Turn with me there to Ephesians
chapter two. As we have learned last week that God has prepared
beforehand that we should walk in good works, works that he
does, works that he creates and that we are saved by grace through
faith and that God's grace is the effective agent that gives
us eternal life. We learned last week that faith
is a gift and that what we see, therefore, by grace, you have
been saved through faith. And this is not of your own doing.
It is the gift of God, not as a result of work so that no one
may boast. There is much theology to be
learned from this text and from the letter to the Ephesians.
We will never be able to dive into the deepest corridor of
these passages. And so my prayer for you is that
you would continue to read it and study it and meditate it
and talk about it in your own heart and mind, and that you
would question what it is that you believe and why you believe
it. Last week, we dealt a lot with the idea of God's grace.
We looked at God's grace as the means through which one is saved.
A lot of times we say that we understand God's grace, but then
we don't really have it. have its full effect in our lives.
In other words, we we say, OK, God has given me eternal life.
God has saved me. God has graciously pursued me.
God has done all of these things. However, the way we live our
lives, the way we worship, the way we approach the word of God,
the way we approach relationships, the way we approach church, the
way we approach our approach, our Christian faith. It's often
very different than what we say we believe by God's grace versus
how we actually operate. And what I mean by that and that
you may or may not fall into one of these examples, I'm just
reviewing my own life is that sometimes we feel that we have
it down. We have God's grace down. We
have an understanding of who he is. And therefore, we aren't
really in a position to try to learn more because we know that
God's given us the grace to be his children. OK, let's move
on to something else. There is nothing else. For grace
alone is the effective agent, is the power, is the glue of
the gospel. And if it weren't for God's grace,
there'd be no reason to be together today on this Lord's Day. There'd
be no reason to even have a Bible in our possession. There'd be
no reason to even concern ourselves with evangelism. There'd be no
reason to deal with worship. There'd be no reason to do anything
except to seize the day of our own salvation, of our own life,
of our own joy, and decide what we're going to do with our own
future. But God's grace is the means and the purpose and the
causal agent of all that there is to know about who he is, about
how he saves and about the life that he gives us. Friends, it
is God's grace that even the wicked live in this world. And
that is something that we need to understand, that there is
not an evil person that's ever lived in this world who has lived
outside of the will of God and lived apart from his plan and
from apart from his power and apart from his grace. But God
is patient and long suffering, even with the wicked. But as
we see in Proverbs, that the wicked were created for the day
of evil. And as we see in Revelation, the wicked were also created
for the day of destruction. And so, friends, I want you to
remember that we've already learned through Paul's teaching is that
we all once were wicked and we all even in our in our in our
DNA, if you will, today are wicked. But what God did with wicked,
evil and dead people is He reached inside and He brought us to life.
And He brought us to life in Christ. He raised us from the
dead in Christ. He crucified us with Christ.
That our sins and our sin nature has been dealt with, the judgment
against us and against our sin has been paid. It is past tense
paid. It is done. It's not waiting there for someone
to write a check for us and for us to cash it. God's grace does
not work like a bank that they give you a loan and they give
you a check and the check's only good if you put it in the bank.
That's not the way it is. Some people think faith is cashing
the check of God's grace. Friends, that's a big lie that
came straight from the pit of hell. I want you to understand
that today this is going to be probably Some of the most frustrating
issues that we'll deal with in the letter to the Ephesians,
because faith alone, as we see, sola fide, where is it? It's
over there on that wall, sola fide, faith alone. We believe
as evangelicals that salvation is through faith alone. by grace
alone, through faith alone. This is where it comes from,
not just here, but as we see in just a minute, the entire
letter to the Ephesians teaches this. We'll see some aspects
of faith today that you may or may not have understood. We'll
also see faith as a noun, not just an action. And so as we
look at this text, I pray that you would just open your hearts
and pray that God, I pray that you would pray that God would
help you to see and help you to have the faith to see, because,
friends, faith is seeing, and I will prove that to you today.
Faith is seeing, to steal away from Dr. Piper, and savoring
Jesus Christ. We see Christ for who he is and
we savor him. And so I want you to understand
that we aren't going to be dealing a lot with grace, God's grace,
this gift of life. We're not going to deal a whole
lot with grace today because we've dealt with that in the
past. So it's very essential and it conjoins with this faith.
It conjoins with the essence of who God is and how he operates.
