What Is Saving Faith?

Reflections on Receiving Christ as a Treasure

John Piper

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781433578366
• eBook ISBN: 9781433578397
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Bestselling Author and Pastor John Piper Reflects on the Relationship between Treasuring Christ and Saving Faith 

What happens in the heart when it experiences real saving faith? John Piper argues that faith in Christ is not saving unless it includes an "affectional dimension of treasuring Christ." Nor is God glorified as he ought to be unless he is treasured in being trusted. Saving faith in Jesus Christ welcomes him forever as our supreme and inexhaustible pleasure. 

What Is Saving Faith? explains that a Savior who is treasured for his all-satisfying worth is more glorified than a Savior who is only trusted for his all-forgiving competence. In this way, saving faith reaches its God-appointed goal: the perfections of Christ glorified by our being satisfied in him forever. 

• Written by Best-Selling Author and Pastor John Piper: Explores a critical and misunderstood element of the Christian faith, urging believers to ask the unsettling question,  Do I have saving faith?
• Theologically Robust: Studies respected theologians' work regarding salvation, including John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Henry Scougal, John Owen, Wayne Grudem, and J. I. Packer
• Accessible: Written for students, nominal or thoughtful Christians, and church leaders of all levels, as well as anyone interested in the nature of faith and the essential relationship between faith and feeling

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,1 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).2

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?”3 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.”4 To give you a glimpse into the controversy, here are the beginning paragraphs of my laudatory response to MacArthur’s book from those days:

When latter-day Puritans J. I. Packer and James Boice both write enthusiastic forewords for a confessed “premillennial dispensationalist” (25), the common adversary must be ominous. What alarm welded this unusual coalition? Answer:

“L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Newsletter Signup
• Other Crossway Books
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Roots of My Concern
• 1 Taking the Lordship Battle to Another Level
• 2 The “ Free Will” Air We Breathe
• 3 Why I Am Not a Roman Catholic
• 4 If Saving Faith Is Affectional, Does It Merit Justification?
• 5 Provocative Voices from Church History
• 6 Does “Saving Allegiance” Clarify “Saving Faith”?
• Part 2 Seeing Reality through Six Hundred Lenses
• 7 Confident Trust in What Jesus Says
• 8 Saving Faith Receives Christ Himself
• 9 The Spiritual Sight of the Glory of Christ
• 10 The Substance of Things Hoped For
• 11 The Root of All God-Pleasing Works
• 12 A Supernatural Creation of God
• Part 3 Receiving Christ as Our Supreme Treasure
• 13 Saving Faith Receives Christ, but Not in Vain
• 14 The Message of Jesus about His Supreme Value
• 15 The Surpassing Worth of Knowing Christ Jesus
• 16 We Have This Treasure in Jars of Clay
• Part 4 Christ, the Believer’s Treasure and Satisfaction
• 17 Saving Faith Is the Substance of Hoped-For Joy
• 18 Saving Faith as Love for the Truth of the Gospel
• 19 Saving Faith Overcomes the World
• 20 Whoever Believes in Me Shall Never Thirst
• Part 5 Calling for Faith When Faith Is Affectional
• 21 The Offer of Treasure
• 22 Counting the Cost of Embracing the Treasure
• 23 Warning People to Flee from Judgment to Joy
• 24 Repentance, the Renovation of the Heart’s Desire
• 25 Does Affectional Faith Make Evangelism Impossible?
• 26 Does Affectional Faith Undermine Assurance?
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• General Index
• Scripture Index