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.

How Can An Infinite Hell Be Just When Our Sins Are Finite?

While speaking with my brother about Christ, this question came up. How would you answer?

Here is an answer from RC Sproul:

The wisdom of this question, I would argue, is that it gets at the real horror of hell. A lake of fire is a frightening thought indeed. The greater dread, however, is the duration of hell, that it never ends. This, I suspect, is what tempts some to try to tweak the church’s historic view on hell, including everyone from John Stott to Rob Bell. Is it possible to posit a truly terrifying, painful hell that only lasts a time? Can we affirm the just judgment of God, and still hope that it will one day come to an end?

Well yes you can posit it, but in so doing you would expose a lack of understanding of the scope of the evil of our sin, and a lack of understanding of the nature of God’s judgment. Sin, the church has argued, must be punished infinitely because we sin against an infinitely holy God. The problem with taking a cookie out of the cookie jar isn’t the cookie, nor the calories. Rather it is the shaking of our fist at the God of heaven and earth. When we commit even the smallest sin we are committing what one great theologian calls “cosmic treason.” When we steal the cookie we are declaring to the God who made us, who sustains us, who daily pours out His grace on us, “I WILL NOT HAVE YOU RULE OVER ME.” Thus we stand infinitely guilty, and no amount of intensity to the sinner’s pain can trump the eternity of the sinner’s pain. As painful as it may be to admit, anything less than eternal punishment would not be just, given the depth of our depravity in rebelling against our Maker.

If, however, that still does not satisfy ones sense of justice, if we still find God less than honorable to punish the earthly sins of men with an eternity in hell, consider this. Men do not cease to sin when they die. That is, the souls in hell are still unregenerate, still captive to their sin. Indeed they are all worse than they were when they were on earth. Hell lacks the common grace of God, the restraining grace of God. It is true that even the sinners below confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, but they do so with clenched teeth, seething with rage. It is true that their knees are bowed, but only because our Lord has broken them with a rod of iron. They hate God and curse Him for eternity.

Indeed one could argue that the deepest horror of hell is not that the pain will be so intense, nor that it will endure forever, but that we will ever become less and less what we were made to be. Without His grace we will continually devolve, and continually earn His continuing wrath. We, like hell, spiral ever downward into deeper and deeper darkness, deeper and deeper evil.

Hell is too dreadful a place to think on for too long. If you are comfortable with it, if the thought of it does not make you squirm, likely you don’t understand it. Sin, however, is still more dreadful, despite how comfortable we are with it. Hell is forever.

When Faith Is and Isn't Real

From 9 Marks:

When people pursue faith in an unbiblical way, false converts are made, and the world is misled about what it means to follow Jesus. Pastors, therefore, need to keep an eye out for false faith, that they might separate the false from the true:

1. True faith is not deedless, but shows itself in deeds.
James asks what kind of faith is saving by asking about faith’s relationship to deeds. “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder” (James 2:19). According to this passage, knowing the truth is not enough. It is possible to know about the truth, and be deceived. So mere knowledge does not equate to a real saving faith. Rather, true faith shows itself in deeds.

2. It is not faith in yourself, but in God.
Walk into any Christian bookstore and you’ll see bestselling Christian books with self-help advice. Westerners today love talk of the God within. Yet we cannot save ourselves: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved” (Eph. 2:4-5). Following ourselves and believing in ourselves will not result in eternal life, but eternal death.

3. It is not faith in heritage, but in Christ.
Growing up in a Christian home is not what saves you. Having grandparents who are saved is not what saves you. If anyone had reason to place their faith in heritage it was Paul—“circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews,” and on and on he goes (Phil. 3:4-11). But all this is rubbish, he concludes—our heritage does not save us. Christ does.

4. It is not faith in faith, but in Christ’s completed work.
Much so-called Christian TV and radio programming today panders to what peoples' "itching ears" want to hear: the promise of earthly gain. Over and over again we hear the testimonies of businessmen who "turned on to Jesus" and saw their businesses double. “If you don’t have these things,” people are told, “it’s because you are not believing hard enough. So believe harder!” Notice two problems here: stuff (not Christ) is the end, and looking inward (instead of outward at Christ) is the means. Sadly, people take their eyes off of Christ’s finished work on the cross, and put them on themselves. But true faith does not look to itself, it looks to Christ, his work on the cross, a sacrifice that we know God accepted because he raised him from the dead.

5. It does not fail to repent, but changes direction.
Apart from repentance, faith is not real and it is not saving. There are many people who say they believe in Jesus, but nothing has changed in their lives. They refuse to renounce the old way of living. Repentance is not just feeling sorry for sin. Anyone can feel bad about sin. True repentance begins with sorrow, seeks forgiveness, and then culminates in a change of direction. A person turns around and starts walking the other way.

Real saving faith is repentance and trust in Jesus Christ as a living person for forgiveness of sins and eternal life with God.

It is full reliance on Christ. He is the object.

It is the way of surrender, and evidences itself as real by the authentic crop it produces.

Quote of the Day

“Faith is nothing but the instrument or the channel by which this righteousness of God in Christ becomes ours. It is not faith that saves us. What saves us is the Lord Jesus Christ and His perfect work. It is the death of Christ upon Calvary’s Cross that saves us. It is His perfect life that saves us. It is His appearing on our behalf in the presence of God that saves us. It is God putting Christ’s righteousness to our account that saves us.” 

-Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Quote of the Day

“You are not redeemed by a profession of faith but by the possession of faith.”

– R.C. Sproul

President Obama's Faith

Christianity Today has an interesting article on the faith of our president. Interesting reading for all of those out there debating his faith and values.

Here is the part that interested me.

The culture, not Scripture, is the primary driver of President Obama's views. With abortion, his own values matter, not Psalm 139; with homosexuality and marriage, his daughters' opinions matter, not Genesis 2 and Romans 1. But it is not merely President Obama's isolated policies, troubling as they may be, that give many Christians like me pause. It is the whole worldview. As seen above, there are deeply unbiblical ideas running beneath the surface of the President's orthodox declarations. The President's oratory sometimes smacks of Billy Graham, but those who listen carefully will also hear the dulcet tones of Harry Emerson Fosdick. His is a no-injury Protestantism, liberal Christianity enrobed in a revivalist shell.

Keep reading...

All You Have To Do Is Recognize Your Need. Really?

With regard to saving faith, have you ever heard a preacher say "all you have to do is recognize your need" as if this were the easiest thing in the world?

You might as well tell a sinner "all you have to do is perfectly obey the ten commandments."

The nature of proud fallen man is such that he can no more submit to the humbling terms of the gospel any more than he can obey the law, without the Lord removing the old heart of stone and granting him a new heart of flesh (Ezek 36:26)

Who is sufficient for these things? Grace is at the root of saving faith. This spirit-wrought faith is the hand by which the soul lays hold of Jesus Christ, is united to Him, and is redeemed. They who have true faith take hold of Christ's strength, courage and his victory over the world. The more faith you have the more useful will you be. Faith is like a seed planted by God and germinated by the Holy Spirit and grows up organically, by degrees, from faith to faith. That our faith would grow should be the daily prayer of all who love the Lord. Do you have faith? Always remember that it is not something that comes natural to men, but is a supernatural gift from on high.

As John the Baptist said, "...a person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven." And when Peter confessed that Jesus is the Christ the Son of the Living God, Jesus answered him that "flesh and blood had not revealed this to him but my Father who is in heaven."

The command to repent and believe the gospel is given indiscriminately to all. But, contrary to what many modern preachers would say, this is no easy command to obey. Men are tethered to the yoke of sin and are by nature hostile to God (Rom 8:7; 1 Cor 2:14) making them unable to rise above their own native resources to believe. Jesus does not come to fix our old house but says that the old house must be torn completely down to the ground. There is no coming to him in faith unless the Father grants it (John 6:65) The synergist, who still gives people hope they they are sufficient in themselves to meet God's condition, comes along as says, "All you need to do is humble yourself, recognize your need, believe the gospel..." which then puffs up the sinner, as if we only need to fix a few things in our old rotting house. But the true gospel gives a death blow to the root of our self-righteousness. The fallen man is proud and self-righteous by nature. He would do anything, even outwardly obey the commandments, rather than let go of his self-righteousness. But to give up self-righteousness is absolutely needful to salvation, and this humility, this letting go, is not a fruit that springs from nature. We cling to tightly and fiercely to ourselves. To confess that there is no good thing in us,that we have no merit or goodness of our own and must trust in the righteousness of another is the product of a new heart and so Jesus declares that it is a gift from on high that we owe to God's sovereign, particular grace in Jesus Christ ALONE with no mixture of glory to man.