God is gracious. I was meeting this morning with
Neil and we were looking through Luke's gospel and Zechariah's
praise, Zechariah's prophecy that he does right there in chapter
two of Luke. of Luke's Gospel, and he talks
about how God has promised and covenanted with Abraham to save
his people so that they may walk holy and blameless before him
and worship him in righteousness. Friends, this is the desire of
the Jewish people from the beginning of history. Not that they would
be free as Americans to do what they please and to have their
own joy, but that they found their complete joy in walking
in the statutes of God. And they wanted to be free from
oppression. They wanted to be free from slavery. They wanted
to be free from all of these things so that they could effectively
worship God and display His righteousness through the sacrificial system
and through the temple worship. They didn't want to be free to
live their lives for themselves. They wanted to be free to live
their lives for God. But the problem is, is they looked through
the veil of the law. And as we'll see today, is that
faith is the removing of that veil. We don't look at what God
has declared and commanded in order to be justified before
Him. We look at what God has finished in the person of Jesus
Christ. What God has declared, justified, and done, and we rest
in that fact. That is how faith is going to
be seen today. God's grace is a gift of life that comes only
through the pleasure of God. It's not brought on by man's
decisions or man's effectiveness toward God, but only by God's
sovereign and pure affections. And nothing can move God. Nothing
can move these affections except God's own affections and pleasures
itself. himself. God is immutable and
it is impossible to change God through human decision. It is
impossible for God to change. Thus, his own actions are his
and they were always right. They are always just. And God's
actions are always true. So God's effective grace towards
sinners is just because He placed our sin on the person of Jesus
Christ and then crucified them, effectively satisfying His wrath
and judgment against us as His children in the body of Jesus
Christ who lived as a man, as a perfect man, and fulfilled
the law. As Jesus talks to Nicodemus in
John chapter 3, we see where Jesus is teaching Nicodemus that
what he knew as a Jew from years and years and years, as Moses
lifted up the snake in the desert, the very thing that gave death
to the Israelites was the very thing that they were to look
upon by faith and be healed from. So they were to look upon the
very thing that killed them, or was killing them, to say that
it would save them. Jesus, speaking to Nicodemus
in John chapter 3, teaches that that is a point of shadowing
and foreshadowing Christ. So in other words, that as the
Son of Man is lifted up, He will draw all men. And He's speaking
specifically about the ethnos. He's speaking about the cosmos.
and the idea of all types of men, not just Jews. Though Moses
lifted the snake in the desert to save Jews, so I, the Son of
Man, will be raised up that I might save men of all people. So the
very thing that causes us to die, which is our flesh, is the
very thing that we look upon on the cross, the flesh of a
human being who is the divine flesh of Jesus Christ. And we
look upon that flesh and our sin is placed on the flesh of
Jesus, the man. And God is justly satisfied because
He sacrificed the full holiness of God in the person of Christ. And He put our sin, He who had
no sin became sin, that we might become the righteousness of God.
Friend, this is a serious issue. What I'm preaching about today
is the core battle that started the Protestant Reformation. Justification
by faith alone. It is the core battle that causes
decisional regeneration. It's the core battle that has
caused the havoc in the church for the last hundred years, if
you will, in the American evangelism. It started with Charles Finney
and it's still going to continue to go as long as Satan is allowed
to be free. And friends, I'll tell you this right now, and
I love all people, even lost people, but there are some people
who call themselves my brothers, but they deny the very grace
of God and justification along through faith. And I cannot stand
on stage with them and say that they are my brothers in Christ,
for they are hoping in a false gospel. If it is not faith alone,
then it is works, and the Catholic Church is correct, and we better
all get our butts to Mass. So this is a division issue.
It's not a method issue. It's not an opinion issue. This is God's opinion. This is
God's judgment. This is God's justice. And this
is God's truth and His reality. And so Christ died so that God
could be just in justifying sinners who do not deserve it. And that
is only by grace. See, God alone, as we've seen
in the last two weeks, is the actor. He is the author of grace.
No man can enter God's grace or receive it without grace.
You see, we can't even receive grace without grace. It's grace
upon grace upon grace. That's what we see in John's
Gospel in the prologue. And from His fullness, what fullness?
The fullness of God's glory. We've seen God's glory. We've
seen God's glory in the face of Jesus Christ, and from that
fullness we all receive grace upon grace. What John says is
from Moses we receive the law, we view it through a veiled face,
but from Jesus we receive grace upon grace. I said this last
week, that the reason they repeat that is to show that it's a never-ending
thing. They could have just said grace upon grace upon grace upon
grace and just kept on going, but we'd have a big Bible. We
could memorize that verse very easily. Just keep repeating ourselves. The issue now is for us to understand
that faith is the means through which one is aware of God's adopting
affection toward them in redemption, as we've already seen in chapter
one of Ephesians. For God, as He chose us in Him before the
foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless
before Him. He predestined us for adoption
as sons through Christ Jesus according to the purpose of His
will, to the praise of His glorious grace with which He blessed us
and the beloved. In Him we have redemption through
His blood, the forgiveness of our sins according to the riches
of His grace, which He lavished upon us, and all wisdom and insight,
making known to us the mystery of His will according to His
purpose, which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness
of time to unite all things in Him, things in heaven, and things
on earth. And so we know that it is by faith that one receives
this grace, but it's by grace that one receives the faith to
receive this grace. And that's what Paul is teaching here. It's
very clear. And as we start to look through a true objective
eye and through a discerning eye, and we see doctrine as it
comes all the way, there aren't two different ways of salvation.
God did not save the Jews differently than He saved the Gentiles. He
saved one people, and that people is Israel. And according to Paul,
we are Israel. The people that are Jews today
are just a waste of a nation if we try to establish a nation.
