A study was done a few years ago in California in which Christians were asked to give the reason which they found in themselves which was the greatest hindrance to their witness. The answer that came, interestingly enough, was not lack of knowledge, it was not lack of method, it wasn’t any number of things you might want to mention—but is was the lack of holiness of life. In other words, a bad conscience; a feeling that there was something wrong with you so that you were really not qualified spiritually to witness. They said, and it was practically unanimous among those Christians who were investigated, that this was the biggest deterrent to their telling other people about Jesus Christ. In other words, most of them did not feel that they were okay as Christians. They felt that there was something profoundly deficient in their way of living and in their character.
Now you might say that the answer to that problem is very simply, straighten up and shave or whatever you do or grow a beard or whatever would be your version of changing. Wherever you go, go and just become holy. There are books written on how to become holy. There are many valuable insights in them. The only problem is that most people who read these books never seem to get very holy. They still don’t witness, and you can read an awful lot of books and still be pretty tied up with yourself. What we are going to talk to you a bit about tonight is the experience of the church of God in discovering that there are some foundational things … if you know these, they are going to go a long way towards liberating you for a life of outreach.
What I’d like to point out [is that] in the 16th century, the time of the Reformation, there were thousands, even millions of people that were turned to Christ through the influence of the books of Galatians and Romans. It spread really like a wildfire. It just wasn’t to be stopped. Luther in Germany and Calvin in Switzerland. There were other people all over western Europe who were studying these books. Then in subsequent generations, in the 18th Century, when the Great Awakening came to western Europe and to the Colonies, one book which had a tremendous influence was Martin Luther’s Commentary on Galatians. People were transformed. Also, his writings on Romans. Edwards, himself, tried to take a crack at Romans and he wrote a sermon which triggered off the conversion of thousands of people. So there’s got to be something powerful here. When you look more closely at the 18th Century, you find that there were at least three groups that were very prominent at turning around a whole continent. By the 18th Century, western civilization was very close to being dead. We lament about how bad it is now and it is pretty bad. but it was really bad then.
Anyway, during the 18th Century there were three groups that had a great deal of spiritual power in outreach. One was the Moravians. They had a small group movement. They had missionaries. They were one of the first groups to send out foreign missionaries in large numbers. I think they sent out 28 or 29 to what is now called the West Indies. I believe that within two years 21 or 22 were dead, but they just kept sending them. Tremendous missionary zeal. They sent them everywhere—South Africa, to the American Indians. I believe they were also in Greenland. So there was a tremendous outpouring of faith there but what was it built on. Well, really it was a rejuvenation of the Herenhooters through the study a lot of it of Luther on Galatians. Then when they came into England, they influenced and inspired Wesley and Whitefield. Now Wesley and Whitefield had a break with them because they felt that there were some things that went wrong with the Moravians and they pursued them. There was a conflict for a time. It eventually got somewhat straightened out; at least Whitefield and the Moravians were reconciled but Wesley, I don’t think he ever reconciled. Anyway, they borrowed a great deal. There whole small group movement came … its inception … out of the Moravians. Now in this Moravian small group movements there were bands; they were called soldier bands. In these groups, they tried to do a couple of things. One, they tried to make sure that everyone was aware that God loved him or her. The other thing was [to] unload any sins that bothered you today. They may have gone overboard a little sometimes helping each other unload sins but it did seem to help a great deal. Most of us collect them and if we know that someone is going to call us to account it can help. At any rate I think that there were some extreme elements in the Moravians. This emphasis on the love of God revealed in justification by faith was very prominent.
Well, when Whitefield took this up, he also had his own small group movement, as well as doing a great deal of public preaching. He was the greatest preacher of the 18th Century and perhaps of any century since the time of the apostles. In his preaching the thing he was able to bring to the people was this drumbeat: You can know that your sins are forgiven. There is such a thing as free grace. There is such a thing as the placing of Christ’s righteousness to your account. You can become a son of God through faith. It was this joy which was so deep in his heart that just captured whole nations. People would come from miles around including the philosopher, David Hume. David Hume was known to drive 20 miles just to hear Whitefield. Perhaps you have heard the story of someone questioning the skeptic why he would go to hear George Whitefield preach. Some said, “You don’t believe, do you?” He said, “That’s true but George Whitefield does.” Men would come simply fascinated by the power and the zeal in this man’s person as he preached Christ. The evident joy which was so winsome so that many people [who] came to make light of Whitefield ended up going away terribly sobered. The feeling that this man was so touched by God, so fearless in his presentation, that they had to be reverent over what God was doing.
