Jon and Justin talk about adoption–how God has brought us into his own family through the blood of his Son. We now call God, “Father.” The guys also get into some law/gospel stuff and a biblical understanding of God’s holiness.Giveaway: “The Bruised Reed” by Richard SibbesScripture References:John 2:13-17Mark 2:23-27Luke 6:6-11Luke 13:1-5Mark 7:1-23Luke 18:18-27Luke 15Matthew 9:12-13Matthew 11:28-30Matthew 12:18-21John 10:14-18John 14:1-3John 17:24Luke 12:32Luke 7:36-50Romans 8:151 John 3:1https://youtu.be/mrW_BEPI1FwSemper Reformanda TranscriptsJustin Perdue: Welcome to the Semper Reformanda podcast. I know we were being funny with the title For God So Hated the World, but that is so often how it comes across. “God is just really angry and reluctantly at best is saving sinners. But really, I don’t even know if He wants to do that. If it didn’t bring in glory, He surely wouldn’t do it because He has no interest in our wellbeing.” That’s just so far from the biblical picture. He is holy, He is righteous, He is just, and He is gracious, merciful, tender, and delights to save sinners, and that’s why He is so worthy of worship. Here we are to talk about that more.I’m mindful of Luke 12:32, about how Jesus says, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s delight to give you the kingdom.” That’s a wonderful thought here, too. But where I’d love to pivot this conversation to is like a Romans 8 idea, along with other passages, of how we have been adopted into God’s family. Like 1 John: we’re now sons and daughters of God. And how we’ve not been given a spirit of fear, but we have been given the spirit of adoption through which we cry, “Abba, Father,” and God is no longer our judge. God is no longer scary. I’m preaching to myself here. He’s no longer scary, He’s no longer threatening, He no longer condemns us, He’s not our judge anymore—He is our Father. We don’t have to do anything to climb up into our Father’s arms to be held by Him and to be loved by Him. That’s already been given.Jon Moffitt: He picks you up.John 20, Jesus comes out of the tomb and Mary realizes that Jesus is not the gardener, but is Jesus. The King James mistranslated it and it was very confusing. It says, “Don’t touch me.”Justin Perdue: Don’t you criticize the King James version.Jon Moffitt: Oh my. I got myself in trouble with that.She grabs him—I’m imagining that she’s holding him around the legs as if she’s saying, “I’m not letting you go.” Jesus gives her motivation to let go. This is what he says: “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and to your God.'” I love it. It’s like he’s saying, “We’re brothers. We’re family. Your Father and my Father.” Why can Jesus proclaim the inclusion that he makes? Because he gave the right to adoption to sinners. His blood is the ink on the page that says you belong. It’s amazing.Justin Perdue: Thinking about adoption, JI Packer’s book Knowing God is a Christian classic. I think the best chapter in that book is the chapter on adoption. Packer makes the argument—and this was written in the 1970s—that it is one of the most neglected doctrines in the Scriptures. Like you said, the ink is literally the blood of the son of God. Our adoption is secure and our status as adopted children is going nowhere. Just to think about God’s love for us and how He did these things for us. If we thought more about it, we would be greatly helped—and I think he’s right.Martin Luther famously wrote the hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. And there’s that line, I think, at the end of the third verse (at least the way we sing it at CBC) where he’s talking about the devil. That song is about God being our fortress and how the devil and spiritual warfare is real, but we’re safe and secure in the Lord, and in particular in Christ and what he’s done for us. But at the end of that one verse, Martin Luther writes that one little word that will fell the devil. Luther was cited as saying that that one little word, as he had it in mind when he wrote the hymn, was Abba and how us being able to call God “Father” is what ultimately undoes the devil in all of his work and power. That’s a remarkable thought: God being our Father and us being able to call him that and being able to, with confidence, approach the throne of grace because of God’s fatherly, gentle disposition toward us is the undoing of the evil one. What a blessed thought.Jon Moffitt: You said a couple of things. When you are dealing with someone who says, “Yeah, but I think you guys are deemphasizing the holiness of God. And because of that, if you continue to present this position of Jesus, then people will not see it necessary to be holy.” Your response to that is?Justin Perdue: A number of thoughts. One of them is what I said in the regular show that I think that when we rightly present the totality of God’s nature, rightly emphasizing His holiness, justice, righteousness, and His love and grace and mercy, and help us understand that the holy God is the one who delights to save sinners, what is actually produced by that whole accurate presentation is reverence and awe before the Lord. I am amazed that this God loves me and has saved me and sent His Son to live, suffer, bleed, and die for me to the extent that I am moved to worship and my desire is to love and serve and obey this God. So that’s one of my responses. Yes, we uphold the holiness of the Lord and His righteousness so that we can accurately represent Him in His grace and mercy. That is most obviously seen in the work and in the cross of Christ, which I think is the most moving, gripping, epic message in the universe and would produce awe and reverence before the Lord. It would do anything but produce licentiousness, looseness, and apathy towards the things of God. I think, if anything, the message where holiness is overemphasized and it’s all about righteousness and wrath and the like, what that ends up producing is either hatred of God or it produces a fear of God, like I said before, where the last thing in the world we want to do is be near Him. And it’s like He’s not really worthy of worship, except for the fact that like a dictator, I feel like I have to or I’m going to die. In the other position, my heart’s cry is that I love God because of what He has done for me. I don’t deserve it—I’m a wretch and He loves me. He is incredible and awesome. Praise be to His name and I will delight to live in His presence forever with the other redeemed saints. It’s a disconnect for me.I think my other response is a basic law and gospel response. I was having this conversation the other day with the guy who was on staff with me here at the church, and we were on our way to a meeting with some people from our church. We got into just talking about some other churches in our area that we know of and some things that have been brought to our attention lately. Just talking about how there is such a lack of law and gospel preaching, and how if I or the guy on our staff were ever invited to a church like this particular church, our sermon is a law and gospel sermon. We just begin with what the Lord requires. The 10 Commandments are great, but let’s just even simplify it more than that and let’s take it straight from the lips of Christ himself: we’re to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and we’re to love our neighbors as ourselves. How are you doing with that? We preach the law of God in all of its holiness, because the irony is many of the people that scream about wrath and scream about God’s holiness else are over there relativizing the law. They are telling people to live a certain way, and they can, in one sense, please God. Or they take a scalpel to the law or a machete to the law and say, “I’m just going to cut some parts out and leave in other parts. I’m going to emphasize this and throw this over here.” Whereas, I think what we need to do is preach the law in all of its holiness and frankly, in all of its terror apart from Christ because we are ruined and crushed by that. Then, having preached the law to people who cannot keep it and then showing us that we can’t keep it, then we preach Christ and his work and what he came to do in his own words, that he, “did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.” And then you begin to see that this is what the Lord has been doing all along. This is why he gave the law in the first place. This is what the sacrificial system, the priesthood, the day of atonement, the Passover, and all the feasts and all these things were about. This was about what God would accomplish through Christ, and we preach that message.That’s my response. I agree with you that we need to emphasize holiness, and we need to do it in such a way where we are astonished at the grace of God and the fact that He loves sinners and actually celebrates when we come to faith and repent—which is His work anyway, but He celebrates that. And then preach the law and preach the gospel. I don’t think anybody’s going to get it twisted that we don’t think God’s holy.Jon Moffitt: As you were speaking, these are the thoughts that came to my mind: mercy, rightly taught, creates merciful, Christians. And grace, rightly taught, creates gracious Christians. But what ended up being taught in the modern Calvingelical legalistic context is law, and it creates legalistic Christians.Justin Perdue: Self-righteous Christians.Jon Moffitt: Right. Legalistic, self-righteous Christians.When I think about the woman at the feet of Jesus in Luke 7, what did Jesus constitute to her disposition? Much forgiveness. When I see people in my congregation who see that their sins have been massively forgiven, they tend to have a mass amount of mercy and patience and grace. When Paul says in Ephesians 4 to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called,” and immediately points to graciousness, mercy, and longsuffering, God has been merciful and patient and long suffering towards us. He says, “Look, I will not forgive you if you are unwilling to forgive.” The response of a Christian should be mercy and grace, and yet what I hear is legalism and law and self-righteousness.Justin Perdue: It’s not surprising. I’m picking up on your idea and I think you’re exactly right. I just jotted this down as you were talking. I think when the law is mishandled, which is what you’re saying, 1 Timothy 1:8, we uphold the law when it’s used lawfully, but when the law is not used lawfully and is used irresponsibly, damage occurs. And in particular, what often happens is the law is preached to Christians and it’s confused.In our churches, Jon, you and I mean to do two things in preaching to the redeemed. We do mean to preach the first use of the law every week to continue to remind us all that we can’t keep it and we need Christ for that and that he’s done it. So we do that. But then we also preach the third use of the law as the guide for our lives, but we do that in a way that is gentle and not threatening and not condemnatory because the law can no longer condemn us in Christ. It doesn’t mean that we don’t love it and that we don’t want to follow it—of course we do—but we’re not afraid of the law anymore. But what happens often is that the third use of the law, in the minds of many Calvingelical preachers, the guide part is actually preached with this threatening tone like it’s the first use. Then what occurs is when people are being told effectively to live better, it’s done with this edgy and threatening tone, which then produces people that are edgy and threatening in how they interact with everybody else when it comes to obedience. It’s always about doing something or else. That’s how we interact with each other. It’s not shocking. The tone and tenor of the preaching in how the law and the gospel are understood then affects the tone and tenor of all the relationships in the church.Jon Moffitt: Justin and I could do this all day—we’d go off each other. But as you’re talking, what I hear is that preaching that should be relieving people of their burden and giving them hope for their burden, like in Galatians 2, bearing one another’s burden, instead, we are putting a burden on top of them and we’re exhausting Christians with the law inappropriately preached with the first use. And Jesus is saying, “No, no, no. My burden is light. The yoke that comes with me is a relief.”Justin Perdue: Why is that? Because he’s done.Jon Moffitt: That’s right. So when I or any preacher of the gospel or even you who are sharing Jesus with your friends, neighbors, and your congregation, and you’re building each other up, it should be the relief of the burden off of them. You weren’t adding to the burden, but you’re carrying that burden. Galatians 6:2: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” What gets me upset is there are people preaching Jesus and they give more burden. Paul says you preach Jesus and carry burdens; you don’t put more burdens on people.Justin Perdue: Suffice it to say that Jesus is gentle, lowly, and compassionate toward those who know that they need him. He is always that way: he is not scary, he is not threatening, he is not disappointed. He welcomes us in love, he invites us to come to him, he reminds us that in him are found peace and rest and life, and we can approach him for those things. And he wants us to be with him. If anything, for me, one of the takeaways is that God so loves us that He rejoices to save us. That is a reminder that I don’t think we can hear enough.Grace and peace to you saints who are listening to this podcast. We hope sincerely that you’ve been encouraged in Christ and in the love of your heavenly Father today. We have been as we’ve talked about it. Keep pressing on, keep trusting Christ, keep loving each other in your local communities. We pray that things continue to develop with SR and the app and the groups and all that good stuff so that even more community and encouragement can ensue. So pray for us.Please continue to support this ministry. We’re very grateful for you and your partnership. We look forward to more of this and more rest in Christ and more joy in him and all that stuff, should the Lord tarry in the months and years to come.Jon Moffitt: Join some groups. If you’re not in a group, join an online group or a local group. Let’s get this thing rolling.Justin Perdue: Jon’s condemning all of you who haven’t joined the group yet now that we’re done with the gospel part.Jon Moffitt: I’m encouraging you, not condemning.Justin Perdue: Jon’s encouraging you. He is your kind adviser.Anyway, before this goes off the cliff, we’re going to say goodbye. We will talk with you guys again next week on SR. Peace.