Now, I'm not saying that they're not important people, but they're
no more important than Americans. They're no more important than
Chinese. They're no more important than Hispanics. They're not anything
special because of their nationality. And I know this is frustrating
for a lot of people because there is this great undercurrent of... of this attitude toward Israel
that we better deal with Israel in a very kind way and allow
them to do everything that they want to do so that God's favor
will be on America. Friends, God's favor has been
on America before it began. But let me tell you, friends,
God's favor is not going to remain on America no matter what we
do. If we all fall on our face today, God's favor will end with
America when His kingdom is established forever. There will be no Americans. in the kingdom of heaven. There'll
be believers in the kingdom of heaven. There'll be no Indians
in the kingdom of heaven. There'll be believers in the
kingdom of heaven who may have once been Indians, who may have
once been Americans, who may have once been Hispanics, who
may have once been Africans, but we are all one race and it's
the race of people who are the children of God or the race of
those who are unbelievers who will be fully established under
the wrath of God's feet and under His judgment. And so here I want
you to understand that we're going to focus on the wording
through faith. through faith, by grace, through
faith. And I'm going to answer several
questions. I've tried to organize this a
little more clearer than I normally do and that I did last week.
I felt like I talked a whole lot and didn't get anywhere.
But Lord is faithful. But I'm going to ask the question.
I'm going to answer the question of what faith does. And I'm going
to answer the question of what faith. Means. And then there are about
five questions in between those two. What faith does and what
faith means. In other words, what faith actually,
what's the effect of faith in our lives and what does it mean?
What difference does it make in our lives? What does it do
and what difference does it make? Those are two different things.
One is the activity of faith, the action of faith, what faith
actively does in our lives. And the other is the outcome
of that action. There are two different things. And so the
first thing I want you to understand, faith does. Faith brings justification. Faith brings justification. It's
a declaration and justification is, and I'm going to define it
for you, a declaration of righteousness by God, through Christ, by grace,
through faith. Did you hear that? It's a declaration
of righteousness by God, through Christ, by grace, through faith. And so what that means is that
God alone has declared me righteous. He's looked down to the wickedness
of the world, and He's seen James Tiffins before the world began,
and He says, James, you are righteous. I declare you perfect before
Me through Christ. He can do that because Christ
bore my sins. So now my sins have been paid
for. God is satisfied. So through Christ, by grace,
He has done that. He did not have to do that, and
nothing that I have done has warranted that love and affection
toward me. So by grace, God has acted on
my behalf for His glory, for the praise of His glory, for
His worship, for His namesake, that He would be seen. Worthy,
holy, merciful, just, righteous. And so now we see that it's not
just by Christ, it's through Christ. By grace, then how will
we receive that? Through faith. We receive Christ
through faith. We receive eternal life through
faith. We receive regeneration through
faith. But what does that mean? See, when we see that reception,
I know there are some people who are out today because they
are sick. They have caught a cold. They didn't hunt that cold down,
find somebody who was sick, smear their nose onto their hands and
lick it. That's a disgusting thing to think about now that
I visualize it. They did not do that. They did
not go out, seek, and take a cold. They just received one. They
didn't know when they received it. They weren't aware that they
had received it prior to the symptoms coming. And friends,
I'll tell you that by grace, through faith, we receive regeneration
from the Holy Spirit of God, and then we become aware of it,
and then we express that faith and the awareness of our rebirth.
Now, I know that sometimes it feels like semantics, but I'll
tell you what. There are two actions here. There's the action
of man or there's the action of God. Who is it? And if man
is responsible, man is responsible for our sin. We are responsible
for our sin and our wickedness. We suppress the truth in Romans
one that what is known about God is plain to us. But we suppress
the truth because of our unrighteousness and our wickedness. But God,
see, God gives life. for the righteous walk by faith."
I'll read that text out of Romans 1 in a few minutes. But it brings
justification. In Ephesians 1, verse 15, we've
already seen this, "...for this reason, because I have heard
of your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and your love toward all
the saints." So we see faith and love. We see the action of
trusting in Christ and loving others as one and the same. We
see it breeding that. Their faith in the letter to
the Ephesians is listed about seven times. And that's one of
them. The second time it's listed,
we're not there yet. But in whom we have boldness
and access with confidence through our faith in Him. So faith allows
us to love. That's what I was going to point,
I was going to make there out of the Ephesian letter. Faith
allows us to love others. Faith allows us to believe in
Jesus Christ. Faith allows us to be declared
righteous from our sin. Faith allows us to have boldness
and confidence through our faith in Christ that we are actually
able to approach, as the writer of Hebrews says, that we have
confidence to approach the throne of grace with boldness. And then
Ephesians 3, 12, I mean, excuse me, and Ephesians 3, 17, so that
Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being
rooted and grounded in love. Now, what's amazing about that
is this is probably the only place that we really see we're
talking about Jesus dwelling in the hearts of man in that
context. And sometimes people have taken
this and said, see, this is what it means to be saved. You've
got to ask Jesus to come into your heart. You don't have to
ask Jesus to do anything. Matter of fact, you can't ask Jesus
to do anything Jesus hasn't already determined to do before the world
began. Jesus is God, and so nothing that you say to Him is going
to change His mind and make Him actually effectively act on your
behalf. He is not bound to the will and
the decisions of man. God cannot be bound to the decisions
of man, for then the creation then can command the Creator. How wicked is that? That is paganism
at the core, is that man can then affect deity. That is not
what we believe. We do not believe in witchcraft.
We just know that it is myth and legend and entertainment.
So Christ, in the sense of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us,
is through faith. Faith gives us the indwelling
of the Holy Spirit. So then we see in Ephesians 4,
we have one Lord, one faith, one baptism. That is not the
action of faith, as we'll see in a minute. That is the subject
of faith. That is the object, if you will, the attitude of
there being one establish faith, the Christian faith. That doesn't
mean that there's one Lord, and then you express faith in Him
one time, and then you're baptized one time. That doesn't mean that.