Then you have Wesley—I have some problems with some aspects of Wesley’s theology, as you can imagine. But, in spite of the fact that Wesley’s theology had in it this two-stage approach which is not very palatable to us of the Reformed tradition, yet there were some strengths there which came out of justification by faith. One of the things that Wesley saw clearly is that you can’t get missionaries to go anywhere unless they believe that God loves them. You can’t go very far unless you are assured that God loves you. Of course, we have a debate over exactly how to interpret God’s love for the world after you go on from there but, nonetheless, he also recognized that you can’t win other people unless you believe that God had some kind of love for them too. So this impulsion which was in Wesley, both John and Charles, was a spiritual strength for reaching out. So what they got from justification by faith was the assurance that you could really know your sins are forgiven once and for all; big umbrella. You’re under that umbrella and you can have daily confession of sins and the assurance that every sin was removed on a daily basis as you confessed it.
Now it’s amazing, in spite of the weaknesses in Wesley’s theology, he had a second thing that was really right. The second thing he is strong on, even though we don’t agree with the two-stage theory of salvation, not only is justification by faith but sanctification is by faith. Now you can say, “Yeah, I agreed with that all along. I knew that that was good theology. I even remember that Berkouwer had a book called Faith in Sanctification. But that really doesn’t carry you very far if in your heart you really believe that it is up to you basically to provide the power to sanctify yourself. If you are not really convinced that everything flows out of Christ, it’s going to be pretty hard to really feel and to know and to love with authority and confidence. Life will just be a kind of load that you’ve got to carry.
The thing that Wesley brought to the church then, even though it had a twist that we object to, he did bring to the church that justification is by faith and that growth is by faith. Unless you believe that you’re going to grow, you’re not likely to grow. I just don’t see how you can because you have hindered the Spirit right away. So what Wesley was able to do under his leadership, I should say what the Spirit was able to do, was to carry the gospel into the poorer classes in the United Kingdom. Those poorer classes turned in mass to Jesus Christ. He was able to penetrate the working class in London, Bristol, and other places. It was because [of] this firm faith and the combination that said, “If I’ve got a hold of this Christ and the assurance that He and I really belong together, I can do whatever He wants. I must be willing to obey Him all the way because it’s worth it. If I’ve got that kind of love behind me, no fight is too big for me to take on.” Now that was the spirit really that was predominate in the 18th Century.
Closer to our time, I just want to refer briefly to Spurgeon, another great who was much committed to these things. It happens to be Spurgeon, Charles H. Spurgeon. Spurgeon as a preacher was committed to preaching Christ and there was so much love for Christ is his preaching that, at times, it was as though heaven had touched earth. When he came into a new church building one day, he was just going to test it for the acoustics and he quoted these words, “Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.” There was a workman working way up there in the rafters and he heard this voice coming out of nowhere. Spurgeon hadn’t seen anybody up there and suddenly the workman heard this voice, “BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD …” Well, he almost fell off the rafter … He became a Christian right there. There was a power in this man. One of his boasts was that there was no heart too hard that I can’t break it with the hammer of the gospel.
I quoted that in my book Evangelism and the Local Church, and an elder in a local church said that that is heresy. I laughed and I said, “Well, it certainly sounds like Romans 1: The gospel is the power of God to salvation.” If you could say anything more about the gospel, Spurgeon said it was a hammer and he could break anybody with it. Paul said that it is the power of God. Now is there any greater power than that? You can’t say that of the law. The law is the will of God but it’s certainly not the power of God to save people. It tells men what they should do, what they should not do, but only the gospel tells them what God has done to save them. That’s why people [such] as Spurgeon were just set afire, were touched with wisdom, reasoning powers, natural gifts lifted up and increased. He began to do what he could not possibly have done before.
I was lying there on my hospital bead in Uganda, and I was reading a sermon by Spurgeon on the resurrection. As I was reading it, he was making some kind of apologies for how little he had accomplished in his life. I looked over at the date on the thing and added up some things and I said, “This guy had to be 22.” He had ten thousand people listening to him every Sunday and was greatly concerned that so little had happened in his life. I thought, “Man alive!” But you see his measurement wasn’t what he himself was to do, his measurement was the gospel and its power and its glory and its authority, it’s capacity for changing those who are the most hardened.
