There are perhaps more souls lost through a false confidence of salvation than by any other deceit the Devil makes use of. I do not mean those notorious sinners, but among the more decent formalists, who because they have never fallen into any foul, gross sins, or because their lives are somewhat reformed, and they practice some outward duties, make no doubt of the safety of their state. Yet they have no union with Christ by faith; the great renovating change has never been wrought in them; their natures are still unrenewed, their hearts unsanctified; they never saw and bewailed their own vileness; they never felt their real need of a Savior, in a way of renunciation of their own righteousness. They do not pant and labor after higher degrees of grace and holiness, like a true child of God, who can never rest contented with his present attainments [of grace]. They [the deceived] keep plodding on in the same beaten track, vainly thinking to divide their hearts between God and the world and content themselves with a formal, lifeless, luke-warm religion, which only tends to their greater delusion. Thus they go on dreaming of heaven till they awake in hell. Sir Richard Hill
This is a very sobering and perhaps frightening statement. It is not frightening because of the use of hyperbole or because of flowery language, but because it is so earnest and so to the point. It is frightening because it appears to be so true of so many. It is frightening because it is biblical and so applicable to our present day, perhaps even more than the author’s own day. It is also frightening because this is the same thought of Jonathan Edwards and others. It is frightening because so many are encouraged and pumped up to think that they should have confidence in our day. It is frightening because so many ministers want to give their people confidence and hate the idea that their confidence would be shaken. It is frightening because there are so many ministers who will not try to discern between the false confidence of so many and that of a true faith.
The Lord Jesus spoke of a wide gate and a broad road that many are on. It can be that people think of that gate and road as referring to the whole world, but it refers to those who actually think that they are on the road to heaven. “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. 14 “For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Mat 7:13-14). These people were trying to enter the gate that leads to life but they actually entered the gate that leads to destruction. The wide gate and the broad road that leads to destruction are populated or tried by those who think that they are on the way to life. This should startle us and wake us up to stop playing with the Gospel and the nature of true conversion. When the Gospel is watered down, the message becomes something other than the true Gospel and becomes a message with a wide gate and a broad road.
While it may be nothing more than an intellectual problem or something to tickle the fancy of others, this is as serious as it gets. A false confidence of salvation is used by the devil to deceive human beings to damnation. This means that professing churches can be one of the favorite places of the devil to deceive people. This means that people who are more concerned with evangelism than the truth may in fact be the evangelists of the devil. This means that preachers who are more concerned with numbers and growth than the true Gospel are preachers for the devil. All of those things lead people to a false confidence of salvation.
While the thought may seem repugnant to many, it makes perfect sense when one reads Scripture. The devil began his human history of deception with twisting the words of God. He tried to twist Scripture in his temptation of Jesus. There is only one place in all of history that God inspired (breathed forth) His words about the Lord Jesus and the true Gospel. This means that men who are careless in their handling of the Scriptures and preach and teach a gospel that is not according to the whole of Scripture are deceiving men about the Gospel. We live in a day where it seems that the vast majority of people judge professing churches by results, numbers, and money. Where is the Gospel? It has been watered down by people on all sides. Some will tell us that all a person has to do is repeat a prayer while others will give us a list of moral issues that we must take up. The devil, however, continues to give people a false confidence in their salvation while keeping people busy with so many other things rather than the Gospel itself. Once again, the genuine Gospel is rare in our day.
God Loves... Himself 
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