How is it that so many preachers forget this obvious and pervasive truth in the Bible? It all arises out of ignorance and our desire to credit some portion, however small, of our salvation to ourselves. But once the light of the gospel shines in our hearts, and the Spirit disarms our hostility, the bondage of sin and self-righteousness is broken. Let us never "glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Tim. 1:15; Gal. 6:14.) not only for justification when we come to faith, but also for the quickening of the Spirit that brings us to faith. Both derive their power from the Person and Word of Jesus Christ. He provides everything we need for salvation, including a new heart to believe.

The Value of Faith

“To say ‘justification by faith’ is merely another way of saying ‘justification by Christ’. Faith has absolutely no value in itself; its value lies solely in its object. Faith is the eye that looks to Christ, the hand that lays hold of him, the mouth that drinks the water of life.”

— John Stott

Is Your Faith Toward Christ Real?

Would you like to know whether your faith is real? Then try it by the feelings toward Christ which it produces. Nominal faith may believe that such a person as Christ existed, and was a great benefactor to mankind. It may show Him some external respect, attend His outward ordinances, and bow the head at His name. But it will go no further.

Real faith will make a person glory in Christ, as the Redeemer, the Deliverer, the Priest, the Friend — without whom they would have no hope at all. It will produce confidence in Him, love towards Him, delight in Him, comfort in Him, as the mediator, the food, the light, the life, the peace of the soul.

~ J.C. Ryle

Quote of the Day

“But why is faith the means of justification? Simply because it is the action of union with Jesus Christ. Faith is our coming to Him, our trusting Him, our resting in Him. The moment we are united to Him, we are immediately endowed with all that He has secured for us. We are immediately justified before we have done a single good deed, because we are His and He is God’s. Just as a very poor woman is a very poor woman until the very moment that she marries a wealthy man. But at the moment that she becomes his wife, she becomes a wealthy woman. It is by means of her acceptance that she becomes a wealthy woman, but her acceptance does not make her a wealthy woman; it is her husband’s wealth that makes her so. So faith does not justify; Christ justifies. But faith is the act of union with Christ.”

- John H. Gerstner

Faith-Gift from God or Human Fraud

Justification is by grace alone through faith in Christ alone, all to God’s glory alone. The Bible teaches that this faith that justifies is a GIFT from God (Eph 2:8,9; Phil 1:29) and not merely the product of man’s unregenerate nature which is still spiritually dead towards God in sin.

If faith is a merely a human choice, then it can be lost. This is true of a false and fraudulent kind of faith, which is temporarily enamored with the blessings of the kingdom (the idea of guilt removed, peace for a troubled conscience and such like) but which never can be characterized by a true and lasting love for the biblical Christ and the biblical Gospel.

In contrast, true saving faith is God’s gift to His elect people and is characterized by its enduring nature. Those who have made a profession of faith in Christ and walk away, never had the real thing. They never belonged to Him (1 John 2:19).

Quote of the Day

“Without conversion of heart we cannot serve God on earth. We have naturally neither faith, nor fear, nor love, toward God and His Son Jesus Christ. We have no delight in His Word. We take no pleasure in prayer or communion with Him. We have no enjoyment in His ordinances, His house, His people, or His day. We may have a form of Christianity, and keep up a round of ceremonies and religious performances. But without conversion we have no more heart in our religion than a brick or a stone. Can a dead corpse serve God? We know it cannot. Well, without conversion we are dead toward God.”

– J.C. Ryle