It means that it's forever one system of thinking, one worldview,
one kingdom, and one Lord. That's it. And if our faith is
not forever continually in this one truth, one truth, then our
faith is misplaced and it has no saving power. So this is the
reality of it. In Ephesians 4, verse 13, we
see faith again, "...until we all attain the unity of the faith
and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to
measure the stature of the fullness of Christ." So by faith, we grow
and mature. By faith, we understand. By faith,
we start to acknowledge truth. By faith, we study and perceive. By faith, we listen and we hear. So in Ephesians 616, in all circumstances,
listen to this imagery, take up the shield of faith with which
you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one. Ephesians
623, peace be to the brothers with love and love, with faith
from God, the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. And so we
see that as Paul is establishing the understanding of what faith
is in this letter, we know that it is something that is there's
several things I want you to see. The first thing I want you
to see is that faith. is not the work of man. So we're going
to define faith based on what Paul, not completely because
there's a lot of text there and we don't have time to do all that.
That's why I think it might be some next week as well. But we're going
to define faith in several ways. What we want to see and what
our American culture wants us to say is that we want to ask
the question, does this mean that faith brings saving as the
vehicle of mercy, brings salvation? So faith, in other words, if
I don't have faith, then God won't save me? Is that what you
mean? Well, if so, then who is the glory due? If it's up to
me, literally, if I don't recognize that my faith is a gift of grace,
but I recognize that it's something that I decided, apart from God,
I'm in trouble. Because then God's glory becomes
mine. Then I have a bragging right
to God and I cannot do that. And so we're going to define
and we know, of course, that God alone, God alone is the agent,
author of faith. Jesus is the perfecter, the author
and the perfecter and the finisher, it says in Hebrews, of our faith.
So we're going to define faith as not a work of man. Faith,
therefore, is not something that man determines to exercise, for
there are two faiths that we see in Scripture. There are two
types of exercising of faith. We see the faith that leads to
damnation, and we see the faith that leads to eternal life. And
so we ask ourselves, which is the one that I have? What faith
do I have? Well, you'll find out by the
end of this sermon which faith you have, because you'll determine
as to whether or not you put your faith in your faith or your
faith in Christ. And you'll see where it's laying unless you
can't see, because you don't have faith to see. You see the
problem? If I say see again, you're going
to throw something at me, aren't you? Grace is the effective agent
of salvation, not faith. Faith is the receiving end and
the result of such things, and in itself is the work of God
also. So grace saves. That's how I
want you to change your mindset. I want you to see what Paul is
teaching you. He says that by grace, you are saved by grace. You have been saved by grace. How are we saved by grace? How
do we know through faith? You see, and faith. And the language
is not of your own doing, is the gift of God. That's what
it says there. That's what it says in the Greek. And that's
what it says plain in the English. But the problem is that we have
thought the other way around for so long that we have misconstrued
the gospel and we're teaching a false gospel when we teach
any other gospel. And in Galatians chapter one,
the scripture Paul uses the word anathemas to be eternally damned
if we teach another gospel. Friends, I'll tell you to tell
someone that their faith saves them apart from God's grace. is anathemas. Your faith by grace, by grace,
through faith that is of God's gift. So by grace, you are saved
through faith. By grace, you are saved. That's
what we see here. And I know it may be beating
a dead horse. You may say, I get it. No, we don't. We don't get
it. We need to sit. This needs to be a forever endless loop
in our minds. I need to have the three, three,
three, three with a line of the top of it at the end of our numbers.
It needs to continue to go. It needs to forever be running
like a hamster that has no life expectancy. or an end to this
life, and it's going to run in the core of our soul forever,
squeaking and everything. So grace saves faith, receives
through whom? Well, faith must have an object.
See, how do we how do we have faith? Well, faith has to be
placed on something. We can't just have faith in some some
idea. We can't have faith in a system.
We can't have faith in and in a teaching. We can't have although
we can. That's not saving faith. There
are many people, the demons and the devils, the Scripture teaches
that Satan believes the Scriptures fully, better than we do. He
knows it and he believes it. The demons believe and tremble,
the Scriptures say. Why? For there is no salvation
for them. There are many a theologians
who will stand before God in judgment and say, but didn't
we? And Jesus will say, depart from me, I never knew you. There
are many pastors who will stand before Christ in the judgment
and He will say, I never knew you. There are many church deacons
and church members and godly people and religious people and
sweet people and beautiful people and giving people and generous
people who will stand before God, and they will think that
what they have done in their lives is evidence of their new
life in Christ, and their faith will be misplaced. They'll put
their faith in the fruit of their own faith, thinking that they're
saved. That's why we must preach the
Word of God as it was intended to be preached and not manmade,
connived, corrupted teachings. And I stand hard on that and
I stand against anyone who does that because it is wrong and
you cannot be saved apart from the true teaching of the Word
of God. And so, church, I pray that you would just learn to
read it for itself. Faith must have an object, as
we see in Acts 16.31, and they said, Believe in the Lord Jesus
and you will be saved, you and your household. Romans 3.22,
the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ. For all
who believe, for there is no distinction, we know what he
says there, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Of course,
that object of faith is who? That is Jesus alone. Christ alone. Solus Christus. That's one of
the pillars of the Reformation. That's why we as Baptists, we
hold to these five pillars. We hold to the Reformation doctrine
as Baptists, as Christians, as Evangelicals. We know that there
are methodologies and different things and baptismal modes and
things like that that demonstrate a little bit of a resistance
or a fodder or a debate amongst the evangelical communities. But ultimately, all evangelical
Protestant communities have started from the core of the Protestant
Reformation that fought the battle against the power of the church
over justification by faith alone. And that is the crux of the gospel.
