Part 1
The Roots of My Concern
More powerful than all the other forces that pressed me to write this book is the lifelong habit of reading the Bible every day. Chapters 1 through 6 will describe the theological battles, cultural pressures, historical inspirations, and contemporary challenges that motivated me. But nothing in these chapters comes close to the simple fact that reading the Bible has filled me with a longing to know what God brings about in his children when he gives them saving faith. I want to understand what my mind and heart are doing when I believe in Christ.
Yes, this implies that we can experience the wonders of saving faith without a clear and full grasp of what saving faith is. You don’t have to be a theologian to be a Christian. If the only thing we could experience is what we could explain, no one could become a Christian. Conversion is a God-given miracle. With it, saving faith comes into being. We will spend eternity discovering the wonders of the experience of saving faith.
So year after year of reading the Bible, the questions pile up. There are always more questions than answers. To be sure, there are many answers. Spectacular answers. All the answers we need to glorify God and do his will. But every day, there are new questions:
- Jesus, if you say that you are the supreme treasure (Matt. 13:44), and that receiving you is what faith does (John 1:12), then what is it like when faith receives you as such a treasure?
- When you describe believing as coming to you to drink and never thirsting again (John 6:35), what are you saying about faith and the soul’s satisfaction?
- Paul, what do you mean when you say that we can have faith—even mountain-moving faith—and still come to nothing in our lives (1 Cor. 13:2)?
- What do you mean, Paul, when you say that we can believe the gospel “in vain” (1 Cor. 15:2)?
- Why do you contrast “not believ[ing] the truth” with having “pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thess. 2:12)?
- If the gift of faith is the new ability to see the glory of Christ (2 Cor. 4:6), and if there are “eyes” in our hearts (Eph. 1:18), then why do you say that we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7)?
- How is it that faith has the amazing power to cause people to love each other (Gal. 5:6; 1 Tim. 1:5), and that everything that does not come from faith is sin (Rom. 14:23)? What is it about faith that makes loving people inevitable?
- Since you say that Abraham grew strong in his faith, giving glory to God (Rom. 4:20), would I be justified in saying that God is not glorified by being trusted for a promise while being regarded as embarrassing and boring?
- And, John, how does faith overcome the world and turn burdensome commandments into happy obedience (1 John 5:3–4)?
- Finally, whoever you are who wrote the great, Christ-exalting book of Hebrews, what am I to make of your definition of saving faith as “the substance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1 KJV)? Or should I not translate ὑπόστασις (hupostasis) as “substance” like the old-timers, but as “assurance”?
I just used the word finally. But only because ten questions is enough to give you the flavor of where this book came from. It came from a lifetime of reading the Bible with the habit of asking questions.
Of course, we don’t write books about every question. God has his ways to make some questions rise to the point of producing a book. That divine action does not happen in a vacuum. Which brings us back to the theological battles, cultural pressures, historical inspirations, and contemporary challenges that have urged on and shaped this book. That is what we turn to now.
1
Taking the Lordship Battle to Another Level
The longer I live, and the closer I come to heaven, the more troubling it is that so many people identify as Christians but give so little evidence of being truly Christian. The more I ponder the radical, miraculous nature of the new birth, and its absolute necessity for entering the kingdom of God (John 3:3, 5), the more distressing it is how many professing Christians seem so cavalier about being new creatures in Christ.
“I Never Knew You”
My sadness grows when I consider that there may be millions of people who think of themselves as heaven-bound, hell-escaping Christians who are not—people for whom Christ is at the margins of their thoughts and affections, not at the transforming center. People who will hear Jesus say at the judgment, “I never knew you; depart from me” (Matt. 7:23).
As I have pondered the roots of this looming calamity, I have not been able to escape the conviction that it is partly rooted in a widespread misunderstanding about what saving faith is—not just among nominal Christians, but also among pastors who don’t show the unsuspecting “Christians” their error. Of course, I am not the only one who has seen this impending shock coming for nominal Christians at the judgment of Christ. Many have sounded the alarm about this deadly disease of churchgoing unbelief, even if their diagnosis of the cause is not exactly the one I am dealing with in this book.
MacArthur’s Timely Blast across the Bow
For example, in the first decade of my pastoral ministry, the 1980s, this issue took the form of the controversy over so-called “lordship salvation.” Do we need to submit to Jesus as Lord as well as believe on him as Savior in order to be saved? The most important and biblically wise book published in that skirmish may have been John MacArthur’s The Gospel according to Jesus (1988).
The book was a response to the very crisis of Christian nominalism that I just expressed. MacArthur asks, “Who knows how many people are deluded into believing they are saved when they are not?” When the book was published, I read it like a miser finding gold. I wrote, “As for my own personal response to the book, I could scarcely put it down for joy.” To give you a glimpse into the controversy, here are the beginning paragraphs of my laudatory response to MacArthur’s book from those days:
