the Canons all insist upon: that Christ himself, and not merely his benefits at a distance, is freely offered to sinners as sinners, and that the hearer who has waited a long time may come to him tonight, just as he is, and may know that he belongs to him.
Search it out for yourself
None of this rests on my say-so. If you have sat under this preaching and wondered whether the door is really open to you tonight, do not settle the question from this article. Settle it from the Scriptures, and from the very authors that are probably on your bookshelf. Read them with one question in view: to whom is Christ offered, and may a believer come to know that he belongs to Him?
| Bible Text | What it says |
|---|---|
| Isaiah 55:1-3 | The invitation is free, to everyone who thirsts, “without money and without price.” |
| Matthew 11:28-30 | “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” |
| John 6:37 | “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” |
| Acts 16:30-31 | “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” |
| 1 John 5:11-13 | Written “that ye may know that ye have eternal life.” |
| Old writers | Where to find it |
|---|---|
| The free offer to sinners as sinners | Edward Fisher and Thomas Boston, The Marrow of Modern Divinity |
| Christ offered to everyone who hears | Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, vol. 2, ch. 30 |
| None who come are ever cast out | John Bunyan, Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ |
| Faith laying hold of the offered Christ | Alexander Comrie, The ABC of Faith |
| Assurance belongs to the nature of faith | John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.2 |
A note on sources
The sermon figures come from an analysis of transcribed sermons, scored against a fixed list of criteria drawn from the Three Forms of Unity, with every rating supported by a verified quotation from the source transcript. Each quotation above is reproduced verbatim from a verified row in that analysis. The RCNA sample is about 130 sermons, almost all of them GGiN sermons preached in Dutch; the Reformers (16 sermons) and Church Fathers (14) are smaller comparison sets. Quotations from these Dutch Reformed Experiential churches are translated from the Dutch; the RCNA quotation and the Boston, Ferguson, and Spurgeon material are given in their original English; à Brakel is quoted from the published English translation of The Christian’s Reasonable Service. Sermons from these churches are cited without naming the preacher, whether quoted as a problem or as a better example, since the concern is a shared pattern rather than any one man.
Works referenced: Gert van den Brink, Hyperdordt: Belijden zonder te geloven and Dordt zoals je Dordt niet kende (2023); Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ (2016); Edward Fisher and Thomas Boston, The Marrow of Modern Divinity; Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service (Reformation Heritage Books); Alexander Comrie, The ABC of Faith; John Bunyan, Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion; Charles Spurgeon, the sermons “The Warrant of Faith” and “Helps to Full Assurance”; and the Three Forms of Unity (Heidelberg Catechism, Canons of Dort, Belgic Confession). Scripture is quoted from the King James Version.
