Stone VIII - Redemption: Faith

As we establish our altar of remembrance, we have heard the stories of Creation and The Fall.
We began our third movement last time, Redemption. Redemption is the idea of salvation used to express deliverance from sin. We are looking at redemption in three parts that make up the fundamental statement of Christian belief, that salvation comes by Grace alone, through Faith alone, in Christ alone.
Last time we started by looking intently on the glory of God’s grace. Grace and the atonement explain why and how God himself makes a way for our salvation, through Christ, and actually regenerates us by the work of the Holy Spirit, imparting new spiritual life within.
This week we will examine our appropriate response to the gospel call, justification by faith. We pick up where Paul concludes Romans 3 by saying, “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.” He then uses Abraham as an example of how believers were saved in the Old Testament through faith by quoting Genesis 15:6, “Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness” in Romans 4:1-8.
Paul applies the salvation by grace through faith formulation to those who share Abraham’s faith through the rest of the chapter and clearly concludes in 5:1-2 “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.”
I. Our Response
Conversion is our willing response to the gospel call, in which we sincerely repent of sins and place our faith in Christ for salvation. The word conversion itself means “turning.” For us it represents a spiritual turning from sin to the person and work of Christ.
The turning to Christ is called faith. The turning from sin is called repentance.
A. Faith - What is faith? Faith is term that we throw around in the Christian world in a way that if you really listen, it leads you to believe that we have no idea what it really is. The primary misconception is that faith is an object in itself. So many times in our culture we talk about faith as though faith were the thing, as if we were placing our faith in faith. The result is that we quantify the object. It becomes about having more faith, and we are told we need to have more faith. That is a lie.
Faith is not the object, God is! And the key is not to have more faith, but to place your faith in God. Jesus did say to the disciples when they asked why they had failed cast out a demon that it was, "Because of your little faith.” However, He continues “For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”
What Jesus was saying was that the object of their faith was small, but that the smallest amount of faith placed in the right object has infinite power. You don’t need more faith you need faith placed in the right object. If you are a believer, then you have enough faith. For can the same faith that saved you from eternal hell not accomplish all things in Christ?
Saving faith is trusting in the work of Jesus Christ as a living person for forgiveness of sins and eternal life in the comfortable presence of God. Faith is not an object or a quantity. So, what is the nature of faith?
1. The Nature of Faith - is an acceptance of truth and trust in the promise of that truth. Therefore, it is knowledge, acceptance, and personal trust. Personal saving faith, according to the testimony of Scripture, requires some knowledge of the person and work of Christ. While faith involves more than just knowledge, it is necessary to have some understanding of who Christ is and what he has done, for Romans 10:14 says, “how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?”
Knowledge about the facts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are important and we should do everything in our power to make sure our children and grandchildren have a working knowledge of those facts. However, knowledge of those facts is not enough. People can know the facts and rebel against them. Even more, merely knowing and accepting the facts, or agreeing that they are true, is not enough. Each of us must decide to depend on Jesus to save us personally.
In addition to knowledge of the facts, and approval of them as true, I must decide to depend on the promise of the truth for salvation. Belief must produce the action of faith, which is trust in the person and work of Christ as the object of our faith.
2. Object of Faith - Faith is personal trust in Christ alone to save me. Because saving faith in Scripture involves personal trust, trust is often a much better word in our culture than faith or belief. The reason is that in our contemporary use of language we can “believe” something to be true without having any personal commitment or dependence involved in it. That is where far too many professing Christians actually live today. They have knowledge of the truth and profess to believe it, without any real personal dependence on it or trust in it. Therefore, they live most of their lives as though what they profess to believe is not really real! The word “faith” is often used in our culture to refer to an almost irrational commitment to something in spite of strong evidence to the contrary. It communicates a sort of irrational decision to believe something that we are quite sure is not true!
In these two popular senses, belief and faith have a meaning contrary to the biblical idea. Our use of trust is much closer to the biblical idea, of Christ as the object of faith. With this understanding of true NT faith, we can appreciate that when a person comes to trust in Christ, all three elements must be in place; some basic knowledge of the facts of the gospel, agreement with these facts as truth, and a decision of the will to depend on, or put my trust in Christ alone as my savior.
This personal decision is a matter of the heart, the central faculty that makes commitments for our being.