It's the call of the church. It's the call of the individual.
For I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power
of God unto salvation, first of the Jews and the Gentiles.
I'm not ashamed of it, Paul says. We should not be ashamed of it
either. And when we don't study and when we don't grow, we don't
challenge our mind and our heart, we're staying in that stagnant
place. The object of our faith must be Christ alone. The faith
is worthless if it's placed in itself or if it's placed in its
fruit. It has to be placed on Christ. Faith is what happens
when one sees Christ. Faith is seen in two lights,
the light of abiding and trusting in what God has done, period,
alone, and also the totality of the Christian, if you will,
faith. So there are two types of ways of seeing faith in this
context, the faith. The saving faith that comes to
light, that we can see Christ and believe, and then the faith
as a whole, as I talked about earlier, as it says in Ephesians
4. But there's one body and one Spirit, just as you were called
to the hope that belongs to your call. One Lord, one faith, one
baptism. So there's one Christian faith.
There's one, if you will, and don't hang me, there's one Christian
denomination, and that is truth. Though we may have different
hats and different things and different conferences, we are one body
if we are one faith. We have one faith, and that is
the truth, the doctrine of Christ, which centers around the doctrine
of justification by faith. See, there's two ways of actively
expressing faith. Faith is actively expressed.
It is expressed through believing. It is expressed through professing.
It is expressed through living. It is expressed through loving.
It's expressed through serving. Faith is expressed all the time
in the life of people. But the problem is, we see two
ways in Scripture that faith is actively expressed. We see
how people For example, like the rich young ruler. We see
the rich young ruler and we see the desire to follow Christ.
He hunted Him down. He followed Him physically. He
knelt before Him, worshiping Him. And Jesus says, You call
Me good, only God is good. He stayed there and He continued
to ask Him, How do I gain eternal life? He wanted to live forever.
He wanted to live eternally. He loved the law of God. He loved
righteousness. He loved holiness. And Jesus
says, Test your affections. Do you love Me? More than everything
that you've worked for in your life, do you love Me above all
that your life has accomplished? Your position, your power, your
property, your prestige, the people that you know, the people
that you love? Do you love Me more? And this man measured up
eternal life, which he had in his mind would be a kingdom for
himself in the face of God. And God would look down in pleasure
and see this man's accomplishments. But Jesus says He walked away,
or the Gospels say that He walked away dejected. And Jesus spoke
to His disciples. And he says that it's impossible
for it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a sewing
needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven. And these
disciples say that who can be saved in Jesus is what is impossible
with man is possible with God. So what we learn throughout what
we see here is that if it weren't for God's grace, it would be
impossible to come to faith. And God's grace is not just sprayed
out of the atmosphere for everybody to soak up or cough out. It's out there, but that's a
common grace. And that common grace, according to Romans chapter
1, is a damning grace because we're without excuse. And unless
what is dead in us comes to life, there is no hope for us. And
so there's two ways of seeing faith expressed. The rich young
ruler was one of those. He saw Christ as divine, but
he had an empty faith. Nicodemus saw Christ as divine,
but he had an empty faith. He comes to him and says, We
know that you are from God, for no one can do the things that you do, except
God be with him. And Jesus says, Truly, truly,
I say unto you, that no one can see the kingdom, speaking of
himself, except that he be born again. And Nicodemus is perplexed,
and he says, How can a man be born again? Does he go once again
into his mother's womb and come out? And Jesus says this, that
unless a man is born of the Spirit and of water, he cannot see the
kingdom of God. He says the kingdom or the Spirit
of God is like the wind. You see the wind, you see what
it does, you see where it goes, but you cannot see from where
it comes nor where it is going, such as the Spirit. And Jesus says, Do not marvel
that I say you must be born again, for that which is Flesh is flesh
and that which is spirit is spirit. And we know what we speak of
because we come from above, but you know not what you speak of.
Are you not the told teacher of Israel? Yet you don't understand
these things. You must be born again. Nicodemus
had a faith that Christ was divine in some sense, but he could not
see him. He could not see the kingdom until he was born again. Jesus
says that. Jesus says to the rich young ruler, to the disciples,
that it's impossible for man to come to faith without God's
intervention fully. And then he tells Nicodemus,
unless I reborn you, unless you are reborn by the Spirit, you
cannot see me. You can make all kinds of professions,
but you're not mine. Chapter 2, at the very end of
that chapter, says many people believed in His name that day
when they saw the signs that He was doing. Many people throughout
all of Jerusalem. But it says, but Jesus Himself
did not entrust Himself to them. In other words, they believed
in Jesus, but Jesus didn't believe in them. For He knew what was
in the heart of man. No one had to tell Him what was in man.