Jon and Justin encourage the listener who has struggled with assurance and who is now being told he/she is an antinomian or a hyper-grace advocate. The guys also talk obedience under the sufficiency of Christ.

Resources:
Our podcast on “Dying with Dignity”
Justin’s sermon on Genesis 12:10-14:24

Book Giveaway: “Putting Amazing Back into Grace” by Michael Horton

https://youtu.be/gh2H-mYALso

Semper Reformanda Transcripts

Jon Moffitt: Welcome to Semper Reformanda.

What I ended with in between our two podcasts is, I think, we needed to have the “you’re not crazy” conversation. How do we help our loved ones, our friends, and those on the internet just take one more step towards Jesus and rest in him.

Talk to us, Justin, first of all about how we’re not crazy, and how do we help that person who’s seeing what we say and saying it sounds like antinomianism, it sounds like it’s let-go-and-let-God, and it just didn’t feel right. How do we help that person?

Justin Perdue: The “you’re not crazy” part, in my own experience in what I’ve observed in the church, I do think that the things that we pointed out today on the regular episode are pretty prevalent. You see a lot of faith in faith, and that’s a result of some misunderstandings or squishy or atheological churchy stuff. People really are thinking, “I believe, therefore I will be in heaven.” That’s basically how they think it through. And if you’re a person who has a relatively tender conscience or—we all are prone to this, but maybe you’re especially prone to just doubt, wrestling, and really fighting against unbelief, you tend to live with anxiety and fear and all of these things, you question stuff. Then that answer of having faith and therefore you’re good will fall flat for you because you’re going to think, “Yeah, but my faith is so inconsistent. How in the world could something as shaky as my faith ever be the bedrock that I’m supposed to stand on before the holy God of the universe?” I totally get that and feel that too, and I don’t think you’re crazy if you’re coming from that sphere where you’ve been pointed to your faith and your thinking, “Yeah, that isn’t going to carry the day.” I agree.

Second thing: the obedience thing and being pointed to our faithfulness is very common, especially amongst the Calvinistic types in the American church or in the Western church. I’ve used this illustration before, Jon, and I feel like I can say this on SR because it’s a safe space. I think that pietism, which is effectively that faith in your faithfulness jazz, pietism is the evangelical version of gaslighting. Because what you’re going to experience in the church, from the front, the gospel being preached in that Jesus is our Savior—his death for us, his righteousness, all these things—that’s going to be communicated. But then where the rubber meets the road is you’re constantly going to be pointed back to yourself and how you’re doing your disciplines, your obedience, your performance, your affections, that stuff. We’ve talked about that a ton on Theocast.

Here’s the issue: when that’s where you’re pointed so often practically, then you’re going to be filled with all kinds of doubt if you’re the kind of person that has a tender conscience, that’s mindful of all the ways you’re blowing it and failing and not doing enough. You’re gonna think, “How could I ever have confidence before God? Because I’m not doing enough. And nobody can ever tell me what enough is anyway.” But then when you raise it like, “I have no assurance because I don’t think I’m obeying enough, I don’t love God enough, and my affections aren’t where they’re supposed to be. I’m sinning over here even though I don’t want to.” The answer to that question is, “We’re not sure why you don’t have assurance. You believe the gospel, right?” Then you just kind of leave dejected. I think that’s gaslighting in that the analogy is the husband in that movie keeps turning down the gas lamps, trying to drive his wife insane. Every time she asks him if the light is dimmer, he says, “No, the light is fine. Same as it has always been. Ain’t nothing going on here. The problem is clearly with you.” I think that kind of happens to people in the Calvinistic evangelical church because you raise the issue of assurance and you’re met with, “You believe the gospel, so you should just have assurance. Maybe what you need to do is just work harder so that you have it.” People leave beat down, confused, dejected, and discouraged. So you’re not crazy if that’s been your experience. You see that there’s something off, but then you’re told that everything is fine, and that what you need to do is figure it out on your end so you won’t struggle the way that you do.

Jon Moffitt: Modern Christianity has various forms of prosperity gospel, which we talked about last week in Dying With Dignity. Something I say every single week at our church, which I know I’ve said this before, and you have a similar statement, but basically Grace Reformed Church is not for those who have put their lives together—it’s for those who have not. It’s there for those who are broken, it’s for those who have been destroyed by Christianity, and it’s where everyone has an equal need of grace because no one has ever achieved anything in the eyes of God.

What happens in the faith in your faithfulness model of church is you are left with this upward and onward trajectory. We live in these unrealistic expectations where your life has to be at a certain level by a certain period of time. And those who have been crushed either by the world, by sin, or by other Christians—which I have seen a lot lately—holy mackerels. Do Christians have concrete boots they love to just put on the necks of other Christians? The suffocation that happens out there is just unreal. I personally have felt this recently where it’s like there is no room for frailty and failing, there is no room for frustrations and struggle, and the church should be for those. Literally, Jesus says I have come to seek and to save sinners, lost people, the weak. How does Paul describe this in 1 Corinthians? The weak, the frail, the not strong. And yet the church somehow has this projection of, “No, we’re the strong ones of the community. We’re the ones who have it all together.”

When I golf sometimes with people who are burned by Christianity, or have a jaded perspective of it, and they describe church or Christianity to me, they’re surprised when I say, “I couldn’t agree with you more. I wouldn’t want to go to church like that either.” They kind of chuckle. I don’t have my life all together. Do you? I don’t. I’m not doing well. Are you? Why would you want to go and be in a room with a bunch of people who are? They’re just going to judge you. I’d probably go be in a room with a bunch of people who know they’re messed up, they know they can’t do enough, and they know that there’s nothing that can fix this. That’s my people. I want to sit at the table with those people because Jesus becomes the only source of food that sustains us.

Justin Perdue: I completely agree; 100 emoji, complete stamp endorsement on everything you just said. I’m thinking about it and I, too, want to go to church with people that know they don’t have it together, that know that they have no hope in and of themselves, but can yet offer me hope for the life to come in the form of Jesus for me. That’s where there’s a difference between the church and the world. It’s not that the church has it all together in the world—it’s the church that knows we don’t have it together.