What I want to say also … I’ve talked to you about the love of God, and I’ve talked about your faith and your growth … now I want to say this: There is a mysterious thing and I do not know always how God works. I know at times that I am completely baffled. But I do know that if you do not have faith, you cannot be justified. I know that if you do not have faith, you cannot be sanctified. I also know if you do not have faith, you cannot have fruit upon your witness. You cannot grow disciples unless you believe you can grow disciples. You must believe that you can grow disciples. If you believe you can somehow, they always grow. If you don’t believe they won’t grow. It’s mysterious. The same thing is true when they first come to Christ. If you don’t believe anyone is going to respond to your witness, to your preaching, to your teaching, to whatever you do in presenting Christ then probably no one will respond. “Be it unto you according to your faith.” Also, “Be it unto you according to [your] unbelief.” It says that of Jesus in relationship to part of Galilee.
I remember the first time I decided that I had to have some converts when I preached. Mother’s Day came rolling around. I said, “I’m going to have converts or know the reason why.” Well, I admit there was a bit of unbelief in this because afterwards I was really dumbfounded that two women were converted on the spot during the sermon. That was the first time it had every happened. Just a little bit of belief began to work. What happens when men believe, and women believe is people sense the presence of God. When they know that you love God and that God loves you, and you believe that God is alive and doing mighty things, then it begins to convict people.
We met one of the ladies a few months ago and she said, “I can still remember coming into that church service not knowing a thing about the Christian faith and suddenly hearing what I needed to do in order to become a Christian. It was such an astonishing thing.” It was charming too. They were upper middle-class ladies, and they didn’t bring their Bibles when they came to that church service. This was long before New Life. But they came back to the evening service and each one of them had gone home and they had gotten one of their big family Bibles. They came just so very well dressed and each of them was carrying one of those big family Bibles. The only ones who came into the church carrying Bibles that size. They said, “Well, we didn’t know that you carry smaller Bibles, but this was all we had.”
You see, what I am trying to convince you of is the power of God at work wherever there’s faith at work. You can almost put it this way. Wherever there’s faith in the gospel, wherever there’s faith in the risen Christ, where there’s faith in His rule, His intercession, His return, things are going to happen because He is the Lord of the resurrection. He cannot be present without changing people. He raises the dead. The dead hear the voice of the Son of God and live. Therefore, that is the nature of things. So it isn’t so much that you’ve got to stir yourself up to create something by faith. It’s already created. You don’t have to put Christ in the heavens. You don’t have to make the gospel strong. All you have to do is recognize how strong it is and act on that.
Now here is a little bit of the catch. It’s easy to hear me get excited about this. But then I remember my neighbors, the ones I really know, the ones who turn it off when I try to tell them about Christ. I work with some people, and I get to witness to them about once every six months if that. I can’t get too excited about this tonight because after all I’m going to have my fall on Monday or Tuesday or whenever it’s coming up. So there’s a sort of built in fear that I’ve got to do something and that I’m being stirred up to do something. No. The whole idea of what the gospel is is to get you to see that the King is moving, simply get out of the way. Be willing to be an obedient servant. Be willing to do His will. Be willing to ask Him for grace to be obedient in your witness, to be obedient in your life but then believe that He will bring about the results. That it is not up to you to know who is going to be a Christian or who isn’t but it’s up to Him to do that work. You can be confident that the gospel will be working as a great scythe cutting down the harvest. It will bring down the lost. It will have effect.
You see, that is almost … you might say that when you have faith and when you pray in faith that the kingdom has already moved before you have even moved. You discover an amazing harmony as God sanctifies you by faith. Then when you go forth, you find that He’s already begun to speak to somebody else. If He’s humbled your heart and by grace, grace is flowing to you, then He is going to prepare someone else.
Let me give an example that really impressed me. This is for a moment when this might be a paradoxical thing to say, and I guess it is, but when New Life first began, I was getting depressed. Some of the converts were beginning to fall away. Some of these that I was trying to disciple, they were really hard to disciple. One of them … I’d been working with a family down on Hillsdale Avenue, Hillside Street there, and one of the new Christians said, “Jack, let me give you a ride.” So he takes me down to Hillside Street and there was a family that I had tried to witness to and they had an air hose there out in the street. They were doing some work in their yard and he drove over the air hose. Well, they were all waving, “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” and I said, “You just blew two years of cultivation to that family if you didn’t notice that air hose.” Here I was sitting in the front seat of his big car and, oh man, I was really discouraged by that. So I came home that night and I thought, “Is the gospel powerful or isn’t it?” So I simply said, “I believe it is and I’m not going to act in the light of what I feel but I’m going to act in the light of what the Bible says.”
So that particular night I decided I was going to go out and find Bob Heppe, well, no not really. Do you know Bob Heppe from New Life? But I did go out that night … well, not that particular night but I did get ready to go out, determined to go. We had a young man as an assistant pastor and I told him that he had to go with me. I invited my son Paul to go, and he said that he was getting into Christian education. He would pray for me he said. Anyway, what we were looking for was motorcycle gang young people. We didn’t actually find them, but we did find Bob Heppe and his friends.
You see, it came out of despair over my weakness, over the weakness of others. The reason is, I believe, that God was going to do something because I was so humbled by the circumstances. The only thing that I could see was that God could work now because there was no way that Jack Miller could brag about it afterwards. Then when I talked to Bob, he said, “Would you believe how these things all work together? You had met me about three or four months before. You and your wife had picked me up in Wyncote and when you got out there, there were mobs of people, and it was getting kind of rough. I recognized you.” He was the one who made them listen to us. It was chaos out there. But then as he listened, it really began to convict him. He said, “Before you had ever come out here, I was calling your house, wanting to talk to you.” The one he had scared to death was our daughter Keren. She was thirteen. For those of you who don’t know my family, Keren became Bob’s wife. She had put the phone down like this for he was drunk. This was before we went out there. How God harmonized that.
Then … but the beautiful thing about it was that he said … even before we had earlier picked him up in a car when he was hitchhiking in Wyncote … he said, one day, suddenly, he had this strange feeling come over him for the first time, “I am an evil person. Before [he] never had any sense of evil even though [he] was very wicked … Can you imagine it? Here I was a drug dealer and all the rest, thief, and I had no sense of sin. But before I met you, this sense of evil [was] in me, [it] came to me and I was gripped by it and so when you began to talk to me about the joy of knowing Christ and the peace you could have, already I was beginning to be drawn into it.”
In other words, the Holy Spirit set him up for it. He [the Holy Spirit] combines things and He works in your life, He’s going to be working with somebody else and as you pray, He is going to use prayers to convict somebody you are going to meet. If you believe that, then it gives you more courage and the darker the day seems to you the more willing you are to take a shot at it because you say, “Well if I’m this far down then the Lord is going to get a lot of glory. If anything good happens I sure don’t feel like bragging about it afterwards. I’ll have to say that this is Jesus’s work, and you will be telling the truth.”
Now having said that I would like to say, “What is the foundation of that in the book of Galatians?” If you turn with me to the book of Galatians Chapter 5, I’d like to explain how I disciple others to come to see these convictions on their own. One thing I do with somebody who is going to disciple with me informally, we simply get together and we read Galatians 5. We usually meet once a week and some of the things we work on are: How to get up in the morning and have your devotions; praying for one another to have devotions. The first thing I do with another person who is going to be discipling with me is to let them read Chapter 5 and then I ask them this question—Which verse or verses really stand out in your mind as you read it?
Typically, people are impressed by verse 1, “It is for freedom Christ has set us free.” That’s a pretty powerful verse. It says something about not negatively being under the law or condemnation, but also having the power of the gospel, of being a son of God. Then the attention is drawn to the fruit of the Spirit but most people say, “Well let me not draw too much attention to that because that is so familiar, let me look for something else interesting.” They usually come down to verse 6, “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself in love.” That is pretty good. I don’t rush a person into seeing that but once you get a hold of that verse and that verse gets a hold of you, you’re beginning to go somewhere. Because this is the essence of what Wesley saw without the two-stage theory involved in it. But the beautiful thing is that faith has power. It has power to work by love.
Now just a quick run-down on the sense of the passage. If you’ve studied justification a bit, you’ll find that most of the time justification is past tense or present tense. Romans 8, towards the end, is exceptional, where he’s talking about the Last Judgment. He’s talking about the future when he says, “Who is he that condemns?” But by and large, justification is present and past. Now this is really talking about the future: “The only thing that counts.” Well, what is going to count? Well, “faith expressing itself through love” on the Judgment Day. [For] context, verse 5 says, “But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit, the righteousness for which we hope.” He’s talking about Jesus Christ coming back and representing in His person that righteousness which is the ground or the basis of God’s forgiveness of me and acceptance of me through faith. So he’s saying in verse 5 that by faith we have been justified. We eagerly await for that righteousness to take effect on that Last Judgment Day and we will be fully vindicated. But when that happens there will be a grand thing—everything that we did by faith through love will shine at that point. It will really count with God. So he’s saying then that the reason that faith is so great isn’t that it’s great in itself but it knows Christ, it trusts in Him for free justification.
Love does not justify. If love could justify, then you’d be justified by a good work. Only faith can justify. But once faith has justified you and you wait for that hope of righteousness so that you will not be terrified on the Day of Judgment but vindicated. In that vindication, when Christ’s righteousness is revealed there as the umbrella covering over all of your sins and weaknesses, then what will be lifted up will be all of the deeds of love that you have done through faith. They will not justify you, but they will be evidence that you have been justified. So what he’s saying then is that there’s a very special power in the faith that you do because you believe that you have the power to love people and do deeds of love. You are no longer a victim even on Monday morning or Monday evening or whenever it may be that you have a hard time. That you are never a victim.