B. Repentance - Not only must there be a turning to Christ in faith for salvation to be real and conversion to be true and complete, but there must also be a turning from sin, or repentance. We may define repentance as a heartfelt sorrow for sin, a renouncing of it, and a sincere commitment to forsake it and walk in obedience to Christ. This definition indicates that repentance is something that can occur at a specific time and is not equivalent to a demonstration of change in a person’s life. To say that someone has to actually live that changed life over a period of time before repentance can be genuine, turns repentance into a work of obedience that would merit salvation.
Of course, genuine repentance will result in a changed life, and a truly repentant person will begin at once to live a changed life that we can call the fruit of repentance. In order to pass on from generation to generation the reality of the gospel, in our families and in the local church, we must regularly call ourselves to repentance. I believe there are three categories in which people should be called to repentance; believing sinners, unbelieving sinners and religious people.
1. Believing sinners should be called to repentance by acknowledging that they sin by both omission and commission in their thoughts, words, deeds and motives. These people are the easiest to call to repentance because they desire to adjust their lives to the will and pleasure of God. By the power of the Spirit, in the community of the church, they can change their deeds, out of their newness of heart, as God grants them “repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.” The next two are much more difficult.
2. Unbelieving sinners should be called to gospel repentance, which fundamentally means changing their mind about who God is and what is really important. Through the gospel they come into loving relationship with Jesus. Then their lives change out of their new heart-level love for the Lord. Like Paul, we proclaim that “they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance.”
3. Religious people should be called to repentance for their religion. Religion attempts to attain righteousness apart from or in addition to the gift-righteousness given through the cross of Jesus. This is where most of us live. Religion seeks righteousness through goodness and religious devotion, mostly to various unbiblical legalisms and liberalisms.
I believe there are at least three reasons why we must call both the lost and the religious to repent as part of generational faithfulness; for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of unbelievers, because of the example of Jesus.
1. For the sake of the gospel both lost sinners and religious people ought to be called to repent because both pursue righteousness apart from Jesus’ grace, which is an offense to the gospel. We mock the cross when we live as though we can be good enough, or as if we deserve to be saved!
2. For the sake of unbelievers both the lost and religious should be called to repentance because if only the lost are called to repent, they wrongly think that the church is trying to make them into religious people. Far too often, they are right, while religious people fail to see that they are sinners too who need to repent and live humbly by grace.
3. Because of the example of Jesus both lost sinners and religious people ought to be called to repentance because it was religious leaders whom Jesus most sharply rebuked and was by whom he was most violently opposed.
Some of you, even now are upset in your spirit because I would suggest that you need to repent.
Though I have not called your name, you can be sure I am talking about you, because that is the Spirit, in the community of the church, calling you to turn from your selfish pride, humbly to the Lordship of Jesus. Or would you say you have no sin, and make God a liar!
Jesus said to the religious leaders of his day, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”
“For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” (Matthew 23)
If we are to follow the example of Jesus, we must be just as forthright with the religious, as with the lost, while accepting that they will most likely be our most vocal critics and opponents. To be an example of what a believer should look like, as Paul urges Timothy to do, leaders should openly confess their struggles and failures as sin in the hope of establishing a culture of humility and honest repentance in the church that gives everyone an opportunity to follow the leaders in personally acknowledging their need for Jesus’ saving, forgiving, and transforming grace.
C. Faith and Repentance work together - Scripture puts repentance and faith together as different aspects of the one act of coming to Christ. They both must occur simultaneously, as we turn away from sin, we turn to Christ, and as we turn to Christ, we rightly turn away from sin. They are two sides to the same coin of conversion. Neither comes first and they must come together. Therefore, it is contrary to the New Testament to speak about having true saving faith without having repentance, and also to speak about the possibility of someone accepting Christ as savior but not as Lord.
When we realize that genuine saving faith must be accompanied by genuine repentance for sin, it helps us to understand why so much preaching of the gospel today produces inadequate results - a generation of people who claim to believe, but who demonstrate no real faith in Christ in their daily lives.
Although we have been considering initial faith and repentance as the two aspects of conversion, or redemption, it is important to emphasize that faith and repentance are not confined to the beginning of the Christian life. They are rather attitudes of heart that continue to be acted out throughout our lives as believers.
Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 6:12 to pray daily, “Forgive us our sins as we also have forgiven those who sin against us.” Therefore, although it is true that initial saving faith and initial saving repentance occur only once in our lives, and when they occur constitute true conversion, the ongoing heart actions of repentance and faith only begin at conversion. They should continue throughout life, and I believe become more acute as we mature spiritually. Each day there should be a heartfelt repentance for sins that we have committed, and faith in Christ to provide for our needs and to empower us to live the life of a true believer.