Some people in the world know that too, but all they have to offer is, “We need to love and accept everybody. I really don’t know what to tell you about the life after this one, because I don’t even know.” That right there is also a hopeless message. Those people are easy to kick it with. What we want in the church are people who also understand that we don’t have it all together and that we struggle, and that there needs to be compassion and room for wrestling, but then can also point us beyond all that fray to say God remains, truth remains, and Christ is for us—he is our hope. That’s the difference between the church and the world that I’m looking for. I know you are too.

Basically, circling back to where we began, if you’re listening to this and you’ve been struggling, you’ve been burned, and you’re thinking, “My whole life I’ve either been pointed to my faith, my faith is shaky, and I have no assurance.” Or if you’re thinking, “My Christian life has been pointed to my faithfulness and my obedience and I don’t do as well as I should. I have no assurance,” then welcome because all of us are in the same boat as you. We are all looking to the one who is our righteousness, advocate, and mediator. He is the ground of our peace. That I know, for me as a pastor, colors and flavors and tints everything that I mean to do as an elder of our church. I know it does for you too, Jon. But it’s really what drives this podcast—it is that heralding of Christ for us because his work in our place as our substitute, like we said earlier, and as our representative is really what we’re banking on. His word stands, his life is unshakeable, and we’re safe.

Jon Moffitt: Jesus didn’t say, “The world will know that you’re my disciples by the dedication that you have, by the self-sacrifice that you make, by the disciplines you have,” which are necessary. But he said, “The world will know that you are my disciples by the love that you have for one another.” And what is the evidence of love? You think about what Jesus is for us. I would say Jesus is the embodiment of compassion and patience because without those two things, we have no hope. I think the thing the church has failed in is compassion for those who have struggled, for those who have ongoing ailments, for those who seem to be just doing the same stupid sin over and over. There’s no compassion there and there’s no patience for those people. The more that our churches grow, Justin, the more I beg the Holy Spirit, “Lord, I need compassion for these people.” And they need patience because they bite me, they kick me, they’re smelly, they bring in all kinds of junk with them. If I do not have the compassion and the patience of Christ, why am I a pastor? What am I even doing? And remove being a pastor, why am I a claimer of Christ? If I can not have compassion and I cannot have patience, then what am I doing?

What is so frustrating to me sometimes is even when I go in the Facebook group—which I hope SR never becomes this; I always want SR to be a haven of Christians who evidenced the love of God as disciples, who demonstrate compassion and patience. And listen—not acceptance of sin, not winking our eye at disobedience. That is not what compassion and patience is. These are obedience: to be compassionate is obedience. If you want to be disciplined in something, how about you be disciplined in compassion and gentleness? There’s a thing. Discipline yourself in compassion and patience. Let’s start there.

Justin Perdue: I agree. We’ve talked about this in recent episodes. I’ve been saying this for a long time: people make all these lists about what characterizes a Christian but beyond resting, receiving, trusting, and hoping in Christ in terms of what our lives look like, if you don’t have love for the brethren as the number one thing, I don’t think you’re reading the same book I’m reading. Because that’s just the obvious testimony of the New Testament.

Along these same lines, I’m going to make a few comments here. If you’re newer in this stream and people are looking at you and are saying, “You’re just an antinomian. You’re a hyper-grace person,” I have a couple of thoughts on that. Antinomianism, “against the law” or anti nomos, has existed through church history, but that is not what we are advocating. People who are legitimately antinomian would say things like what we were talking about earlier—about that kind of faith in your faith trash, Zane Hodges, and this whole make a decision once and then it doesn’t matter what you do after that—that’s legitimate antinomianism. Or people through history who have denied the third use of the law as the guide for the Christian’s life—that’s antinomianism. But we are not denying any of that. We are upholding the law as the guide for our lives now, though the law no longer condemns or threatens us. So that’s a piece on antinomianism.

The hyper-grace label is a terrible label. It’s a misnomer. You cannot overemphasize grace biblically. But what people sometimes do is they misdefine grace. Grace is something that we use to call things that are wrong as right because that’s what people think, or something we use to overlook wrong and act like it doesn’t exist. Grace is the thing that we employ because God is gracious to us. In the face of real wrong, we are gracious. We are not faithful yet God remains graciously inclined and disposed towards us. So grace is a way of dealing with real wrong, not calling something wrong right, or not saying that something that is wrong is okay. So we need to just be very clear about that.

We actually are heralding grace and Christ because if anything, we want to make a bigger deal out of sin than most churches want to make. Because it runs deeper than we ever think, it is a part of our nature, it has corrupted every part of us, and none of us have ever kept a single command that God has given. None of us have ever done it for one second of our lives: we have not loved him with our hearts or loved our neighbor as ourselves. So we just need to stop acting like we can do this because we can’t.

Here’s a few reasons why Jon and I care a ton about disobedience in our churches and why we encourage obedience. Obedience is good. Obedience to God’s law is always good. We encourage people to pursue righteousness and obedience for a number of reasons: it’s good for their neighbor, it will be good for their own lives, and God is pleased and honored in that whole thing. Now, when it comes to disobedience, why is it so bad? One, it confuses the gospel. It’s terrible. We do not commend Christ in the gospel when we act like fools. We need to have that in mind. Secondly, it makes us ineffective, to use the language of 2 Peter 1. We are not effective in loving others and supporting and ministering to others. We are not effective in those things when we are just running headlong into sin. Third thing that I would say, disobedience, without doubt, destroys lives—your own and the lives of anybody who’s ever close to you. Why in the world would you ever want to pursue it? The only reason we disobey as Christians is because our flesh is real. In our inner man, we don’t want to do these things. The power of the flesh and the cravings of the flesh are the reasons why people run off into disobedience.

Last comment on this. This is related to disobedience, our need for the church, and a number of the things that we’ve just been talking about. I am very aware of this because—I’m sure it exists in your church, Jon—in any church that is of any size, you’re always going to have people that are running into sin and are distancing themselves from the church. This is just evidence that I care about disobedience, and so does Jon. I would just say this: if you could point out for me one saint who willingly, of his own volition, distances himself from the church for a season of time. Give me one example of that going well for their lives.

Jon Moffitt: Apostle Paul in prison?

Justin Perdue: Jon, I said volitionally. I’m not talking about the person that’s imprisoned. I’m not talking about the person that’s deathly ill and is in the hospital who chooses to distance themselves from the church of their own volition like, “I’m going to cut myself off from the church.” Give me one example of that going well—it doesn’t. And why do I say that? Because disobedience and sin ruins lives.

Jon Moffitt: Consider how to build one another up so you are not hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

Justin Perdue: Exactly for that reason. What you just said. Basically what I’m saying to you, saints, dear ones who are listening to this podcast, when people throw antinomianism at you and they tell you you’re crazy, and they tell you you’re hyper-grace, respond with these things: obedience is always good and we uphold it for these reasons, and disobedience is terrible and we discourage that, and aim to keep ourselves and protect ourselves from it. That’s why we need the church. Ultimately, we’re still hoping we’re hoping in Christ because he is our only righteousness.

Jon Moffitt: Your obedience isn’t what keeps you in your justification; that’s Christ who keeps you in your justification. But your obedience is what helps keep your brother’s faith strong while he waits for his final glorification. So my obedience is designed to help my brother’s faith. Consider how to build one another up that you may not be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. So it’s not for your justification; it’s for the justification of your brother. Their faith needs to be encouraged.

Justin Perdue: And I’m not saying that I couldn’t be of any help to you, Jon. If I’m mired in sin, there may be some ways that I can be helpful to you because God is gracious and works miracles through us. But in a general sense, if I am mired in sin myself and my life is just in absolute shambles because of dumb decisions I made, how helpful can I be to you in propping up your faith and in encouraging you in the faith? Not as effective, right? Yes, I’m a sinner-saint. I’m struggling, but here I am. There is such a thing as faithfulness that we want to concern ourselves with—we just don’t hope in it.

Jon Moffitt: That’s right. I want every single listener to be faithfully trusting and obeying Christ faithfully while we await our final salvation.

Justin Perdue: Parting shot. I absolutely want to beat the drum of faithfulness. Trust Christ, love each other, show up to church, flee from sin, pursue righteousness. Those are good things that we all should give ourselves to.

Jon Moffitt: That’s right. Amen. Well, we gotta wrap it up. We’ve got much to do today.

We’re so thankful you guys joined us. We look forward to seeing you in the app. Justin and I are gonna figure out ways to hop in that app once in a while. We’re roaming in there once in a while so shoot us a message or say hi to us. We look forward to doing that. We’ll hop in there once in a while.

All right, guys, we’ll see you next week.

Here’s a controversial statement: Faith never saved anybody. While that may sound shocking to many Christians, it’s true. Faith doesn’t save sinners; Jesus does. Faith is simply the means through which the merit and work of Christ are applied to us. Jon and Justin talk about the confusion that exists in the church today and how we tend to place our faith in things that don’t save.

Semper Reformanda: Jon and Justin encourage the listener who has struggled with assurance and who is now being told he/she is an antinomian or a hyper-grace advocate. The guys also talk obedience under the sufficiency of Christ.