You look a little bit more closely, and I try to get a little bit [closer] to that person, and I say, “Okay, faith’s power is being emphasized here and it’s the power of sonship, but when you come down the text, how does it all come together?” Well, when you go down to verse 13, when he picks up this matter of love again, he says, “Don’t indulge the sinful nature but what you do is serve one another in love and the entire law is summed up in a single command, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” Now he’s talking about what faith produces at this point; faith fulfills the law in our sanctification. Faith does not, as it were, atone for our sins; it is not a new obedience that saves us, but it brings us to Christ. We are brought to Christ and Christ justifies us, and out of that union we love others by faith.
He also says in verse 15 [that] you should keep your tongue. “If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.” Now the point that I want to make there is—notice how quickly he moves from the positive to the negative. If you love one another then the thing you are not going to do is bite and devour. You are going to hold your tongue. Then as he develops this, he shows the contrast between the flesh and the Spirit, the mind of the sinful nature and then in verse 22 he comes to the fruit of the Spirit. He says again, “Love.” The first one is love … now I believe the sense of the passage isn’t just that this is fruit on a kind of chain or where one is just attached to the other without any logical development. But I believe what you have here is something like this—that love is the foundation, or the development of love leads to joy and joy to peace and that leads to patience or longsuffering, and that love leads on to kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
In other words, I take the angle from verse 6, “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” and that love, you see, brings into being all these other qualities: that faith creates love and loves shapes all the rest. Now you can quarrel with me on that and we’d never settle It. But the thing that I want to say is at least look and see the predominant note in the chapter [is] that faith works by love, and that is the foundation or the crucial thing. Out of that the other qualities will follow. If you are impatient then the reason that you are impatient is faith is not working by love the way it should. That’s the way it goes. If you are not joyous that means that faith is not working by love to give you joy.
If that’s so then we ask ourselves, “But wait a minute: the fruit of the Spirit, I do notice it does say singular, doesn’t it? The fruit of the Spirit, that’s helpful, isn’t it? Maybe you have a point that this has more of a unity than I realized. But I notice that it doesn’t say the fruit of faith is love, joy, peace, patience and so on. I just caught you and I’m glad I looked at the verse a little more closely.” So we talk about that when I disciple someone. Why doesn’t it say faithnow? Before he said faith working by love, but now he says the fruit of the Spirit. Well, the answer has to be, as you think about it, [that] when you have faith, can you count on faith? Can you measure it? How much faith do you have tonight? Well, it’s hard to measure. How much of the Holy Spirit do you have tonight? That’s even harder to measure, right? Isn’t that true?
So how do you know if the Holy Spirit is working in you? Well, we go like this—you know that the Spirit is working in you if you have the fruit of the Spirit. You only have faith if you have love because faith works by love. So really what you are discovering is, if you follow my line of thought, is that faith and the Spirit are almost synonyms. Let me get you that again. Faith has a fruit—love. Isn’t that true? The Spirit has a fruit. What is it? Love, joy, peace and all the others but still there’s a parallel. Notice the parallel there. So if you say … suppose someday your faith is damped down and you are really weak and you say, “Well, I don’t know if the Spirit is ever going to be with me again or He ever will be with me. All these other people out there, they’ve got the Spirit. They are much more vocal than I am. They dance and sing, and I don’t dance and sing very much. It’s not my personality or whatever.” Well, the thing that I want to stress is that the real evidence of the Spirit’s work is the fruit. If you have the fruit of the Spirit, you have faith because faith and the Spirit produce it together. Why?
Now here I want you to learn something foundational. We are getting close to the point. The reason the Spirit can produce all these beautiful fruit, the reason faith can do it is because they have one thing in common. The Spirit unites us to Christ. Faith unites us to Christ. Because to believe is to be united with Christ and to have the Spirit is to be united to Christ, therefore, if you are united with Christ then the qualities that are Christ-like come into your life as you believe.
Now that’s good theology. It’s standard Reformed teaching. Faith unites us to Christ. The Spirit unites us to Christ. The Spirit does it first by working personal renewal in our hearts and that unites us to Christ but then the conscious expression of that, the human side of that, is that faith unites me to Christ. When faith unites me to Christ, I really get a hold of the power source for all spirituality. Or better, it has a hold of me.
