Wrong Answers to the Right Question

From Grace to You:

What does saving faith look like? Does it produce a life marked by increasing righteousness, holiness, and good fruit? Or is salvation a momentary event that has no lasting impact in the life of a Christian?

We’ve been considering those and other important questions in the face of popular theological trends that drive a wedge between salvation and sanctification. The heart of the issue is determining the biblical marks of authentic faith—how does a saved person live his or her life? To that end, we’ve focused our thoughts on the book of 1 John—specifically 1 John 3:4-10.

Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness. You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin. No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him. Little children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous; the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother.

Right away, some key statements jump out at us. The first is found in verse 6, where the apostle John writes that “no one who abides in Him sins.” This theme echoes throughout the passage, and John expands on it in verse 9 with the words “because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin.” At face value, it appears John is saying that sin is impossiblefor believers.

Those are astounding statements, especially considering 1 John 1:8. There he writes, “If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.” And again in verse 10, he writes, “If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.” In the short space of a couple chapters, John makes what seem to be very contradictory statements about the existence of sin in a believer’s life.

There have been several theological attempts to harmonize John’s apparent contradiction. Some make the case that the sin John refers to in chapter 3 is only mortalsin. In fact, that’s the view of the Catholic Church, which differentiates between venial (forgivable) and mortal sins. But that’s a false, unbiblical dichotomy. All sin carries with it the same consequences (Romans 6:23).

Others argue that John is only referring to willful, deliberate sin. The idea is that Christians don’t actively commit sin; they merely suffer it. But the New Testament never depicts believers as helpless victims of iniquity. On the contrary, it teaches that believers sin because they choose to yield to temptation (James 1:14-15).

At one extreme end of the discussion, perfectionists would assert that believers can gradually overcome sin until they become completely sinless. In that system, the Christian lives in a constant struggle with sin, regularly losing and gaining ground against its influence, until he eventually reaches sinless perfection or loses his salvation altogether.

At the opposite end of the debate you’ll find the antinomian view. The term antinomiancomes from the Greek word for law (nomos), and it refers to people who live without regard for the law of God. Antinomians believe that sin in the life of the believer simply doesn’t matter, since every aspect of his or her life is covered by grace. That corrupt view—which Paul taught against in Romans 6:12-18—is still popular today.

Modern proponents of cheap grace and easy-believism have their own means of explaining of John’s apparent contradiction. Some say the apostle was exhorting lawless, misbehaving Christians to rededicate their lives to the Lord and move from immature, carnal behavior to spirituality. With that interpretation, they attempt to tone down the letter and make it less definitive or harsh. But their arguments cannot account for John’s clear purpose for writing the letter—“These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). The dichotomy John presents is not mature faith versus immature faith, but rather a saving faith versus a non-saving one.

Still others miss the meaning and application of the passage due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of saving faith. They incorrectly believe that repentance is nothing more than a synonym for faith, and therefore does not refer to turning from sin. Turning from sin, they say, is unnecessary for salvation. Saving faith, then, is nothing more than mere intellectual assent to the facts of the gospel. Pleading with sinners to repent from sin is tantamount to asking them to contribute works to their own salvation. Hence, they accept that salvation may make no change at all in a person’s doctrine or behavior. Even a lifelong state of carnality is not sufficient reason to doubt someone’s salvation.

All those popular views and interpretations attempt to harmonize the apparent contradiction in 1 John. And not one of them gets it right.

The true key to understanding John’s apparent contradiction is Greek grammar. In the passage above, John refers to sin in the present tense, indicating continuous, habitualaction. In other words, John is not referring to occasional acts of sin, but to established and continual patterns of sinful behavior. Believers will sometimes sin (Romans 7:14-25)—even willfully—but they will not and cannot sin habitually and persistently as a way of life (cf. Romans 6:4-14; Galatians 5:24; Ephesians 2:10).

When the Holy Spirit draws sinners to God, regenerates them, and grants them eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ, they are recreated (2 Corinthians 5:17). The nature of the new creature in Christ is to obey the Word, follow Christ, reject the temptations of the world, and display the fruits of righteousness in their lives (Romans 8:6; Philippians 3:9; Colossians 3:2). While the old nature is still present, there is a new desire, interest, and capacity to love and obey the Lord that wasn’t there before.