Resources:
Our podcast on “Dying with Dignity”
Justin’s sermon on Genesis 12:10-14:24

Book Giveaway: “Putting Amazing Back into Grace” by Michael Horton

https://youtu.be/BMHimsDL5sk

Podcast Transcript

Jon Moffitt: Hi, this is Jon. Today on Theocast, here’s our topic: Faith Never Saved Anyone. I know it sounds controversial and it actually is. Justin and I are going to do our best to show you from a biblical and historical perspective what actually saves you—and it’s not your faith. Stay tuned.

At times we like to pick very punchy topics, but this one is a very significant and very important topic because of how much it impacts people’s day-to-day life, their choices of churches, and how they interact with Christ. We’re going to talk about the three different ways faith has been used within the history of evangelicalism and even within Scripture, and then present for you the biblical and historically Reformed perspective as it relates to our faith.

We’re going to start with examining how, in the last 300 years more prevalently, it has influenced the United States, and now broadly, even the world, that we put our faith into our faith—the idea that we have belief in something that gives us the confidence and the assurety that God is good with me, that I can be justified, and that at the end of my life all will be fine because I have faith.

So, Justin, why is it a problem theologically and biblically to say that my faith is what saves me?

Justin Perdue: The thing that we’re really answering today is if somebody were to ask you how you know that you’re saved, how you know you’ll be finally saved, how you know that you’ll make it to heaven, or however you want to frame that question. That’s essentially what we’re trying to wrestle with today. You just highlighted one of the answers that’s given. I would say that this is probably the very common answer amongst the average evangelical Christian in America: you know you’re safe when you have faith. That’s the answer. In one sense, you are offering faith as the thing that would save you. Or if you were to stand hypothetically—and this is taking some liberty with the illustration and we’re going to do this throughout—if you’re standing before the judgment seat and you’re being asked on, what basis should you be admitted into heaven, the answer on the part of many evangelical Christians would be, “Well, I believe.” And we’re going to unpack this more throughout this episode.

Dear friends, saints who are listening to this episode, if your answer to the question on what basis should you be admitted into heaven begins in the first person, you’ve gotten it wrong. If it begins with, “I have done anything,” including, “I believe,” that’s not the right answer.

Jon, I think it might be good for us to go ahead and lay our cards on the table quickly and then continue to unpack this. So, our answer to that question, biblically speaking, of “On what basis would we be admitted into heaven? On what basis are we reconciled to God?” The answer is Jesus. Period. He is it. That’s why we’re saying faith has never saved anybody; Jesus saves sinners and faith is the means through which the work of Christ is applied to us. We’re going to think more about that throughout this episode and we’re trying to get at it in several different ways.

The issue here, Jon, as I look at this, in answering this question, not only are you placing confidence in something that is related to you that is somewhat subjective in that sense, it just does not hold even biblically. I know immediately there are objections that always get raised to this. We even get this on our social media sometimes. People say, “What about like Luke 7 when Jesus looks at the woman of the city and says, ‘Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.'” We would respond to that by saying that the woman in that account comes to Christ in a Pharisee’s home. It’s very clear that she has no confidence in anything pertaining to her. She has no righteousness on which she’s going to stand, she’s not confident in herself in any way and is casting herself completely upon Christ as the one who can save her. So, it’s clear that the one who she is trusting is the one who does the saving. It is not her faith that does that. Faith, even in that account, is simply the means through which Christ’s saving work would be applied to her.

Jon Moffitt: Throughout all of the book of John, Jesus calls people to believe in him. Literally in John 6, they say, “Make it plain that you are the Messiah.” And he says, “I’ve already given you all the evidence, but you don’t believe in me.” That was his point. It’s not faith in general. He is proving to them that he is the source of their justification, or he is the source of their hope into the Kingdom. This even goes back to the rich young ruler when he walks up to Jesus, the one he should be trusting, and asks, “What must I do to be saved?” What he’s saying is, “What can I trust to get what I want?” And Jesus says, “I’m standing right here, and the fact that you don’t know that is the answer that you need.” So, he tries to crush the man who trusts in himself. The man literally starts with, “I’m trusting this so far. What else do I need to trust? I have obeyed the law.” In the end, Jesus sends him away because he’s unwilling to trust Jesus. It’s not faith in your faith. The way I would reword this, and this is going to sound heretical, and maybe we can kind of work it out, but the way I would say it is that faith is the evidence of your salvation. Because I am saved by Jesus, therefore I believe. So, you’re resting in the sufficiency of Jesus to hold on to you; you are not resting in the sufficiency of holding on to Jesus. Because Jesus saved me, therefore I believe that he is sufficient to carry me home. This is what Paul says: he who began a good work in you will complete it. Where are we putting our faith? In Christ.

Justin Perdue: It’s good to mention where this comes from in the contemporary evangelical movement. You had a lot of people back in the eighties or so who began to articulate things like this, where there was a good motivation to emphasize the freeness of the gospel. But then what ended up happening was it was kind of a hyper Arminian, very man-centered approach to this whole thing. You had Zane Hodges from Dallas Theological Seminary, famously in his book Absolutely Free, begins to articulate what is necessary is to have this one moment where you make this decision of faith, it’s this one act of faith, and then at that point, based upon that act, a person is secure forever. That’s where you get this language of “once saved, always saved” in this mechanical sense. What is the basis of that “once saved, always saved”? It was that one act, that decision of faith that you made at that one point, and you’re looking back to that as the ground of your assurance before God. That is problematic because then in that view, what ends up happening—and where Zane Hodges went with this—is that once you’ve made that one decision of faith, it really doesn’t matter what happens after that. It doesn’t even matter if you continue believing. It’s kind of crazy the way that it goes. I think that’s the greatest example that we could give of placing faith in your faith, or placing faith in one decision that you made, as the ground of your hope before the Lord and the ground of your reconciliation to Him.

Jon Moffitt: The problem starts with—and this is where the whole Lordship thing came out—the gospel that’s being presented. The good news is not this. The good news is Jesus Christ saves sinners and presents them as righteous by his own obedience. What they’re hearing is, “If you say this prayer, you can be saved,” or, “If you dedicate yourself, you can be saved.” It’s like you’re the acting agent in salvation; the gospel is Jesus is the acting agent in salvation.

Justin Perdue: I think one of the reasons why it’s so damaging is that if you’re putting faith in your faith and yeah, and faith is this one decision you made or this act of faith that you do, effectively, what you’re saying is that faith is a work that you accomplish. You’re saying that you are capable of mustering up faith, and that faith that you have produced is what is your confidence—and that’s a really big dilemma.

What I would want to say to those individuals who are going to say, “Well, I believe in Jesus, and that is the basis of my admittance into heaven,” I assume that if you’re like every other person I know in that your faith—pick your descriptor: the strength of it, the quality of it, the consistency of it, the vitality of it, the fervor of it, etc.—that ebbs and flows not only by the year or the day, but by the moment sometimes. If your confidence is based in something so subjective, like how you feel about Christ or how strong your faith is in this moment, how in the world could you ever have peace? And the answer to that is, if you’re saying and you’re objectively assessing it, you couldn’t.

Jon Moffitt: People put faith in all kinds of things that have no reality to them. I’ve met people who have all kinds of beliefs and things but there’s no reality to their faith. They believe strongly in it, but they cannot place a reality connected to their faith. You’re asking this question, Justin: how is it that you can go from condemned to child, from unrighteous to righteous? Faith is not what does that. Jesus doesn’t look at you and go, “Oh, you believe that can happen? Therefore, it’s yours.” No, there has to be a substance; there has to be a key access. For instance, just because I believe a plane can take me from point A to point B doesn’t mean that the plane actually does it until the plane actually takes me from point A to point B. Faith doesn’t make the plane fly; the plane does. So, Jesus is the one who saves and sanctifies and presents us as righteous. I know it sounds nuanced, but it is important because in the end, when I stand before God and He lets me into His Kingdom as His child, it has nothing to do with me and it has everything to do with what Christ did on my behalf. We reword faith and almost say it’s an acceptance. Do you accept the reality that without Jesus, you cannot be saved? Yes. I accept that. Do you accept the reality that without Jesus’ obedience, you cannot be seen as righteous? Yes. I accept that reality. Then you are given all the benefits of Christ; faith is acceptance, it’s not doing.

Justin Perdue: It’s not acceptance, it’s receiving. I would say it’s also trusting. The real question at the heart of the matter is who are you trusting? What are you trusting? Are you trusting in your faith? Are you trusting in something about you? Or are you trusting in Christ in his sufficiency? And that is where we’re headed with this whole thing.