Now, there was a man named Nicodemus. See, that's 2 and 3. It goes
together with one complete thought. In John chapter 6, the multitude
that He fed, the 25,000 people, 5,000 men. and all their families. He fed them out of a bubble boy
sack lunch. And then at the end, they picked up 12 baskets. Each
disciple picked up a full basket, probably a week's worth of food
and took it with them. And the next night that he supernaturally
walked on water and teleported a boat of disciples in the midst
of a storm. To Capernaum. And then he gets there. The people
had looked for him for a long time and they couldn't find him.
So they get in the boats and they go over there and they see him and
they say, teacher, they call him teacher. How patronizing. Teacher, when
did you come here? And Jesus says, he didn't say,
hey, it's good to see you. I came over here this way or
whatever. He looks at them and says, you don't come to me because
of the signs and the wonders that I did. You don't come to
me because of my power. You don't come to me because
of my worth. You come to me because you got your belly filled with loaves.
Do not labor for the food that perishes, but labor for the bread
that endures to eternal life. Give us this bread always, they
say. And he says, I'm the bread. So
they followed him around as long as he did what they needed, gave
them what they needed. Jesus had compassion on them,
it says in John's gospel, and he fed them. They were hungry.
He saw them and he fed them. We should have compassionate
people who are hungry. And he fed them, but he didn't feed
them again. He gave them the gospel, and that gospel is that
that bread you're eating is going to rot and die and your body
is going to rot and die, but your soul lives forever. And if I'm not
sufficient, if I'm not your satisfying morsel, then my life on this
earth, my resurrection, my death on this cross, my body and my
blood, which is about to be broken. That is the true bread. That
is the only place that your faith is going to save you. If you
place it in me, I will fill you up and you will be satisfied.
And he tells what does he say in John chapter four that you'll
be running over? I'm the living water. And I'll
give you water that well up in your soul into eternal life.
Do you hear this? Do you hear this church? Do you
hear these words? The multitude believe to follow
him. But he said he alone was the bread. See, man's way of
seeing is not faith. God's grace gives true sight
in the rebirth, the regeneration of what was dead and helpless
and lifeless, then come to life so that we could see and believe.
God brings to life all who truly live, all who truly have faith.
Why do most men have faith like this? Why do most men have faith
like the rich and ruler or the magician or Nicodemus? Nicodemus finally did come to
faith. He finally did see. Why? Because they're not born
of God by grace and therefore they trust in themselves. Let's
look at faith in this way. Faith is not a work of man, but
faith. We're going to define faith as
a gift of God. Faith is a gift of God. And this,
look at the text there in Ephesians chapter two. For by grace, you've
been saved through faith in verse eight. And it is not of your
own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of work so
that no one may boast. Friends, it is very clear, and
I'll say this over and over again, and this is not of your own doing.
This is referring to faith, and it is referring to faith. Always
referring to faith, right there. You can say what you want to
say. Your salvation, the graces of God, but your faith is a gift.
That's what it teaches us. Why is that so? Why is that so
offensive to us? I know it was offensive to me
when I first read it for the first time in Scripture and knew
I was really had the wrong translation. So I got another one and I got
another one. I started looking and I realized that I had just
never really seen that for what it was. Because my faith, thankfully,
was. Placed in Christ, but my understanding
of it was really bad and I started thinking, well, how in the world
am I? going to deal with the idea that God gives the gift
of faith and it's not on me. Well, if it's on me, then I have
the power to come to faith without God. And so the issue here is
that who wants to worship God or who wants to worship himself?
And friends, what makes us most angry is because it attacks the
flesh that we live in. When we hear this for the first
time, we go, this is strange. I made the decision to come to
Christ. You did, but it was a gift of God. And you better be making
that decision every single day. It's called enduring faith. It's
not a one time thing. It's not a ticket to heaven.
It's a life with Christ. Jesus didn't print tickets out
of his blood drops. He paid for the sins of his children
and he brought them to life. In Romans 1, Paul makes a bold
and remarkable contrast between these two types of faith, of
seeing in the flesh and seeing in the eyes of grace. Faith is
seeing. In Romans 1, listen to this. For I'm not ashamed of
the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone
who believes, to first the Jew, then the Gentile. For in it,
the righteousness of God is revealed from faith. For faith, as it is written,
the righteous shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed
from heaven against ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who
by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known
about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. Now,
let me stop there. Let me show you the contrast.
Paul is saying that there are two types of seeing. There's
the scene that comes from faith to faith. And then there's the
scene that comes from unrighteousness. So if God gives the gift of faith
and we see that we are alive, we are reborn, we live and we
walk by faith, we are the righteous and we walk by faith versus the
unrighteous who walk by flesh, by sight. by what they see. And yet they're then what he's
also saying is that God has made what is known, what can be known
about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them for
his invisible attributes. See, people like to say, well,
it's the it's the it's the idea of, you know, something has been
created. It's the cosmological argument that there is a creator. I mean, this microphone show
it just begs somebody created it. It didn't fall out of a tree
somewhere. It did not like somebody hit a turtle on the street and
just pop into a microphone with all the electronic stuff. And
that's a simple device compared to today's technology. That's
not what Paul saying, Paul saying his. Invisible attributes are
clearly known to the world at large. Every human being is aware
of the invisible attributes of God. Namely, His eternal power
and divine nature have been clearly perceived. So God alone is saying
that every human being, even atheists, they know in the depths
of their heart that there is a God and that He is powerful.