John’s apparent contradiction is no contradiction at all. In chapter one, he refutes false teachers who claim to have advanced beyond any struggle with sin (1 John 1:8-10). He goes on in chapter two to make it clear that if someone does not obey Christ’s commands (2:3) and live righteously (e.g., demonstrate love [2:9-10]), he is not a believer. In our passage from chapter three, the apostle reinforces the tests of faith he has already established. In doing so, he further refutes false teachers who minimize or deny the significance of sin. His teaching is just as vital today in the face of similar false teaching. Jesus sacrificed Himself not only to perfect people in the future, but to purify them in the present (Ephesians 5:25-27). Minimizing sin in the church goes against the very work of Christ.

In short, John’s point is that a lifestyle of sin is incompatible with true, saving faith. The life of the believer cannot be marked by patterns of unbroken, unrepentant sin. But John doesn’t leave us with that simple truth. He goes on in the passage to provide three reasons this reality is critical to understand.

We’ll look at the first one next time.

Reviving an Ancient Lie

From Grace to You:

The book of 1 John is all about separating truth from error. Specifically, it’s about testing yourself to see if your faith is authentic. And when it comes to defending against the poisonous influence of false teaching, those tests are as vital today as they were when the apostle John—under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit—first wrote them down.

False teaching and teachers were a serious problem for the first-century church. A simple reading of the New Testament indicates that false teachers were everywhere. They infiltrated the church almost immediately after it began, and many of the epistles were written specifically to debunk their lies and address the confusion and damage they caused.

That shouldn’t surprise us. Satan always attacks the truth. He wants people to believe something—anything—other than the truth about salvation through Christ. In the first century the predominant heresy was a mixture of various pagan, Jewish, and quasi-Christian systems of thought heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. It would eventually be known as Gnosticism.

The term Gnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge. The general emphasis of Gnostic teaching was special spiritual knowledge. They taught that matter (the physical universe, e.g., the body) was inherently evil while spirit (the spiritual world, e.g., the mind) was good. That division between the spiritual and physical led them to believe that the height of religious activity was carried out in the mind. The body, and what one did with the body, was irrelevant to Gnostic religion. Therefore, Gnosticism was the pursuit of esoteric, mysterious spiritual knowledge, while the body and the physical world were disregarded and ignored.

That philosophical dualism caused them to be indifferent to moral values and ethical behavior. To them, the body and spirit were completely distinct. So much so, in fact, that sin committed by the body had no connection to or effect on the spirit. Obtaining the special, mysterious knowledge allowed a person to totally divorce himself from anything earthly, anything physical, and anything behavioral.

In fact, as long as you had that special knowledge, it wasn’t important that the particulars of your theology were correct. It didn’t matter what you believed about God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, as long as you had your secret knowledge.

Those ancient lies parallel teaching we frequently hear today. In churches all over the world, we’re still asking people to raise their hands, walk an aisle, sign a card, or pray a prayer to “receive Christ.” They are then assured of their salvation with no regard for how their faith manifests itself in their lives—or how it doesn’t.

Proponents of easy believism and cheap grace are teaching the same fundamental error as the Gnostics—if you say you believe a certain set of truths, how you live doesn’t matter. And in some extreme circles, you can later change your mind to reject those very truths, and still be saved.

But special knowledge doesn’t save you from the penalty for your sins. Mental assent—even to the truth of Scripture—does not make an eternal difference on its own (cf. James 2:19). Faith and repentance is much more than simply changing your mind about God. Believers aren’t merely people who have special knowledge and beliefs about Christ—we’re new creatures (2 Corinthians 5:17), transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit through the Word of God.

The apostle John wrote the book of 1 John to address the threat of proto-Gnostic false teaching, and to give his readers a series of tests to confirm the validity of their professions of faith. Today, those same tests help us see through the false gospel of cheap grace and easy believism, and show us what true, saving faith looks like. And that’s where we’ll pick it up next time.

