faith for faith

And if my feet would go astray,
They cannot, for I know
That Jesus guides my falt’ring steps,
As joyfully I go (E. S. Hall, His Love Can Never Fail).

When we spoke yesterday on the fixed will of the unregenerate, we spoke nothing on their destination. This is partly due to the fact that their destination will be addressed in detail in Romans 9, and also it is assumed to be common knowledge that the wages of sin is death and this death is the final destination of unregenerate. The destination of the wicked could be much more complicated than this (if you wished to engage in the infralapsarian / supralapsarian debate), but it needs not be. Regardless of the timing of God’s decree of their damnation, the wicked will be judged for their deeds and condemned justly.

When we speak of the regenerate, however, we cannot speak of their destination apart from God’s decree, for we find that the two are intimately bound in Scripture. We find this truth most explicitly in the word predestine–a word that attempts to capture both the beginning and end of time in its parts. And when we speak of the predestination of the saints, there is no debate on its timing (as there is in the unregenerate), for Scripture makes it clear that God chose the saints in him before he created the world (cf. Eph. 1:4).

Also, when we speak of the predestination of the regenerate, we cannot speak of it rightly apart from the love of God. In the great chain of the sovereign works of God in the regenerate in Romans 8:29, 30, we see this at the beginning, “Those whom he foreknew, he predestined.” This foreknowledge of which the Apostle speaks is simply put, to know beforehand. This knowledge is not some mental assent to a creature’s eventual existence nor is it some feigned Arminian notion of God’s seeing a person’s faith before time began, but it is God’s choosing to set his love upon particular persons before the foundation of the world. This knowing is the same act of knowing that is seen in God’s declaration to Israel in Amos 3:2, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth.” This is made more clear in the declaration of Ephesians 1:5: “In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ.” In other words, the saint’s existence is preceded by the love of God and his destination is in the love of God.

Not only is the saint preceded and ended by the love of God, his present life is commanded by the love of God. This portion of the saint’s life brings us back to our topic of yesterday, namely the bondage of the human will. Just as the wills of the wicked are bound to evil deeds and thus their souls to destruction, the wills of the saints are bound to righteousness and their souls to life. And though Scripture is full of exhortations to the Christian to live according the Spirit, to live not according to flesh, to mortify the deeds of the body, etc., these exhortations do not negate the sovereign and providential hand of God in the life of the saint. The Apostle reveals this truth in Philippians 2:12, writing, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. The exhortation to work out one’s salvation or to do good deeds is never apart from the sovereign working of God in the saint.

The objections to this doctrine (as are most objections to orthodoxy) are derived from the experiences of certain individuals rather than from Scripture. The chief objection is found in the so-called “fleshly” or “carnal Christian.” These carnal Christians are those who have made professions of faith in the past, or, more likely, grew up in the Church, and now live lives that make no demonstration of the power of the Spirit. They might have lives that are characterized by drunkenness, sexual immorality, or even apathy to the Gospel, but these are saved by some concocted doctrine of eternal security. Those who profess such a doctrine pay no heed to the Apostle’s warning in Romans 8, “If you live according to the flesh you will die,” or to the declaration of James in his letter, “Faith without works is dead.” Those who believe in the existence of carnal Christians make light of the transformation wrought by God in the regenerate and of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Righteousness in the Christian life to them is a free will choice, just as their belief in the Gospel was, which explains its lack of Power.

However, the necessity of righteousness in the life of the saint is such that the Apostle writes in Romans 6:18, “Having been set free from sin, you are now slaves of righteousness.” He writes this reluctantly (as seen in the phrase “I am speaking in human terms” of v. 6:19) for he knows that he will be writing on the sonship of the saints and their freedom in Christ in Romans 8. Though reluctant, he writes of the saints in this way to make it clear that there are only two types of people in the world–those who present their members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness and those who present their members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification (cf. 6:19). For the freedom afforded by Christ is not freedom of the will to neutrality, but it is the freedom of the will from sin and death so that it might be bound to Another (cf. 8:2-4).

Therefore, as saints, our steps our bound to Christ and his righteousness and are directed by the Father’s loving and sovereign hand. Just as he predestined us in love to be glorified into the image of his Son, so now he works and wills his good pleasure in us and leads us through the good works that he has prepared for us beforehand (cf. Phil. 2:12, Eph. 2:10). All these things are a part of God’s glorious plan to accomplish for us our greatest good by making known the riches of his glory to us, his vessels of mercy.

Thanksgiving Day in America could be more accurately renamed “National Gluttony Day.” The holiday to us is more a day to feed our mouths and to overfill our stomachs than it is one where we reflect on the goodness of the Lord revealed in the abundance that he has given to us and to thank him for it.

This Thanksgiving season, I challenge you (as I am challenging myself) to think of and to pray for the saints abroad who do not share in our abundance. I challenge you to think of them as they starve out of their poverty or imprisonment, and to remember their starvation while you gorge yourself. I challenge you to have a broken heart for those saints who for the Gospel’s sake do not get to eat turkey & dressing, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, etc., and to have a broken heart for yourself knowing that those who starve have a better understanding of the Gospel than we who glut.

I would also challenge you not to forget the saints after you have remembered them this week. Remember them throughout the year, and aspire to help them with your abundance. Remember from the Scriptures the Macedonians who gave out of their extreme poverty with great joy to the relief of the saints in Jerusalem. Cannot we who know nothing of extreme poverty sacrifice a bit of what we have to aid our brothers and sisters who are starving, who have no place to live, and who have no clothes on their back?

Our Father in Heaven, you have been most gracious to us in this country. You have given us much more than our daily bread and have provided for us beautiful homes and closets full of clothes. I pray, dear Lord, that our abundance would not be a snare and a trap to us, but that we would look at our riches as gifts to be given to the saints on whom you have set your love abroad. Burden our hearts with their plight for the rest of our lives so that we might love you rightly by loving your saints and thereby store up for ourselves treasure in heaven. Amen.

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love (Ephesians 4:15,16).

In a society where tolerance is a virtue and offending a person is a crime, telling the truth at times can be tough. And, like it or not, our society’s “morality” has influenced the church’s reaction to the truth. How can we know this? Take this passage from Ephesians 4, for example. Ninety-nine percent of the time when this verse is quoted it is quoted because someone ruffled someone else’s feathers. The expression, “in love,” is taken to mean, “without offense,” in spite of the teachings of this passage. Knowing this passage and understanding its implications are essential to understanding how we are to love one another in the Church.

1. Understand the Goal of the Truth
Paul’s instruction to speak the truth in love is not a call to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. The instruction has a very particular end, namely, to grow up the Church in every way into Christ who is the head. In other words, the instruction does not have an individual objective but a corporate one–unity of the Church under the Lordship of Christ. Therefore, our objective for speaking the truth in love should always be Church-centered. The reverse is true as well; if we are Church-centered people, we should speak the truth in love.

2. Dare to Speak the Truth
Like a physician who would be deemed negligent and hateful for withholding a bitter cure for a terminal disease from an infected person, so should we be deemed negligent and hateful when we refuse to speak the truth. The only remedy that we possess for the heterodoxy and sacrilege that has infiltrated our churches is to persistently apply the truth of God’s Word. We must dare to speak the truth, because when we do, we will be singled out dissenters and as haters of the unity of the Church. People will talk behind our backs, and people who we once thought were our friends will turn against us. But we must persist, because unity that is based upon falsehood and heterodoxy is a not unity from Christ, but it is the appearance of unity from the devil.

3. Dare to Love
Every instance of speaking the truth should be imbued with love. If we do not weep for those to whom we speak the truth, we have no business speaking it. The truth is never a tool for personal gain, and it is never ended by an “I told you so.” Before we ever open our mouths, we need to make sure that, one, our ultimate goal is the sanctification of the Church and, two, that we actually know the truth. These two things coupled with the power of the Holy Spirit are sufficient to cure all the ailments of the Church.

Peace is a blessing from the Lord. Aside from the occasional ridicule that Christians experience from time to time, the Church in America resides in a relatively friendly and peaceful environment. The evidence of this can be seen in where the Church expends most of its energy–divisions. When the Church does not have to worry about hiding underground to avoid being lined up and shot, two things happen to the Church. First, the Church is infested with false teachers and unregenerate converts. When Christianity becomes a low risk lifestyle and social network, people who get invited to church on Sunday might stick around for a few Wednesday night dinners, teach a Sunday School class, and help out with a barbecue fundraiser, all without submitting themselves to King Jesus. Persecution is the refinery of the Church and is extremely effective at removing the insincere. Second, is linked to the first, and that is, divisions in the church become the subject of jokes. So often we find ourselves jesting about how most new churches form from an argument about carpet color, when we should instead be brokenhearted over the disunity in the Bride of Christ–a disunity that is so natural that a church would actually split over the color of carpet.

Even in the innumerable cases where the issue of division is orthodoxy, the greatest teaching and commandment that Christ gave to us is placed on the backburner while we fight and despise each other over minutiae–”Love one another as I have loved you.” While orthodoxy in all spheres is weighty and worth fighting for, no orthodoxy is worth sacrificing the love that we are to have toward one another. And until that fateful day when concerns over carpet and music styles become ash in the refinery of persecution and the tares are removed from the wheat, so long as one names Jesus Christ as Lord, God, and the sole-giver of Reconciliation, we are to love him without question as a member of the Body of Christ.