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Crucial to a Gospel Presentation: Explain Belief (part four)
Actual Lord Jesus Christ
For faith to be saving faith, the person must place the faith in the actual Lord Jesus Christ. This means He is the Christ, not an impostor. It is not saving faith if it does not direct toward the saving object, which is the Lord Jesus Christ. Accompanying this necessarily, the faith must attune to the Person of Jesus Christ. He is not Christ if the said “belief” does not acquiesce to the reign and lordship of Jesus Christ and relinquish the personal will and way. This is in essence the offering of “self” or one’s soul to God. Scripture explicates all of this paragraph.
Believing that Jesus is the Christ is not something arbitrary. He becomes the Christ to the person who believes in Him. That means the one believing in Jesus Christ abdicates his throne to Jesus Christ. The person who believes in Jesus Christ is not on the throne of his own heart, but Christ is. When the Apostle Paul received Christ, he said immediately, “What wilt thou have me to do?” (Acts 9:6)
Count One’s Life as Loss or Deny Self
When the Apostle Paul later testifies about his conversion, he says that he counted everything as loss and dung that he might win Christ (Philippians 3:8). Paul is saying that you do have to count you and the best of you as loss and dung. This is the denying self of Luke 9:23. You can’t believe in Jesus Christ and yourself. Jesus can’t be put on an altar with all someone’s other gods, including himself.
The way of Jesus Christ is in contradiction to the way of you. You’ve got to leave you in order to have Him. You can’t have both. This is the same challenge of the rich young ruler in Matthew 19:16-22 (Mark 10:17-22, Luke 18:18-30). You don’t need to give all of your money to the poor to be saved. No, but if you believe in Jesus Christ like he said he did, then you can give up everything for him. If you don’t, then you don’t believe in Him. You can’t serve idols and Jesus both.
People conflate what I’m explaining to “salvation by works,” even “frontloading works.” Works aren’t involved at all. This is just biblical faith. Saving faith is exclusive. It must be in Jesus Christ, so He must be Jesus Christ. If He is Jesus Christ, then He is Christ and He is Lord. Christ and Lord means control and ownership. You are giving yourself up, so that He is the owner. This is the commitment of believing that is the volitional aspect of faith.
More Than Intellectual Assent to Facts
Faith is more than intellectual assent to facts, essentially head knowledge alone. This is like the check in the box. As I explain the above and state that saving faith is not just intellectual or even worse, just emotional, what is different about faith that includes volition? This goes along with two things Jesus said that are parallel or synonymous with saving faith: (1) Follow me, and (2) Lose your life for my sake. Jesus said among other places in Matthew 16:25:
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.
“Lose it” or “shall lose his life for my sake” is not meaningless. It’s not that we can’t know what Jesus is talking about. We should assume we can know. This is that relinquishing of your will or your way. It dovetails with repentance. You can’t keep going your way and get to heaven. Anyone who comes after him must deny himself (Luke 9:23).
When Jesus talked about the gospel or salvation with the woman at the well in John 4, He told her that God the Father sought such to worship Him and to worship Him in spirit and in truth. What does worship have to do with salvation? The first act of worship is the offering of your soul to God, what Psalm 23:3 and Psalm 19:7 call the restoring of the soul or the converting of the soul. God takes the real you and restores you or converts you, but to do so, He must have you. He wants you. Faith offers the soul to God. This is believing He is Christ and Lord.
More to Come
Right Applications of Matthew 5:17-20 and Wrong Ones (Part Three)
Jesus Is Scriptural
Everything that Jesus said in His sermon from Matthew 5:1 to 5:16 was a scriptural concept. Nothing Jesus taught contradicted God’s Word. Jesus is God. On the other hand, the religious leaders in Israel were “making the word of God of none effect through [their] tradition” (Mark 7:13). If anyone was destroying the belief and practice of the Old Testament, that is, the fulfilling of the Old Testament, it was them, not Jesus.
Believing and practicing the Old Testament was letting light shine before men. Jesus did that and He called upon kingdom citizens of His to do the same. Proof that He didn’t arrive to earth to destroy the scripture He inspired, Jesus promised perfect preservation of every letter of it.
If Jesus would preserve every letter of written scripture, surely He also expected His people to do all of it too. His teachers would also teach men to do everything scripture said. One could say at this point: in other words, you’ve got to be better than the Pharisees. The righteousness of the Pharisees is not saving righteousness. It is their own version of righteousness that comes from human effort. They couldn’t produce the righteousness that would get them into heaven. That righteousness comes from above.
Righteousness and Saving Faith
Righteousness, which is from above and by the grace of the Lord, exceeds the faux righteousness arising only from man’s works. It doesn’t rank scripture into majors and minors, because it can’t keep everything that He said. Like Jesus, it fulfills written scripture. James in his epistle later says the same. True believers are both hearers and doers of what God said.
Saving faith comes by hearing the Word of God. Someone is begotten by the Word of Truth. It would follow that He would also be a keeper of scripture, like Jesus said. That supernatural righteousness of God produces obedience to scripture. You can detect the unrighteous servant of unrighteousness by His diminishing of scripture.
Here is a professing teacher of God. Someone disobeys scripture. He doesn’t want to offend that person by saying something. He lets it go. This is not doing the least of the commandments and teaching men so.
Ranking Doctrines or the Triage Approach
The Pharisees of Jesus’ day ranked doctrines. Their unity revolved around a triage approach. Instead of following the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, they pervert into just the opposite of what He taught. Unity on the least commandments, what they call, non-essentials or minors. These teachings are not a “hill you want to die on.”
Left-Winged Legalism
Professing Christians especially today practice a left-winged legalism more often than the more commonly highlighted right-winged type. The left wing calls its legalism, “grace.” It is turning the grace of God into lasciviousness. Since you can’t keep everything scripture says on your own, reduce its teachings to what you can keep. This is left-winged legalism.
Those practicing left-winged legalism relish pointing out more consistent practice of scripture than theirs as legalism. They do it all the time. How you know they aren’t legalists in their estimation is by their inconsistent practice of scripture. People who try to follow everything like Jesus taught and teach others to do likewise, they aren’t the greatest in the kingdom to left-winged legalists. Instead, they’re “legalists.” Again, it’s in reality just the opposite.
As Jesus moves on in His illustrations in chapter five, you can see how much a truly righteous person strives to love God and His neighbor. It’s not the get-by-ism of the Pharisees and modern evangelicalism, so they can keep their crowds. They’ve dumbed down scripture so that it is unrecognizable as Christianity. This follows the same tack of the Pharisees. There is nothing new under the sun.
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