Spiritual Fallout

From Grace to You:

The disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor power plant released four hundred times the amount of radioactive material released in the bombing of Hiroshima. Experts estimate that as much as 60 percent of the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster landed in the neighboring nation of Belarus.

I’ve had the privilege to minister alongside faithful pastors and church leaders from Belarus, and they can attest to the dramatic, tragic effects of the disaster. The plume of smoke and debris deposited radioactive material across much of the country. The toxic pollution permeated the soil and the water supply, effectively poisoning the entire country, and extending the impact of the disaster to future generations.

Just as environmental pollution can wreak long-lasting devastation across a wide region, the same is true of spiritual poison. False teaching can create years—even generations—of spiritual confusion, corruption, and collapse. But unlike a rogue cloud of radioactive material, false teaching can and must be defended against.

There is a particular stripe of false teaching that has caused a great deal of destruction in the church for several decades—a spiritual scourge that has sown confusion and corruption into congregations around the world. See if you can spot it in the statements below.

• Repentance is just a synonym for faith. Turning from sin is not required for salvation.
• Saving faith is simply being convinced or giving credence to the truth of the gospel. It is not a personal commitment to Christ.
• Faith might not last. It is a gift of God, but it can collapse, be overthrown or subverted, and can even turn into unbelief.
• Christians can lapse into a state of permanent spiritual barrenness and lifelong carnality. Born again people can continuously live like the unsaved.
• Disobedience and prolonged sin are no reason to doubt one’s salvation. Spiritual fruit is not a given in the Christian life.
• Nothing guarantees that a Christian will love God.
• All who claim Christ by faith as Savior, regardless of their lifestyle, should be assured they belong to God. It is dangerous and destructive to question the salvation of professing Christians.
• The New Testament writers never questioned the reality of their readers’ faith.

Those shocking statements do not resemble the gospel of Jesus Christ and His apostles. They are in fact satanic lies meant to give men and women false assurance of their salvation and cripple the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.

And yet those lies have a pervasive impact in the church today. Like poisonous fallout, that false teaching permeates the very soil of evangelicalism, and the tainted fruit of this spiritual catastrophe is deadly.

But there is an antidote to this spiritual toxin. It’s found in 1 John, a book which presents the people of God with several tests to determine the true nature of their faith. In particular, 1 John 3:4-10 gets to the heart of how believers are to think and act as new creatures in Christ:

Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness. You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin. No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him. Little children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous; the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother.

Over the next several days, we’re going to consider the unmistakable truth spelled out in those verses: that the believer’s life is completely incompatible with a lifestyle of sin.

Quote of the Day

“As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene… No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.” 

– Albert Einstein

Quote of the Day

“Does it grieve you, my friends, that the name of God is being taken in vain and desecrated? Does it grieve you that we are living in a godless age? …But, we are living in such an age and the main reason we should be praying about revival is that we are anxious to see God’s name vindicated and His glory manifested. We should be anxious to see something happening that will arrest the nations, all the peoples, and cause them to stop and to think again.” 

– Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Quote of the Day

“Without regeneration, God would just be hosing off the pig and watching it head right back for the muck.” 

– Dan Phillips

Genesis 1:1

Science is observation.

All observations can be categorized in 5 very broad areas:

Time
Force
Action
Space
Matter

In the beginning
God
created
the heavens
and the earth.

Genesis 1:1 is the most complete scientific observation ever.

Quote of the Day

“The very heart of worship, as the Bible makes clear, is the business of expressing, from the depths of our spirits, the highest possible honor we can offer before God.”

– R.C. Sproul

Evangelism: How the Whole Church Speaks of Jesus

From The Gospel Coalition:

Mack Stiles. Evangelism: How the Whole Church Speaks of Jesus. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014. 128 pp. $14.99.

Our church has always stressed the need for evangelism. Whenever our local missions pastor preaches, it almost always turns into a sermon on evangelism (especially when he’s trying not to). We have a local missions team that goes out every week to open-air preach and interact with individuals on the streets of our city, sharing the gospel at every opportunity.

But then, about a year ago, we did something really bold: we took all of our small groups through a personal evangelism workshop. The response?