I want to go ahead and introduce this now, Jon. I think people need to understand, and this is related to putting faith in faith and even faith being a work, that in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation, you had rightly a lot of people preaching and emphasizing faith over and against works to the extent that even back in the day—and I think this happens even in our context too, which is what we’re highlighting here—people made such a big deal about faith that it began to sound like faith was a work that we do that then reconciles us to God. It was even to the extent that Roman Catholic theologians responded to the Protestant Reformation. Some of them even drew the conclusion, “We see that you, like us, believe in salvation by works. You just have a different set of works. Yours is faith; ours is this other stuff,” in terms of the sacraments and the like, “but we all believe in salvation by works.” This is where Luther, Calvin, and the Reformers had to make great effort and take great pains to demonstrate that faith, first of all, was purely a gift from God, biblically speaking, and that it was not faith itself that saved anyone, but it was the object of our faith, namely Jesus, who saved us, and that faith was simply the means through which the righteousness and the suffering and the satisfaction made for sins by Christ are applied to sinners. Historically, this has happened before, and we, like the Reformers and the Protestants through history, need to be careful that we articulate this in ways that are accurate biblically and don’t turn faith into a work that we do that saves, but rather see faith as the means through which the work of Christ is applied to us.

Jon Moffitt: Quoting here Romans 10 real quick—just so you can hear it in Paul’s words. He’s talking about the legitimacy of what’s backing your faith, and he’s even using this illustration. Romans 10:6: “Righteousness based on faith.” Then he even says in verse nine, “Because, if you confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord,” where is he pointing? The object of your faith. He says you’re pointing it to the reality of who Jesus is. I believe Jesus is Lord, and he’s saying that’s the evidence or that’s what saves you. “And believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” So, the faith is in the object of Jesus and what he did. I love that about Romans 10. We always use that verse as having to say it with your mouth in order to be saved and you miss the point. Faith is in who Jesus is and what he did—that’s what saves you; not the actual faith in itself. Just having faith.

Justin Perdue: It’s very clear that the presentation of the Scriptures is that it’s the righteousness of God, it’s the righteousness of Christ that’s being counted to sinners and faith is a means. Think about Romans 1:17, think about Ephesians 2:8-10, think about Philippians 3:7-9. It’s very clear that it’s somebody else’s righteousness, namely the very righteousness of God, in Romans 3:21-22, that is received by faith. So, it’s not faith itself that God counts to us as our righteousness; it is the righteousness of Jesus counted to us.

Jon Moffitt: And it’s evidenced by faith.

Justin Perdue: Let’s move on to the next. We dealt with placing faith in faith, which is a very broad evangelical issue. Now we want to speak more to an issue that would be more prominent amongst Calvinistic or Reformed-ish evangelicals.

This would be, as you put it before we recorded, if the first one is faith in our faith, this category would be many people putting faith in our faithfulness. The answer here would be something along the lines of on what basis should you be admitted into heaven. And you would begin to point to your obedience, you would begin to point to your discipline and your faithfulness. Because I understood these things, I believe these things, I did this stuff that then demonstrated and validated my faith. That’s the argument—that you need to prove the legitimacy of your trust in Jesus through what you do.

Jon Moffitt: Yeah. This is probably a subject that we handle all the time in Theocast. It’s definitely a tricky situation. We’re going to be a little bit more pointed in and try to be very nuanced and careful here. There’s a kind of a razor’s edge here and it feels like we can get pushed off onto either side. We are going to try to be as scripturally relevant here as we can, because what people end up hearing is that obedience isn’t necessary, and that is by no means Reformed, confessional, or biblical in any shape at all.

Obedience is a consequence. It’s what’s going to happen. Even Ezekiel says, “I’ll pull out your heart of stone and I’ll put it in a heart of flesh and will cause you to walk in my ways.” Obviously, Christians who have the Spirit’s power in them are going to obey.

Justin Perdue: I’m thinking of a bunch of Scripture passages: Romans 6—union with Christ, we’ve been delivered from the dominion of sin, we become obedient from the heart; Romans 8—we’re being conformed into the image of Christ; Romans 12—we’re being renewed in our minds. All of these things are our reality as a result of union with Christ by faith. Of course, like you just said, because we have been fundamentally changed and united to Christ and his Spirit is now at work in us, he is going to change us and that is going to result in good works and obedience. And we, along with the Reformed and the orthodox of all time, see that as a necessary consequence of saving faith and a necessary consequence of salvation. The problem is—and you said this so many times, Jon, and I agree with you—the problem is this kind of “prove it” mentality that exists out there because you start to try to make the stream flow uphill and you invert the relationship by saying, “Prove that you’re saved by what you do.” You actually can’t do that; you have to be saved first and then the fruit is born. And when you invert the relationship, we got all kinds of problems.

Jon Moffitt: We’ve gone from one side to the other, right. We are saved by our faith, now we’re being saved by our faithfulness—which no one would say in the conservative Calvingelical world. To be fair, that is what ends up leading people down that road, because what is the basis foundation? Where are they resting? What’s fueling their assurance? And what’s fueling your assurance is the evidence of fruit in your life. Often, I would even say, it’s not fruits of the Spirit, it’s fruit of Christianism that’s been handed down to us. As crazy as this sounds, the moment you say the desire to read your Bible daily is the evidence of your salvation and the ground of your assurance, I’m sorry, but that can’t be it because your desires for anything are going to ebb and flow up and down. This is why Paul talks about the war against the flesh and the Spirit against the flesh: we are going to have our desires that go up and down. Even if you were to say you don’t desire Jesus above everything else every single moment of every single day, you should not have assurance, again, you are saying the ground of your salvation—that which justifies you before God—is based upon either your actions or your emotions or your level of dedication. This is why in the Baptist world that I grew up in, the call to rededication was so relevant because it was like they were saying, “You should question whether you’re good with God. You should question whether God is going to save you because look at your life. You’re not fully dedicated to Him.” we would have these rededication services to the point where some would even get rebaptized—Justin, you know this world—because your assurance level dropped so low that it was like they were doing a re-up on the membership here just to make sure that all things are good. And when you are looking to dedication or faithfulness as the ground of your assurance, then you have a massive problem. This is why so many people who listen to Theocast contact us and say, “For the first time in my life, I feel like I truly have assurance because I am not looking to a prayer on one side, or I’m not looking to my faithfulness on the other side because prayer and faithfulness never saved anyone.”

Justin Perdue: Certainly, this whole premise of walking the aisle, praying a prayer, and making a decision one time, saving someone—that is foreign to the Scriptures. This other thing of the emphasis on your disciplines and your faithfulness and the fruit in your life, and basically pointing people to that to know that they’re saved, is a hopeless endeavor. I’ve said this recently, I think, but I’m going to go and say it again: none of us on our deathbeds will ever be comforted by our obedience. You know why? Because all of us who have been united to Christ and who have been given a new heart and a new spirit, who are actually tender in our consciences and want to obey, we will reflect back on our lives and we will be hyper aware, I trust, of how we could’ve done so much more. We could have obeyed so much more. We could have sinned so much less. You can’t comfort someone with that because we are imperfect at best, even in our obedience, and our sincerity and how we feel about obeying ebbs and flows. So, if we’re being pointed to that, not to encourage us—we agree with the confessions and the Scriptures that we can have our assurance bolstered by being shown the change in our lives—but if you’re being pointed to that as how you know and on what basis should you be admitted into heaven? “Well, I’ve got these good works to prove that I’m legit.” That is assurance robbing and peace destroying. Many saints have been wrecked by that, even in our modern context.

This, in my mind, is bad Puritan theology where there is an overemphasis on moral transformation. The gospel is assumed. Of course, Christ is preached and all that, but that’s in the backdrop. It’s the background and really, the focus is now on the Christian’s life, disciplines, obedience, performance, and the like.

If we begin to answer the question of on, what basis should you be admitted into heaven in the first person in any way, we are wrong. If it’s our faith, our obedience, or the fact that we persevere to continue, brother, sister, you’re looking in the wrong spot.

Jon Moffitt: To be clear, I want to go back and say this. I feel like people misquote me and Theocast quite often. I think Christians should and must be very disciplined in their lives as it relates to their sin and their actions, and I would even say, as it relates to the Word of God, because God’s Word and God’s people point us to the one who is saving us, and the more disciplined and dedicated we can be to focusing our attention on the substance of our salvation, the stronger our faith and obedience can and should be.

Justin, I know you’re about to get to this here in this illustration you’re going to use: the emphasis is put on your faithfulness, but the emphasis has to be put on Christ and his faithfulness. This is 1 John when it says what we are, we are not yet. But we, in anticipation of this, we purify ourselves as he is pure. The looking to is Christ, not to our faithfulness. I know people can feel like we’re being nuanced here, but I will tell you the flip on this: the difference between rest and no rest. You can rest seeking obedience, disciplining yourself, understanding the benefits of living a godly life, and loving those and giving grace, mercy, patience, and longsuffering, resting in the reality that it’s Jesus’ sufficiency that brings me home. Or you can pursue godliness and all of these other things as they ebb and flow, go up and down; as they do, so does your assurance, and so does your emotional dryness because you’re trying to find comfort in yourself and in your self-sacrificing, and it cannot be found. This is why Paul says, “I am,” present tense, “the greatest sinner I know.” And where does he find his hope? In the sufficiency of Jesus.

Justin Perdue: He does, which is where we’re turning.