In the nature of the case, what is happening then, when we think about growing and we think about witnessing, we always say, “What will I do? How will I do it? How will I get ready to do it?” The point we are missing completely is this is Christ’s work. The question isn’t how you are going to do it. The question is how is Christ going to do it? The whole nature of faith then is to cause you to look away from yourself to Christ in everything in salvation. That is the whole nature of the Reformed tradition. Everything in Christ. The Puritans were famous for it. I had a Jewish professor in college, he said, “The Puritans when they think about Jesus, they just sort of explode with joy and praise. I don’t know why they were that way.” I said, “Oh brother, if you just knew what was in Christ.” Faith looks to Christ. You see, if you look to yourself are you going to be able to produce these things? Nope. But you are going to produce them, and you already have because the Spirit is in you and the Spirit is implanting or has implanted Christ in you and the more you look to Him, the more you know what He has done, the stronger you become.
Let me just show you a passage in Galatians a little earlier which sort of confirms that. In Chapter [3], we have in verse 23 this remarkable language about faith as bringing in a new order. “Before this faith came,” this is Galatians 3:23, “We were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed. So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we’re no longer under the supervision of the law.” Now he says in verse 26, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized in Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.”
The whole passage is tremendously interesting, but in verse 26 he says, “You are all sons of God.” How? Do you know what that means? What brought you to become sons of God? “Through faith.” Then he goes ahead to say, “For all of you who were baptized in Christ.” What does it mean to be baptized in Christ? It means to be born again, regenerated by the Spirit. So, on the one hand, faith brought you to Christ and, on the other hand, the Spirit brought you to Christ: the baptism and the believing, one is the conscious expression of the other. So when you come to get hold of this then you realize that the reason that the law couldn’t help you is because the law pointed you to you. The law constantly pointed you to you and the gospel points you to Christ.
Now it’s interesting when he gets here this far in Galatians, Chapter 3:23, instead of saying “Before the gospelcame,” he says, “Before this faith came.” I was expecting gospel. Why does he substitute faith? He begins to talk as though faith has some special powers. He says, “Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law.” We were “locked up until this faith should be revealed.” So he says that all of this looks forward to Christ … what Christ would do and here faith is simply another way of saying almost Christ. Before I said that [faith] was almost another way of saying the Holy Spirit; now I’m saying that [faith] is almost another way of saying Christ. Because what does faith do? It gives you Christ. Do you see that?
Now if you want to apply that to growth, then what it means as you look to the rest of Chapter 3, and as you open that passage and we think of the primacy of faith, you begin to ask yourself, “Now what is Galatians all about?” You’ve heard Jack and Rose Marie say that it is about justification by faith, right? You all know that we said that. We really haven’t. Galatians is not primarily about justification by faith at all. It’s about the spiritual power that resides in those who are justified by faith. That is a little bit different. In fact, that’s a lot different.
In other words, what Paul is doing is defending the spiritual power that moves the church of God. The reason that he defends justification by faith and sonship and adoption so vigorously is because he knows that only those who have been adopted and who believe can have that kind of spiritual power. In the midst of their weakness, whatever their weakness may be, they have this tremendous power. You see, what that does … I’m almost tempted to use the word “fun.” But life can be fun. You can clown around a bit. Or you can do whatever God has given you by way of a gift because you got liberated. You are no longer under the condemnation of the law and the whole argument of Chapter 3 in which he says, “Don’t go after the works of the law, keep to the hearing of faith.” Here he’s not talking about faithworking by love but faith claiming Jesus as your justification, your righteousness.
When he’s talking this way, what he’s saying in [Galatians 3:10–13], Paul has drawn a division here between the law as the system of ordinances in the old covenant and the gospel. What he does in verse 10 is simply draw out the implications that are in the law on the negative side. Elsewhere Paul says, in Romans 7, “The law is a commandment which promised life which resulted in death.” But here he takes the passage from Deuteronomy 27, verse 26, and he quotes it and he intensifies or he extends it. He says, “If you rely on observing the law, that you try to keep the legal ordinances as the ground of your acceptance then you need to continue to do all things written in the book of the law.” Now if you read Deuteronomy 27:26, you’ll find that it doesn’t say everything. But being an apostle, he added to it the thought that certainly was in all of Deuteronomy 27.
What he wants to do as an inspired apostle is drive home the point that if you are going to be accepted by God on the basis of law-keeping and your own righteousness then you’ve got to do it all. If you don’t do it all, you’re under a curse. You’re just going to be treated the way Aachen was treated if you try to keep the law and you must do every part of it. Then he draws out of that a quotation from Habakkuk, “The righteous will live by faith.” In other words, those who have been accepted as righteous, those are the ones who have faith. Of course, Habakkuk 2:4 is building upon Genesis 15:6 where God says to Abraham … He says that “Abraham believed the Lord,” or “believed in the Lord and it was reckoned to him,” or “credited to him for righteousness.” In other words, justification through a free gift.