*crickets*

I was a small group leader at the time, taking my group through the course. It was really challenging material that actually took a lot of the fear out of evangelism. But despite its initial “failure,” the impetus behind offering this training is a good one—a desire to create a healthy culture of evangelism, one where it’s seen as a normal part of the Christian life.

I have a hunch Mack Stiles would stand up and cheer if he knew this was something our church attempted (and continues to nurture). Why? Because that’s exactly what his latest book, Evangelism: How the Whole Church Speaks of Jesus, is all about.

It’s Not About the Results

If there’s one thing Stiles wants you to understand, it’s this: evangelism is not about programs or events. It’s not a technique or a specific kind of response. Many of our problems creating a healthy culture of evangelism stem from a lack of a biblical foundation. We count declarations of faith, hands raised, cards put in a bag, people walking down aisles—but do these things really mean anything? Maybe, but maybe not.

Regardless, if we’re going to see a culture of evangelism take root, “we must be very careful to conform our evangelistic practices to the Bible, because this honors God” (24). So, Stiles, general secretary for the Fellowship of Christian UAE Students in the United Arab Emirates and author of several evangelism books, begins by defining his terms—specifically, what evangelism means.

“Evangelism is teaching the gospel with the aim to persuade,” he explains. “This definition, small as it is, offers a far better balance in which to weigh our evangelistic practice than looking at how many people have responded to an appeal” (26-27).

Those four elements in Stiles’s definition are key: teach, gospel, aim, persuade. Without any of those, you don’t really have evangelism. Our goal in evangelism is to communicate the gospel with the purpose of persuading our hearers that it is true. That doesn’t mean browbeating or extorting a profession of faith. It just means speaking with conviction about the truth of the good news.

This, I think, is one of the places we all get tripped up. We tend to speak almost apologetically about the gospel, or we wring our hands, break out into a sweat, and worry about saying the wrong thing. But this is also where it’s helpful to remember something crucial: “conversion is required [for salvation], but conversion is a function of genuine faith, which is given by the Spirit” (37). In other words, you’re not responsible for the result. You’re only called to be faithful and speak.

What a Culture of Evangelism Looks Like

So what does a healthy culture of evangelism look like? Stiles admits that it’s impossible to instruct people on everything that goes into it, but he can describe the yearnings that surround it. He breaks these down into 11 points:

1. A culture motivated by love for Jesus and his gospel
2. A culture that is confident in the gospel
3. A culture that understands the danger of entertainment
4. A culture that sees people clearly
5. A culture that pulls together as one
6. A culture in which people teach one another
7. A culture that models evangelism
8. A culture in which people who are sharing their faith are celebrated
9. A culture that knows how to affirm and celebrate new life
10. A culture doing ministry that feels risky and is dangerous
11. A culture that understands that the church is the chosen and best method of evangelism

There’s so much that could be said about each of these points, but notice how they all work together. If the people attending week in and week out aren’t passionate about sharing their faith, then no amount of encouragement from the pulpit is going to change them. This culture builds up from within the body and should be celebrated.

Simple, but not.

Create and Cultivate the Culture You Want to See

Creating a culture of evangelism isn’t a one-and-done thing. You can’t preach a series on evangelism or offer an occasional course, pat yourself on the back, and think, Nailed it. You have to be intentional about creating and cultivating the culture you want to see, but there’s only so much control any church leader really has.

Why? Because “a culture of evangelism is grassroots, not top-down.” Stiles writes:
In a culture of evangelism, people understand that the main task of the church is to be the church. . . . The church should cultivate a culture of evangelism. The members are sent out from the church to do evangelism. (65-66)

Do you feel the tension there? It’s so easy to fall into the trap of trying to force the change from the top or to program evangelism. But it doesn’t work that way. A church only becomes more evangelistic as its members become more evangelistic. And this is big, scary stuff. Church leaders can and should model it, but the members have to own it.

Thankfully, every faithful Christian can own this vision. We should want this for our churches. We should want to be the kind of people who take risks to share the gospel, who understand that entertainment doesn’t equal ministry and that God truly rejoices when one lost sheep is found. This is the vision Stiles presents in Evangelism: How the Whole Church Speaks of Jesus. It’s what I want to see in my own life and in the lives of all the members of my church. How about you?