The title of the episode, Faith Never Saved Anyone, is an entirely true statement. Faith does not save sinners; Jesus does. Faith, as we’ve been saying this whole podcast, is simply a vehicle, or a conduit, or a means—whatever word you want to use. It is the object of our faith that is the one in whom we trust who saves us. Even our confession and the ways that it will outline what saving faith is—it is receiving resting and trusting in Christ alone for salvation for all of it: justification, sanctification, and glorification. It is as 11.1 in the 1689 points out with respect to justification. It’s not that God infuses righteousness into us, but He pardons our sins and accounts us as righteous. How? He does it for Christ’s sake alone, not for anything produced in us or done by us. He doesn’t count faith itself, the act of believing, or any other obedience to us as our righteousness. Instead, God credits; He imputes. Christ’s active obedience to the law and passive obedience in his death is our whole and only righteousness by faith—and that is a beautiful definition of what justification looks like, and even of what saving faith looks like, and that’s what we’re trying to outline and articulate here today.

What we want to do now is continue to unpack this Reformed answer to the question, “On what basis should we be admitted into heaven?” The answer is Jesus. Period. There’s nothing else to say. He is the one who has saved us, and we look outside of ourselves always to him as the ground of our assurance and peace before God.

Jon Moffitt: I know you mean this, but not just Jesus, the good teacher, or Jesus, the good person—it’s Jesus, the replacement for our sins; the substitute; Jesus, the righteous one; Jesus, the intermediary, the one who intercedes for us; Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah. That’s the one who saves you. Just to be clear.

Justin Perdue: Like I said, from our confession, it’s his obedience to the whole law—so his righteous life—and its obedience in his death in which he paid for our sins, took the punishment we deserve as law breakers. It’s all of that counted to us so that we are not only viewed by God as though we have never sinned, we are also viewed as having all of the obedient works of Jesus credited to our account. It’s phenomenal news—and faith is the means by which all of that is applied to wretches such as we.

A few illustrations by teachers that most people that are listening to this podcast will probably have heard of, and these are really, really good and helpful. So, the first is Tim Keller. Keller has given an illustration at multiple points to demonstrate how it is God and His promises that saves sinners, grounded in what Jesus has done. So, he says to envision the Exodus where the people of Israel are going to be crossing through the Red Sea. This is an insane event where God miraculously parts the waters. Can you imagine what it would have been like to walk through on the floor of the Red Sea with these, we presume, walls of water on either side. You’re being pursued by the Egyptian army. Keller will rightly point out that you have to assume that there would have been people in that mass of Israelites walking through the Red Sea who would have felt all kinds of different ways about this event. Some of them would have been super confident in God and in Moses, their leader: “Here we go. God is going to deliver us.” And then there would have been some, no doubt, who would have been scared out of their minds. But as Keller points out rightly, both those who were confident and those who were terrified made it through to the other side. Why? Because God was their deliverer. It was not about them and their confidence; it was about God and His faithfulness.

Jon Moffitt: Again, it’s the substance of what saved them. Obviously, they had to believe. And how do we know that they believed?

Justin Perdue: They walked.

Jon Moffitt: That’s right. That’s such a good illustration.

Justin Perdue: Another one. This one’s excellent. Don Carson. So, he presents this hypothetical conversation between two Israelites the night the Passover’s going to go down. God has said He’s going to come through the land of Egypt and kill all the firstborn. He has instructed His people as to what they are to do and how they’re to make this meal, kill a lamb, make this meal and eat it in haste, put the blood of the lamb on the doorposts of their house, and God’s going to pass over that household. Carson paints this picture of two men having a conversation about all this. One of them is absolutely losing his mind. He’s like, “I just don’t know about all this. I’m scared. I don’t know how this is going to go down. What are we supposed to do? How is this going to go down for us?” And the other man responds, “What are you talking about? The Lord has told us everything that we need to know. We can have complete confidence in what He has told us. We just need to do this with the lamb, and we need to put the blood on the doorposts and all this. Everything’s going to be fine.” And he’s super confident. The other guy goes, “Oh my gosh. Yeah, I guess I’m going to go do that. But I just don’t know. I just don’t know how this is going to go down.” So that happens. The one man in confidence goes and does the thing and the other man with a lot of doubt and fear and trepidation goes and does the thing. And then this question: whose house was visited by the angel of death that night? Neither. Why? Because the issue in terms of God passing over the house did not hinge upon the quality of the faith of the people; it hinged upon the quality of the promises and the One who made the promises; it hinged on His character, that the Promise Giver is the Promise Keeper, and it is His nature and His character that carries the day. It’s not how the people felt and how much confidence they have.

This last one has been circulating around social media lately and it’s so good. So, Alistair Begg is a preacher known to some, maybe known to many. There’s a clip two minutes long of him giving a message. He begins by saying some really helpful things about that first and third person stuff, about how, if you were to die and you stand before the proverbial judgment seat, you’re asked on what basis you should be admitted into heaven. If you begin to answer in the first person, he says we’re wrong. It must be answered in the third person because he has done these things, not because I believe, not because I obey, not because I continued.

And then he gives the illustration of the thief on the cross—and he takes some liberty with these things, but the point is still made. The thief on the cross, as people know, was cursing Jesus, and Jesus said some wonderful things to him, and this man ends up trusting in Christ and clearly taking Jesus at his word, where Jesus even looks at him and says, “Today you’ll be with me in paradise.” Begg paints the picture of this man standing before the judgment seat, and there’s the angel there—again, he takes liberty—and the angel asks this man, “On what basis are you here?” And the thief says, “I don’t know.” “What do you mean you don’t know?” “It means, I don’t know.” So, this angel gets very frustrated and goes and gets his supervisor angel, who then comes to question the thief. And this supervisor angel asked the thief and he said, “Okay, tell me what you know about the doctrine of justification by faith.” And the thief says, “I’ve never heard of it in my life.” So, he says, “Okay, let’s then go to the doctrine of Scripture immediately. Let’s talk about that.” And it’s just crickets. Nothing. So even the supervisor angel is now frustrated with the thief and, and he says, “Okay, on what basis are you here?” And the thief looks at him and says, “Well, because the man on the middle cross told me I can come.” Even as he gives the message, the air is let out of the room and everybody’s like, “Amen, brother.” You know as a Christian, as someone acquainted with your own sin, you’re like, “That is right.” Because that is the only way that we could ever have peace: because Christ has told me, on the basis of his unshakeable life and on the basis of his death in my place, he has told me that I can come, and he has secured that for me. That’s good news. How did this shake out for the thief? He was cursing him one minute and now he’s in paradise. Why is he there? Because Jesus told him he could come.

Jon Moffitt: “I have come to seek and to save sinners.” And the thief on the cross is a great example of a sinner. “I’ve come to seek and to save the lost.” Not those who have found their way, but those who have lost their way. It is so counter self-righteousness so that none of us may boast.

Justin Perdue: Why is it that we can be confident? Not only because of what Jesus did for us while he was on earth, but like we talked about in a podcast recently, he has ascended to the heavens and sits at the right hand of God and intercedes for his own—all of us. He’s able to save us to the utmost. He advocates for us when we sin. His word stands. He’s telling us, “Those of you who have trusted in me, you can come. I am the one who guarantees that. I am the guarantor of the new covenant. I’m the mediator here and what I say goes.” The one in whom we trust, the object of our faith, is our confidence. It’s not our faith. It’s not our obedience. It’s Christ and what he’s done for us.

Jon Moffitt: One last illustration before we go over to our next podcast. The disciples are in a locked room. They’re afraid the Jews might find them. Mary’s already told him, “Hey, Jesus is alive,” but they still haven’t figured it out yet. These are cowards. Peter has rejected Jesus three times and knows he’s ashamed of it. Then Jesus appears in the room and the first word out of his mouth is “Peace be unto you.” And he goes back to quote Jeremiah where he says the prophets are proclaiming peace when there is no peace, because Israel is in the absolute rejection of God. And he says, “You are unwilling to repent.” These men who are in the room, not repenting, and Jesus appears before them and says, “Peace be unto you.” I love what John says: he showed them the scars on his hand and his side. The substance of their peace was Jesus’ death on the cross. My goodness. That’s something you should believe in.

Justin Perdue: Amen. It’s Christ’s gentle posture toward them as a gentle and lowly Savior. “Peace to you. Let me show you, my scars. My scars are your salvation.”

Jon Moffitt: “By his wounds, we are healed.” Not by our faithfulness, not by our faith, not by our obedience.

We’re going to continue this conversation in our family time. It’s where we gather together to talk about how we take this message and move it out into the world to encourage each other to ask hard questions. This is called Semper Reformanda. It’s a two-part ministry: we do a podcast every week right after this one to continue the conversation, and then we continue that conversation in local and online groups on our app. You could go in there and join the conversation, whether it’s in the Tavern or in a local and online group. So, if you want to learn more about that, listen to the podcast, join the group. You can go to Theocast.org, and we would love to have you there.