So faith here then is that which claims God’s grace and not works. “But the law is not based on faith,” verse 12, “on the contrary, the man who does these things will live by them” and that’s Leviticus 18:5. The point of Leviticus 18:5 is simply that the law principle requires perfect obedience. If you have perfect obedience, then you live. If Adam had obeyed perfectly then he would have lived, and we could have lived through him. He was our representative. He didn’t and so that’s what the law requires. Then in verse 13 we read, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, ‘Cursed is anyone who is hung on a tree.’” What he shows here then is that the penalty for [the] broken law fell upon Christ. The negative side of our condemnation—that was taken away by Christ becoming a curse for us. In other words, the death penalty was received by Him and that’s a fulfillment of the teaching of Deuteronomy, that everyone who hangs on a tree is under a curse. Not just simply physically hanging on a tree but an outcast from God. An outcast who is treated as the one who is disobedient; the one who has failed to keep the law. Not because He personally failed but because He represented us who had failed and took our sins. What the law couldn’t do was [to] in any way ever justify us. What Christ did was justify us permanently.
Now that passage does not really tell you how faith works but over in Chapter 2, we find, starting in verse 16, that the way this is appropriated, this righteousness of Christ—whether taking away our curse or giving us our right standing before God—is “Man is not justified by observing the law but by faith in Christ Jesus.” In other words, you don’t look to your own good record before the law but it’s through faith in Christ.” So then he uses the language here, “So we too have put our faith in Christ Jesus” … We have a purpose. “We put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law because by observing the law no one will be justified.”
The last part is really a paraphrase of Psalm 103, no 143 … 142, verse 3, I get twisted there. Anyway, the point he’s making is that there are two ways of justification. One is through obeying the law. The problem is that no one can keep that except Christ. The other way of justification is through faith in Christ and Christ keeps the law for you. He does what it requires. He takes away its penalty so that when you claim Him, it is called a righteousness through faith. It’s a righteousness of God which Christ provided, and we receive. The Shorter Catechism summarizes it in this way, it says this about justification, “Justification is an act of God’s free grace wherein He pardons all our sins and receives us” or maybe it says, “declares us righteous in His sight only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received through faith alone.”
Now there happens to be in each of us though, a problem with this. Someone said that we shouldn’t run the Pope down much because there is a Pope in all of us. That’s true. It’s also true that there is a Catholic or a Seventh Day Adventist in all of us. Now how does that work. Well, we feel that this is all free and this is all good but after a while we say, “Well, we can’t be antinomian. After all I’m not all that bad.” Then you vaguely forget that what you were really like when you came to Christ and you lose knowledge of your deceitful heart and the holiness of God, what’s really in the law. Pretty soon it seems, “Now why did Jack say God loves me? I know he said that, and he really yelled it out but I can’t quite remember why he said that.” You see what happens, gradually, we begin to feel better and better about ourselves. We want to say, “I’m okay” because we’re doing okay. How come you’re not doing okay?” You see that needs to be broken in us again and again.
What really happens then is the foundation begins to reverse and this is the Catholic and the Seventh Day Adventist problem. Both of them are willing to say that there might be a foundation of justification there, of some kind of legal justification. Both of them have something of that in their theology but what they do is that they make the sanctification on top so big that pretty soon it is taking over the justification and you can’t see the justification anymore. The justification has no power, and you get a sort of bottomless pit of feeling guilty.
I remember one time I was on this airplane. I was going to Mexico City and Rose Marie was sitting on my left. This man was sitting on my right and I warmly introduced myself. I was reaching for the prototype of the “New Life” booklet; it wasn’t available in those days. This man who was there, he beat me to the punch. He announced that he was a Seventh Day Adventist minister and he said, “I’d like to ask you a question?” He said, “Have you ever heard of justification by faith?” My mouth fell open and I couldn’t say anything because I was so stunned because this was coming out of him. I said, “Well, I have heard or it.” He said, “Well, I’d like to tell you a story. I’m a Seventh Day Adventist minister and when I was back in seminary …” He mentioned some town in California where he had gone to seminary. He said, “I tried to keep all the rules. I worked and I worked and I worked. Finally I had a nervous breakdown. In desperation I stopped my studying. I had to resign it all. In desperation I wandered over to the library and I found this book by Martin Luther, a commentary on Galatians. You’ve never read anything like this before.” Ha, ha. He said, “I read it and it was so liberating. I realized I had everything backwards. I had this great huge load of sanctification I had been working on it, and it just crushed me finally. I realized that I had missed justification and justification was the primary thing.” He laughed and he said, “There were some other fellows I discovered there too. I’m sure you’ve never heard of any of them but there was a fellow in there named Charles Hodge. That guy is pretty good too.” Ha, ha. He then went on to name all the Reformed teachers that I knew a little bit about. He was so thrilled. He said, “Be sure you get a hold of these if you are interested in this sort of thing. It’s done so much for me.”