And they cannot deny it. Now, they may have skepticism,
they may have doubt, but it is there. And it is that skepticism
and that doubt that continually pushes the truth away. Claiming
to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the
immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals
and creepy things and electronics. And I'll just keep going. Therefore, because they suppressed
the truth with their unrighteousness, God gave them up in the lust
of their hearts to impurity, to be dishonoring for their bodies
among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God
for a lie and they worshipped and served the creature rather
than the Creator. Friends, there is no greater
creature worship than self-gratification and salvation. There's no greater
idolatry and creature worship than saying, I'm responsible
and the causal agent of my eternal life because I did something
that God had to act on my behalf. That is arrogance and pride. So what we are able to do and
the faith we're able to exercise is a gift of God and we worship
Him and thank Him for it. We don't stand in pride before
Him and say, I'm glad I did it. Too bad my neighbor couldn't.
Chances are your neighbor is crying on his face to God to
save him and help him and have mercy on him while we're feeling
comfortable. The only illustration we see of that in Scripture,
Jesus says the first guy went home condemned while the second
man was justified. What can be known about God is
plain. God does not hide himself from anyone. Sin hides God from
everyone. the sin that resides inside each
man. For the gospel is the work of God's grace and is received
by faith. Faith is a straw that God pins into the heart of the
dead man and injects sight and life into him. That's the way
I like to look at the hypodermic needle. God puts faith in there
and pops it to life. He shoots life into the heart
of the dead, into the heart of the unrighteous, into the heart
of the wicked, and He brings it to life. For the gospel is
the work of God's grace and is received by faith. It is salvation
to everyone who believes. And in the context of the Scripture,
as we see that, it's always in the future, present, future tense. It's always going into believing
those who are always believing, not those who have believed,
but those who are always believing. Not the ones who had a time of
faith, but the ones who are presently in the faith. Not once, but eternally. Belief in Christ is proof and
is always coupled with holy affections and personal love for others
and through service and good deeds and good works wrought
by God beforehand for us to walk in, as we learned last week.
For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for
faith, that I just read in Romans 1, as it is written, the righteous
shall live by faith. See, those who do not believe
have been deceived, just like we were, and were blind, just
like we were. However, our role is not to convince. people to see, and not to persuade
people to see, and not to use cunning for people to see. But
our role as the church is to command men to repent and believe
the gospel. We command all men to believe. It is the command of God, Be
holy, for I am holy. Repent of your sin, turn from
your sin, and trust in Christ alone. That is the evangelist
message of John the Baptist, where he said, as I read this
morning, I could just preach that text today, in Zachariah's
prophecy. It's out of Malachi, as we see
that the Scripture teaches that In the spirit of Elijah, John
the Baptist was to come to make straight the ways of the Lord,
to pave and enter the way for the Lord. And what did he preach?
Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand. Trust in the Gospel.
Believe in the Bridegroom. Behold, the Lamb of God that
takes away the sins of the world. This is the message of the Gospel.
This is the only sermon that should be preached, for this
is the only text that we ever see, from Genesis to Matthew,
all the way through. It is the true Gospel. And anything
else is a lie from hell. Our role as Christians and as
the church is to command all men to believe the gospel, God's
effective grace that saves. See, faith is a gift from God.
He is the One who removes the scales from the eyes of unbelievers.
He's the One who softens and brings to life the dead, cold
heart of the wicked. He does it. How does He do it?
How does He put it in there? What is the actual means through
which He puts faith in the heart of men? Through the preaching
of the Word of God, Romans 10.17. And faith comes by hearing and
hearing comes through the words of Christ. So if we're manipulating
the scriptures and we're not teaching the full gospel and
we're not showing that it is by God's grace alone that you
are saved through faith by grace, I'm just going to start saying
that text that way, then we are not teaching people how to truly
be saved and they are coming away with a man centered faith
and a man centered theology. They're for all things that are
done in the name of saving others. And the name of evangelism is
a lie if it is not true. And it blinds people from the
truth. Now, the Lord is spirit and where
the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, Paul says to the
church in Corinth. And we all with unveiled face beholding
the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image
from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord
who is spirit. Therefore, Having this ministry
by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart, but we have renounced
disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning
or to tamper with God's word. But by the open statement of
the truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the
sight of God. And even if our listen to this
church and even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those
who are perishing. These are the words of Paul,
the church in Corinth. In their case, Paul says, the God of this
world has blinded the eyes of unbelievers to keep them from
seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is
the image of God. For what we proclaim is not of
ourselves, but Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your slaves,
for Jesus' sake. For God, who said, Let light
shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts, listen to this,
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face
of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure. I
will keep reading this in jars of clay to show that the surpassing
power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every
way, but none. but not crushed, perplexed but
not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down
but not destroyed, always carrying in the body the death of Jesus,
so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our bodies.
For we who live are always being put to death for Jesus' sake,
so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in mortal flesh.