Justin let’s go ahead and head over to the other podcast. We’ll see you guys all next week.

Often in Scripture, the faithful falter. For example, Abraham is called “the man of faith” by Paul, and he is upheld as the model of justification by faith in all of the Bible. Yet, he sold his wife into defilement and adultery–twice. Or, consider the disciples. In the aftermath of Jesus’ death and resurrection, they are hiding together in a room, terrified. What do we make of these things?Semper Reformanda: The guys talk about preaching the Old Testament–and in particular, preaching on the lives of Old Testament saints. What are better and worse ways to do that? What are some common objections raised against redemptive-historical preaching?Scripture references:Genesis 12:10-20John 20:19-23Resources:Justin’s sermon: Faith, Fear, and God’s Faithfulness | Genesis 12:10-14:24Jon’s sermon: John 20:19-23 – When Jesus Says “Peace”Giveaway: “Night Driving” by Chad Birdhttps://youtu.be/R1gv7_4ZnSgPodcast TranscriptJustin Perdue: Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we’re going to talk about when the faithful falter. For example, Abraham is called by the apostle Paul “the man of faith”, and he is upheld as the model of justification by faith in all the Bible. Yet this is a man who, on two different occasions, sold his wife out to defilement and adultery. What do we do with that? Even the disciples, as they are sitting in a room, huddled up together, terrified in the aftermath of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection—what do we do with that account? Why are passages like this in the Bible? That’s what John and I are going to have a conversation about today. We hope that you leave this episode being encouraged in the faithfulness of the Lord Jesus Christ and how he has you and has saved you. So stay tuned.The title of the episode, everybody has seen it, is When the Faithful Falter. Why this topic today? I’m preaching through Genesis. This past Sunday Was in Genesis 12:10 and following all the way through the end of chapter 14. One piece of that section of Genesis is Abraham and Sarai in Egypt. Many may know that that’s the first of two situations where Abraham effectively sells his wife out to defilement, basically motivated by selfishness, self-preservation, and fear. Abraham, of course, has held up as the man of faith and the model of justification by faith in all of Scripture, but it’s quite clear that his faith faltered at points. In other words, his faith was like ours.And then Jon, you are preaching through John’s gospel. Where were you this past Sunday?Jon Moffitt: This is the disciples hiding in a room with the door locked. This is right after Jesus’ resurrection. He meets Mary, and John’s gospel sends Mary off to go tell the disciples that he is going to their God and to their Father. Then Jesus appears in the room. From the moment of Jesus’ arrest in the garden to the moment that Jesus is standing there in that room, you don’t see the strong disciples who said, “We’ll go with you anywhere. We’ll die for you.” All you see is the constant faltering of the disciples. We’re going to take both the New Testament and the Old Testament and show how the narrative seems to be the same.Justin Perdue: Totally. So this is going to be a conversation about Genesis; it’s going to be a conversation about John. And then we’ll probably talk a little bit about redemptive-historical preaching, and that’s probably where we’re going to go in the SR portion, maybe in more detail. So get ready. If you like Genesis and John, today’s podcast is for you.Let’s start out in the book of Genesis. If you have a Bible near you and you want to look along, you totally can. It’s Genesis 12:10-20. We’re not going to go verse by verse or anything, but if you want to read the account that we’re talking about, that’s where you can find it.Basically the situation is there’s a famine in the land where Abraham is, and that famine drives him into Egypt to find food. This is going to happen again with Abraham’s descendants as we know. Jacob and his children are going to go down into Israel as well. Kind of cool how those patterns repeat themselves over and over again in redemptive history, but that’s another podcast for another day.So as Abraham is driven down into Egypt for food, he’s faced with a decision. Because he’s going down there as a sojourner, which means that he doesn’t have rights, he doesn’t have legal recourse, he doesn’t have protection in those ways. He’s vulnerable as a Sojourner and he knows that. So as they’re going down into the land of Egypt, Abraham says to his wife, “Okay, look, you’re a beautiful woman. When the Egyptians see you, they’re going to notice that. And they’re going to want to get rid of me because you’re so beautiful. They’re going to want to eliminate me from the equation so that they can do with you what they want to do.”Jon Moffitt: At what point do you think she’s thinking, “Aww. This is a great compliment.” And then she goes, “Oh, he’s being real. He’s being serious.”Justin Perdue: He’s like, “For real, for real.” Basically, he says this: they’ll kill me, but they’ll let you live. So in verse 13, he pitches the plan. This is what he says: “Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.” So it’s very straightforward in terms of what his plan is and what his hopes are. Because Sarai is beautiful, she is going to tell them that she’s not Abram’s wife—she is his sister—so now they will treat Abram well Because of that. And in verses 14-16, that’s exactly what happens. They go into the land of Egypt and it all unfolds according to Abram’s plan. (I’m using Abraham and Abraham interchangeably—forgive me for doing that. The studious amongst us will know that he is not called Abraham until Genesis 17.)Verses 14 to 16, the Egyptians see that Sarai is beautiful when they enter into the land. And then the princes of Pharaoh commend her to Pharaoh, Pharaoh takes her into his house to be his wife. He treats Abram well—verse 16, “And for her sake he dealt well with Abram,” and gives him a bunch of stuff. It’s all working out according to Abram’s plan.But then in verse 17 is where it really takes a very interesting turn. We read that the Lord afflicts Pharaoh’s house on account of Sarai because of the defilement, the adultery that’s going on. Then Pharaoh, in verse 18, approaches Abram. It’s wild. This whole scenario is insane in how it unfolds. In this account, it’s almost as though Pharaoh is set up as the one who is the righteous man and Abram is the one who is the selfish liar. So Pharaoh confronts Abram in verse 18, “What is this that you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She’s my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife?” In other words, he wouldn’t have done that if he had known that she was married to Abram. “Here is your wife; take her and go.” And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him and they sent him away with his wife and all that he had.This is a remarkable account because Pharaoh is very upright in the way that he deals with Abraham here. When he finds out about the adultery, not only does he stop the adultery, he doesn’t continue, but he confronts Abraham and even rebukes Abraham for lying about it all. He doesn’t kill Abraham, which would have not been uncommon, and he had been giving a bunch of stuff to Abraham because of Sarah and he doesn’t demand any of that stuff back; he lets Abraham keep it all. Then he sends them away out of the country and gives orders to his men to make sure they get out safely. He is kind and merciful and all these things. It’s like the Pharaoh is more concerned for Sarah’s welfare than Abraham is. It is not Abraham’s finest day; he does not handle this in an exemplary manner. That’s very clear.Let me just say this at the outset before we riff on this. Disclaimer—we’ve got to do this because we don’t want to be misunderstood: sin is wrong and sin is destructive; it ruins lives; we ought to flee from it; we ought to pursue righteousness. Nothing that we are about to say excuses, sin in any way. We are just going to have an honest conversation about the nature of life in this fallen world and the fact that God’s people still sin—sometimes heinously. What can we learn from these kinds of accounts about God, about ourselves, and about His ways with us? That’s the question.Jon Moffitt: There you go. You have to make the observation that Abraham is one of the few men who had the privilege of speaking with the Lord, he has conversations with Him. We do know that Abraham believes in God. What his theology is at this point, I don’t know. Obviously, if Pharaoh knows what he’s doing is wrong, Abraham knows what he’s doing is wrong. So let’s just get this clear: it’s obvious Abraham knows what he’s doing is wrong and yet fear is what seems to be his reason.Justin Perdue: Yeah. Self-preservation. Selfishness.Jon Moffitt: Fear and selfishness seem to be his motivation. It’s a random story. Let’s just think about the narrative here for a moment: we understand that the story of the Bible is the unfolding redemption of sinners by Christ. What did this really add to the unfolding story of the redemption of Jesus Christ? We know that Abraham is in the line of Christ’s seed. It’s from Abraham we get to the Messiah. Why did the Holy Spirit find it necessary to put that in there? I think it’s very important because every word, according to Paul to Timothy, is profitable for reproof, for instruction, and in doctrine. I’m going to say very clearly for reproof, instruction, in doctrine, and for holiness; it’s obvious to see that men who are often raised to be faithful are the ones who Scripture describes as faltering. So if you want to talk about the faithful one, we’re going to have to point to Christ. But in this narrative, I can see very clearly why the Holy Spirit put this in here because one of the most famous important men in bringing us the Messiah faltered—not once, but multiple times.Justin Perdue: Some observations here. What I said before I do think matters in terms of a pattern for Israel, because Abraham is going down into Egypt, has dealings with Pharaoh, is brought out by God into the promised land, and Israel will be, too. But I agree with you. Why all the details of his failure? This is one of the things, too, that people have said about Scripture for ages—and I agree; I know you do, too. One of the things that commends Scripture in terms of its truthfulness is the fact that it does not give a flattering presentation of its major figures. This is not a flattering presentation of Father Abraham, the man who is called by the apostle Paul “the man of faith”, who is the pattern for justification by faith in all of the Bible, and yet we see him doing this. I just want to be super clear: the point of none of this is that sin is no big deal. That’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely absurd.Jon, I think to what you just said, the point of this is that God saves sinners, that God justifies the ungodly, and that he doesn’t just save upright, likable, virtuous people. The point is that he saves