II. Definition of Justification
There is but one thing left in this idea of salvation by grace through faith. Once God has made the offer of salvation by His grace and we have responded through faith and repentance, there is forgiveness for our sins.
However, we are still not righteous before God. As we talked about when discussing grace, we still need the redemption that we have in Christ to be applied to us so that God can respond to our faith and do what He promised, that is, actually declare our sins forgiven.
This idea is called justification; a legal declaration concerning our relationship to God’s laws, stating that we are completely right before God and his law and no longer liable to punishment. A right understanding of justification is absolutely critical to the whole Christian faith. It is the dividing line between the biblical gospel of salvation by grace through faith alone in Christ and all false gospels of salvation based on good works.
A. Legal - The use of the term ‘justify’ in Scripture indicates that this is a legal declaration by God. This is most clearly seen in Scripture as it contrasts justification with condemnation.
Paul says in Romans 8:33-34, “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies; who is to condemn?”
To condemn is to declare a person guilty. The opposite of condemn then is justify, which, in this context, means “to declare someone not guilty.” This, by its very nature is a legal transaction.
Though we have been declared innocent, we are not to be confused. We still sin and are sinful by nature. God has declared us to be not guilty because Christ has paid the price for that sin, and through faith we have received that payment.
B. Declaration - In God’s legal declaration of justification, he specifically declares that we are just in his sight. This declaration involves two aspects.
1. It means that we have no penalty to pay for sin, including past present and future sins.
2. It means that God must not only declare us to be neutral in his sight, but as we have talked about many times before, that he declare us to be righteous in his sight.

III. How does God do it?
How can God declare that we have no penalty to pay for sin and that he views us as having perfect righteousness, even though we know that we are in fact guilty sinners?
A. Imputation - Remember before we have talked about the idea of imputation.
Adam’s sin imputed to us at the fall. Christ suffered and died for our sins and our sins were imputed to Christ on the cross.
Now, we see imputation for a third time. Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, and therefore God thinks of it as belonging to us. God thinks of Christ’s righteousness as belonging to us, or regards it as belonging to us. He reckons it to our account. Because of this idea of imputation, God can apply our sin to the account of Christ and apply his righteousness to our account, so that we might be saved, and this is applied to us by faith.
B. Through Our Faith in Christ - Faith is the instrument that God chose to use in order that we might be able to receive the justification earned by the grace of God through Christ Jesus.
1. Faith is an instrument not a work. Scripture never says that we are justified because of the inherent goodness of our faith, or the quantity of it, as we have mentioned. It never allows us to think that our faith earns us favor with God in any way.
Rather, Scripture says that we are justified by means of our faith, understanding faith to be the instrument through which justification is given to us. We are justified solely on the merits of Christ’s righteousness that is given to us, not on any righteousness of our own, for we have none. 2. God chose Faith as the instrument by which justification could be given (instead of love, joy, contentment, humility, or wisdom) because faith is the one attitude of heart that is exact opposite of depending on our self. When we come to Christ in faith, we say, “I surrender, I will not depend on myself any longer. I know I can never make myself righteous before God. Jesus, I trust you and depend on you completely to give me right standing before God.”
3. Practical Implications that result from this central idea are very important.
First, this doctrine allows us to offer real hope to unbelievers. If salvation is a free gift to be received by faith alone, than anyone who hears this gospel may hope that eternal life is freely offered and may be obtained in Christ.
Second, this doctrine gives us confidence that God will never make us pay the penalty for sins that have been forgiven in Christ. We may continue to suffer temporal consequences and God may discipline us, in love, if we continue to walk in disobedience. However, God never can or will take vengeance, or exercise his wrath on us for our sins once covered by the blood of Christ.
Third, this doctrine of justification by faith gives us the privilege of adoption. This is the act whereby God makes us, at the time of our conversion, members of his family. John presents salvation as adoption at the beginning of the gospel, where he says in John 1:12, “But to all who receive him, who TRUST in his name, he gave the power to become children of God.”
The New Testament epistles bear repeated testimony to the fact that we are now God’s children in a special sense, members of his family. And if we are God’s children, are we not then related to one another as family members? That is why the idea of generational faithfulness is so important. Not because it is our plan, or simply because it helps families, but because it is the plan of God from the beginning!
In a sense it is still future tense, in that we will not receive the full benefits until Christ returns and we ourselves have been resurrected. But as we have hope in the knowledge of Truth, confidence in the acceptance or understanding of the Truth, we also have personal trust in the eternal promise of that Truth.