So death is at work in us, but life in you. Since we have the
same spirit of faith according to what has been written, I believe, and so I spoke. We
also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that He who raised
the Lord Jesus will raise also us with Christ and bring us into
His presence. For it is for your sake, so that
as grace extends to more and more people, it may increase
thanksgiving to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart,
for though the outer self is worsened away, the inner self
is being renewed day by day. For this light and more material
affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond
all comparison as we look not to the things that are seen,
but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen
are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
Do you see the point? I don't have time to preach that. I just
want you to hear it. So we define faith as not a work of man. We
define faith as a gift of God's grace. And we define faith as
walking with God. There's the way that we express
this faith and see this faith. We see faith as walking with
God. It is belief. It is walking with
God. Faith remains. Listen carefully to my words.
Faith remains. Faith holds on. Faith stays true. It fights. It runs. It battles. Faith that endures is true faith. Faith that stops, turns away,
tries other things is not saving faith. And thus, one has no hope
but is alone in the world, considering his own wisdom sufficient and
his own actions worthy and his own decisions remarkably glorious
to save. And in the end, death alone is
found. Now, faith, we see it defined
very clearly in closing, is the assurance of things hoped for.
The conviction of things not seen. Now listen, this is a trick.
For by it, people of old received their commendation. By faith,
we understand that the universe was created by the Word of God
so that what is seen is not made out of things that are visible.
Well, you know, it goes on and on. The whole chapter of Hebrews
11, it talks about by faith. Faith is holding fast to what
we know, but we cannot see. Faith is understanding what God
has allowed us to see that we could not see and others still
cannot see. But now we can see, you see. The faith that is in the believer
is a gift of God's grace, and the outcome of that ultimately
is worship. with every fiber of our being
to the praise of His glorious grace. Faith brings obedience. Faith brings repentance. Faith
brings a knowledge of God. John Owen, I read him yesterday
and the day before. If you don't read John Owen,
don't start. He says it's about obedience.
In the sense of the fruit of faith, it's not as its former
essence talking about obedience, but as the necessary effect is
included in the calls. And basically what he's saying
there is I want you to understand that we are justified by, he says, the
whole grace of faith, he calls it the grace of faith. And that
we are obedient, we worship, we love, we hold dear, we hold
on because it is the effect of our gift of grace. The grace
of faith. So in closing, let's ask the
question, what does faith mean? What does it mean? It means that
one holds sincerely and eternally to the reality that Christ alone
is sufficient. He is our sufficient hope. He
is the author of our faith and he is the finisher of our faith.
Faith rests in the reality of God's decrees and out of it flow
all things that please God, for without faith it is impossible
to please God. Faith flows from the seeing of glory in the face
of Jesus Christ due to the regenerating power and the pleasure of God.
Faith remains and abides and clings as a child to the leg
of his father in a crowded mall. I miss those days when your children
are really small and they lose sight of you in public. And then
they see you and they're only this far, but you stand behind
the grocery store. You see a wander out of the sugar
cereal aisle and you just step back for a minute or the toy
section of the cash register and you step out of the way.
And then they see in about three seconds or four seconds, sometimes
it's longer than they look around. They can't find you and they
freak out. And when you step into their eye line, they just
run and they grab hold of your leg and stand on your shoe and
they don't let go. That's a biting. It's abiding. That's what it means to abide.
It's a poor illustration, but it's the best one I can come
up with. It's abiding faith. Faith means that one is in absolute
assuredness as a child of God, that one is justified, redeemed
and surely a saved man, not hopefully, not wishfully, but surely a saved
man, an heir of glory and a product of grace and mercy from God.
Faith means that one agrees. with God's work, with his sufficiency
and lays down all rights to boast and all rights to believe apart
from God's grace, which is what saves us. Faith receives Christ
completely as the means of justification and causes of justification. Faith means that one can see
and that when one sees, he longs for what he sees. Blessed are
those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall
be satisfied." Faith sees Jesus and is satisfied with Him alone,
being the only way to life and to the Father. My prayer for
you, church, is that you would see, is that you would see in
the depths of your heart and see your faith. Is your faith
in Christ? Are you believing on Christ?
Are you believing on your believing? Are you believing on something
you've done or are you believing on what God has declared He's
done? Repent and believe the gospel. You know, the greatest
sin of this life is the sin of unbelief and self-sufficiency.
Let us stop being sufficient in our own thinking, in our own
saving, in our own believing and believe on the one who has
saved us fully and certainly. Let's pray. God, it is just great
to be able just to hear these words. To hear the words of Scripture
and know that just in that small little text, there's so much
more, there's so many things that we need to devour. Lord,
I pray you just sustain our life here on this earth and give us
a heart to study your word more and more each day. Father, we are just grateful
to be able to assemble. Father, I thank you for these children,
Lord, as week after week they sit and they listen. And Lord,
there's some they draw, some they doodle, some they stare
off into space. Father, you are faithful to plant your Word in
their hearts, God, and this stuff will stay as you stick it there. Lord, would you bring our children
to faith? Would you save them? Would you save the men and women
among us? Would you save our families? Would you save our
loved ones? Would you save our enemies that
they might be our brothers and sisters? Father, would we do
all that we do for your namesake and for your glory? And I pray
that as we continue to worship, as we close in song, Father,
that it would be not just music, but Father, that we sing this
lyric, that it would truly be a prayer to you, an exaltation,
a doxology. In Christ alone is our hope found. Father, it is in his name alone
that we pray. Amen.