Not Number One, The Only One

JD Greer writes about the First Commandment:

“You shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20:3

Sounds simple enough, right? The Hebrew, often translated as “besides me” or “before me,” means “in my presence.” The point is that nothing else can qualify as god in your life. The true God is not only to be number one but the only one.

In our day, we don’t like narrow, exclusive options. We might think God is constraining and restricting our choices. But isn’t this how love is expressed? Imagine if I were to tell my wife, “Baby, you’re number one. No matter how many other wives I take, you’ll be my first.” That might make for compelling reality television, but that’s not going to be a good marriage. Love demands exclusivity. My wife doesn’t want to be number one; she wants to be the only one—not because she doesn’t love me but because she does.

So love and exclusivity aren’t at odds with each other. God’s demand for loyalty is God’s display of love.

First Place

Why is it appropriate for God to demand first place in our lives? Is it appropriate for us to demand this kind of allegiance from those around us? Why or why not?

Some of you may look at this first commandment and think, I can check this one off. I don’t call anything or anyone else “God” in my life. I don’t bow down to or worship anything or anyone else. I don’t pray to anything or anyone else. And I don’t have any little statues or shrines in my house. Let’s move on. But here’s where we need to explore more deeply the meaning of putting other things or people before God. And this is where we come to a key biblical concept—idolatry.

What is an idol? It is anything or anyone we put in the place of God in our lives. An idol is anything or anyone we consider so central, so fundamental, so essential to our life that we couldn’t imagine life without it, him, or her. An idol is anything or anyone we love more than God, trust more than God, or obey more than God.

Here are some diagnostic questions to discover what you worship:

• What do you feel you need in order for life to be good?
• What makes life worth living?
• When you dream about the future, what do you dream about obtaining?
• Where do you go for comfort?

Breaking the first commandment leads to breaking the others because idolatry is the gateway to all other sins. If you look deeply into the ways you disobey God, you’ll usually find idolatry at the root.

The areas in your life where you are breaking the commandments are like smoke from a fire. Don’t focus on the smoke. Follow the trail of smoke back to the fire and you will arrive at the altars of the idols you are worshiping.

Sin and disobedience can’t be fixed by changing behavior. We must go back to the attitude that leads to the action, the idolatrous heart that leads to the idolatrous action. Worshiping something or someone else other than God leads us into sin. Therefore, to truly escape the harmful effects of sinful behavior, we must go back to what we worship. And the first commandment is all about God being first.

Should We Fast?

Fasting wasn't just for ancient Israel or the early church; it is a powerful tool for believers today. David Mathis of Desiring God writes:

What makes fasting such a gift is its ability, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to focus our feelings and their expression toward God in prayer. Fasting walks arm in arm with prayer — as John Piper says, she is "the hungry handmaiden of prayer," who "both reveals and remedies."
She reveals the measure of food's mastery over us — or television or computers or whatever we submit to again and again to conceal the weakness of our hunger for God. And she remedies by intensifying the earnestness of our prayer and saying with our whole body what prayer says with the heart: I long to be satisfied in God alone! (When I Don't Desire God, 171)That burn in your gut, that rolling fire in your belly, demanding that you feed it more food, signals game time for fasting as a means of grace. Only as we voluntarily embrace the pain of an empty stomach do we see how much we've allowed our belly to be our god (Philippians 3:19).

And in that gnawing ache of growing hunger is the engine of fasting, generating the reminder to bend our longings for food Godward and inspire intensified longings for Jesus. Fasting, says Piper, is the physical exclamation point at the end of the sentence, "This much, O God, I want you!" (Hunger for God, 25–26).

He concludes:

Fasting, like the gospel, isn't for the self-sufficient and those who feel they have it all together. It's for the poor in spirit. It's for those who mourn. For the meek. For those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. In other words, fasting is for Christians.

It is a desperate measure, for desperate times, among those who know themselves desperate for God.

I think a better question is "Why don't we fast?"

A Tale of Two Gospels

Mike Riccardi at the Cripplegate writes:

And [Jesus] also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner!’ I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

- Luke 18:9–14 -



What intrigues me about the Pharisee in this passage is that he thanked God for his moral uprightness and religious devotion. He is not claiming, perhaps like the rich, young ruler did, that he had kept God’s law and thus is deserving of eternal life. He doesn’t believe that he’s earned his salvation by works of righteousness achieved apart from divine grace. No, he goes to thank God for the grace and charity that God had worked in him, by which he has become acceptable to God. He believes that he is justified by his faith in God as well as the good works which proceed from the divinely-imparted righteousness inherent within him. And he does not go to his house justified.

Jesus told this parable to those who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. Apparently, Jesus thinks that if you believe that the ground of your acceptance with God—the basis of your salvation—is an inherent, God-wrought righteousness that is infused or imparted to you, you are trusting in yourself for righteousness. Trusting even partly in your good works as the basis for your salvation—even if you acknowledge and truly believe that they are 100% God-given—will not leave you going to your house justified.

The tax collector was a different story. The tax collector was broken in sorrow over his sin, so much so that he wouldn’t come near the front of the temple—so much so that he was literally and physically bowed low. He had apprehended the severity of his case before a holy God. He recognized that he had no good works by which to commend himself—whether they originated with him or whether they were graces that God worked in him. He despaired of having anything inherent in himself that could merit acceptance with this God of perfect righteousness. His only hope was to cry out for mercy. Literally: “God, be propitious towards me, the sinner!” “Lord, my only hope is that You would make propitiation for me. All my trust for my acceptance with You rests squarely in Your own sovereign provision of atonement!”

The tax collector went to his house justified.

He trusted nothing in himself. He recognized that he had no basis for righteousness inherent in himself. All of his hope, all of his faith, all of his dependence was upon the merciful provision of righteousness that comes through the propitiatory sacrifice of Another. And based upon Jesus’ conclusion to the parable in verse 14, we learn that God counts that kind of faith as righteousness.

The Pharisee was trusting in what he thought was his inherent righteousness, imparted to him and wrought by God. Yet he was condemned. The tax collector was trusting in an alien righteousness that was none of his own. And he was justified by faith alone. God declared him to be righteous based upon his faith in the righteousness of Another.



A tale of two gospels. One of them saves, the other condemns.

The Pharisee’s gospel was the gospel of Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism teaches that upon believing in Christ, the sinner is graciously made practically righteous by the infusion or impartation of righteousness to the believer. This inherent righteousness increases as the believer pursues good works and charity. Final salvation is a reward for such works of merit combined with faith.

But this is no gospel at all (Gal 1:6–9). This is not good news for us tax collectors who recognize that we have nothing good in ourselves by which to commend ourselves to God. No, if the ground of our justification depends in any part on our own good works, we know we have no hope. That is bad news. And it leaves us condemned.

But the Gospel of the Scriptures speaks differently. The Word of God teaches that when God grants repentance and faith to the sinner—the kind of faith that looks away from self and trusts entirely on the alien righteousness of Christ—God credits that faith as righteousness (Rom 3:28; 4:3–6). He imputes to the believer the righteousness and merit of Christ(Rom 5:18–19; 2 Cor 5:21; Gal 2:16; Phil 3:9), who fulfilled all righteousness in our stead (Rom 8:3–4; cf. Matt 3:15). And on the basis of the righteousness of His own beloved Son, to whom we are united by faith, He declares us righteous and acceptable in His sight. This is truly good news, for it provides for us that righteousness to which we could never even contribute.

What are you trusting in for your acceptance with God? This is the most important question you will ever answer. Are you trusting in Jesus plus: Being a good person? caring about people? humanitarian efforts? volunteer work? church attendance? baptism? going to confession? participating in the mass?

If so, let me invite you to look away from yourself, to survey afresh the severity of your sin in the light of God’s holiness, and to cry out in repentance to God for mercy based on the sacrifice of Christ alone. Stake all your hope for righteousness—all your hope for acceptance with God—on the sufficiency of Christ’s righteousness alone. Don’t trust in yourself to be righteous. Trust in Him to be righteous on your behalf. And go to your house justified.