It was the first time, I think, that somebody had so thoroughly evangelized me before I could get my mouth close. I didn’t have a word to say for about thirty minutes. Ha, ha. Which is kind of a record for me. But it was such a beautiful thing, a sort of glow in this man’s life. It was like somebody had just unlocked the door of prison and he’d stepped out. So I think, in a sense, what he did is what we struggle with all the time. The law constantly returns to us and we’re constantly trying to sanctify ourselves and we wonder why it doesn’t work. “Now what did he say last Sunday? I can’t remember that sermon. He was excited about something.” That is the hardness of heart, the human pride. When we’re broken, we realize that there’s nothing.
Now I want to hear the true Reformed doctrine. I’m hammering away at this true Reformed because I want you to understand your foundations, your roots a little better. In the Reformation, what was the big thing that they were fighting about? They were fighting about this passage. The contention with the best Catholics, not talking about the wild-eyed legalists, but I mean the men, the high Catholics, those who believed in salvation by grace. What was the argument over it?
Well, you can find it in John Calvin’s Institutes in that beautiful section on justification. He says that this is the issue. He says that the issue isn’t simply when you [initially] enter into justification by faith. He says that’s true. He says many of them will say that too. The better schoolmen, he calls them. But he says that the real issue is your ongoing relationship, your permanent relationship with Jesus Christ. Is that by faith alone? Is the bond of that state of justification forever faith alone? Calvin says it is. It must never be that you appear before God in your own name, with your own works, even come out of your own sanctification and say, “God forgive me because I have done these good things.” Calvin’s point is that when you do that, you’re severing yourself from grace. John Owen said the same thing. I believe it is either Chapter 6 or Chapter 7 in his great work on justification.
The point I want you to see is this—we’re going to hold on here for a minute and think about this. The thing that is so easy to miss is the intensification of truth. If you level it all out, it tends to fall into bits and pieces. It’s not all level. Predestination is foundational. [Predestination] is because unless God chose you, your will is still on the throne, you chose Him. How can you ever be secure? You put one little brick in the house of salvation, you can pull it out. So you’ve got to have these great foundational truths and what [they are] related to is the glory of God. These are the banner things.
Justification by faith is one of those banner things. The reason [justification] is a [banner truth]—is [justification] always says Christ alone is my righteousness. [Justification] always points you away from yourself. [Justification] always says Jesus alone, Jesus period. The minute you begin to get sanctification in your mind bigger and bigger, you wonder why you are a little depressed afterwards. Anything that leads you to look to yourself is going to depress you. Now there is enough that leads you to do that. I don’t mean that we preachers shouldn’t do that sometimes. I’ve found depression very helpful many times. Sometimes not, but I think that the thing is this, we don’t want to cultivate depression. It’s only something that should be used as a vehicle to getting us closer to Christ. Do you understand what I am saying then?
But I do believe this—if you look at your own sanctification and you look at it and you look at it, you can’t help but be depressed. So what you need to see is that justification is then not just one doctrine, sort of like train tracks. Here is one parallel track, justification. Here is another parallel track, that’s sanctification. You can keep the train on both. Well, there may be a little bit of truth to that figure of speech but not much. You might say, “Well, it’s a little bit better to say that the first step in salvation is justification, adoption and then sanctification and glorification.” But that really isn’t the way to put it either.
The way to put it is—justification is the foundation that lies under adoption, sanctification and glorification. Because you have this foundation, which is all of Christ, everything else issues from this. They are not all equal. This is the foundation. But if you start making them equal, the other doctrines will start eating it up. And the problem with Catholic thought is that it eats up justification with the Pacman of sanctification. Ha, ha.
The thing that I’m trying to say to you then is no matter how feeble you may think that you are, you get the idea that [you are] always, always [on] the foundation, these great foundations like justification. You get ahold of those then there’s a kind of inspiration in that, a kind of a total humbling; always nothing of you, always all of Christ. Then you are willing to take the risks that go with going with the gospel.
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