wretches in need of mercy and gives us the righteousness of Christ—a righteousness that we don’t deserve and could never earn. That’s what he did with Abraham.Here’s the deal—and you pointed at this, too—as Christians, we all sin and some of us will commit sins as Christians that are shameful. But God will keep us through it all. People will then raise that we can’t be engaged in habitual sins. We’re doing something that’s heinous; surely we should learn from that first experience and never do it again. People would say that about Abraham here. After this and this whole thing and how it shook out, surely he’ll never do this again. Well, he does in chapter 20—and he does the same thing again. He’s going to sell his wife out to defilement again. Not excusing his behavior, but the point is that he is going to fall in the same way again, yet at the end of it all, he will be finally saved on account of the righteousness of Christ—and so will we.Now, if you hear that and—in the face of that mercy, that grace, and that love—your immediate thought is, “Oh, good. Well, we can just go sin now,” I don’t know that you’ve understood the gospel. When we are confronted with that kind of mercy and grace, and that kind of love in the face of our sin and failure, our thoughts should be, “What a God. What a Savior. What good news. I want to go out of here now, love my neighbor, and pursue righteousness because of what God has done for me.”Jon Moffitt: Outside of Christ, there are temporal consequences and there are eternal consequences. The world knows there’s temporal consequences. That is why things like AA exist. People don’t like the effects of sin; most don’t. Look at Pharaoh; he even knows this is wrong. He said, “Why are you doing this?” To think that to promote grace is to make sin acceptable is wrong. I will say that a lot of times I encourage men in my own church to say, “Hey, look, you need to take a long, hard look at your fight against sin and realized that there’s no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, but the temporal punishment or consequence is you don’t want to go through that.” Justin and I both have had to walk people through absolute shattered lives. The scars they carry with them until death are horrendous. It’s disgusting.Justin Perdue: A guy from my congregation and I were having a conversation after the service on Sunday. He was greatly affected by the sermon and the service in general. He was just astonished at thinking about Pharaoh and Abraham and all this. Abraham committed this heinous sin, yet God’s going to deliver him. That’s true. And at the same time, we’re not told all of the details in terms of the fallout that Abraham and Sarai and everybody had to go through. And there’s going to be more in subsequent chapters when he sleeps with Hagar, and then Ishmael was born, and all of those absolutely tumultuous stuff that occurs in his household as a result of that. In chapter 20, when he sells Sarai out again, we’re not told about all of the fallout in terms of their lives on earth. Our lives are wrecked by sin and we ought to flee from it for the good of our neighbor, for the good of everyone who loves us and is close to us, and we ought to pursue righteousness and flee from sin because it does honor the Lord.One thing to comment on before we leave this Old Testament section and jump into John’s gospel—and we may pick up more on this later even in SR—something I said on Sunday is we would do really well to talk honestly about the lives of saints as they are described on the pages of Scripture. In other words, we would do well not to whitewash them. We ought not try to domesticate things and edit out the ugly parts in this kind of flannel board presentation of the lives of the saints. I am convinced that the Scriptures are such a tremendous gift from God to those who seek to be honest about our struggle with sin. We’re able to look at texts even like this and see how Abraham, this man of faith, sinned and struggled and yet is going to be finally delivered. We are able to see something there of how the Lord will deal with us.Are there things commendable about Abraham’s life? Absolutely. We talked about some of those in our service on Sunday; we’ll talk about some of those things moving forward. But there are plenty of things about his life that are not exemplary, and this is why we don’t preach sermons on how to be like Abraham. We don’t preach a sermon series on “Dare to be a Daniel”, or “7 Ways to be Like David”, or a 31-part series on the life of Jeremiah. There’s a reason that we don’t do that. Abraham, if he were sitting here today, would be the first to say, “Be like me? That’s not a good idea.” Because seriously, Jon, you and I both have a number of godly men in our congregations who have not sold their wives out to defilement for their own protection and profit.Jon Moffitt: Nope. 30 years of marriage. Never once.Justin Perdue: Abraham, I think, would tell us, “Look, there’s really only one thing about me that you would want to imitate—and that is to believe God. Believe in the one who justifies the ungodly. Believe in Jesus, God’s promised One who has saved us from our sin.” Abraham’s best moments were when he took God at His word.Jon Moffitt: To defend what you’re saying, let me quote Paul. In 1 Corinthians 10, he is describing the fall of Israel, and he describes a lot of falter. He says, “Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man.” If you think that you don’t have the same capacity to fall as they did, you better take heed. When someone says, “Well, Jon, these are examples,” I’m like, “Yes. That you too can fall.”Justin Perdue: In other words, that’s an example because you are just like Abraham and Abraham is just like you. You could end up doing the exact same thing that Abraham did, though you shouldn’t.I don’t think it takes a lot from us to be able to look at our people and say, “You know, it’s probably not good to sell your spouse out to defilement.” If I need to open the Bible to convince you of that, we need to have another conversation.Jon Moffitt: That’s called “the law in our hearts”.Justin Perdue: For real. The law is written into the human heart and there’s a civil use of it where, like you even said, Pharaoh is clearly aware that to commit adultery or to take another man’s wife is inappropriate.Jon Moffitt: Let’s transition to John. This is going to be a slightly different perspective but the same conclusion—it’s always Jesus—but let’s look at it from a different perspective.Jesus recruits these men and in this narrative, someone even argued that maybe even Mary and some other people are in this room. Obviously Thomas is not because Thomas asked to see later. But at this point, the disciples have abandoned Jesus. Peter has denied him three times. It’s a mess of a story. Of course, Jesus told them this would happen. Some of the disciples here walk with Jesus and eat with him; they don’t know it’s him and they’re trying to figure it out. Then he appears in this locked room. John describes that Jesus appears within this locked room and uses a phrase that’s not uncommon: “peace be to you”. It’s a very common phrase.I think John has an unbelievable sense of humor and he is very sarcastic and snarky at times, in my humble opinion. In Greek, Jesus magically appears and the words he uses are like, “Hey, guys!” To which Luke describes them as yelling out and saying, “It’s a ghost!”John describes the very next thing that makes Jesus’ words come to life. It makes sense. It’s not just a simple, “Hello. Peace to you.” So in Jeremiah, twice Jeremiah yells out to the people—and I would never want to have to have Jeremiah’s job because all he did was preach doom and gloom and wrath upon Israel—and twice he comes after them and says, “The false prophets are saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. You better beware and you better repent because if you don’t, judgment’s coming upon you.” And of course, what ends up happening is judgment does come upon Israel and it’s a mess.Jesus walks into the room of men who have abandoned him, who are afraid of being killed because they’re followers of Jesus, who are doing everything wrong. He appears before them and he says, “Peace be to you.” What does John say? Immediately, he showed him his hands and his side, and then said again, “Peace be to you.” Why do they now have peace with the Father? Jesus is showing them it is not their actions, it is not their faithfulness, it’s not their dedication; it is his scars in his hands and in his side. He received the wrath that Jeremiah was talking about that was coming because there was no peace between God and man, and now there’s peace between God and man.This is where things are a little bit different. I want to talk about the motivation for obedience. Because in this same section, it says, “When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. And Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you.'” I love this. This is their motivation. They’re all good because of Jesus. This is what he says: “‘As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.'” Men who are locked in a room, afraid that they may be caught as a Jesus follower, Jesus comes in and uses what to motivate them? Not fear, not dread, not death, not warning. What does he motivate them with? “All wrath and anger and punishment has been put upon me. Here’s the proof. Now I’m sending you out to finish what the Father has started.” you want to talk about your motivation to obey coming from the gospel? What a point, right?Justin Perdue: Yeah. I’m just sitting here listening to you talk about it. I’m looking at the text, I’ve got my Bible open over here, and it’s very clear. What is it that is to drive and propel and motivate the disciples? It’s peace with God that Jesus alone has accomplished.Like you just said, all the wrath that is due sin, all of the righteous indignation that God has against all of the wickedness that all of His people have ever committed, all of his wrath against just our inherent corruption and rebellion against him and all of those things, all of His righteousness and holiness and everything that that requires, in one sense, in terms of His justice. All of these things have been poured out in full on Christ. His scars are evidence of that. It’s like Romans 5:1: because we have now been justified by faith, we have peace with God because of what Christ has done. It’s like what I was saying earlier: in the face of this astonishing grace and mercy, to be crushed by the Father is what we deserve, but instead Jesus was crushed for it. When we think about how we deserve that, but now we have peace and love and grace and fellowship and security and all of these things, now I get to go be part of what the Father is doing in this world through His Son.Then the question is, “Why would we then want to go sin?” And the answer to that question is because the flesh is real. It is a reality where we are born again, we have been united to Christ, and his Spirit has taken up residence within us. And by virtue of that, we now have become obedient from the heart, we delight in God’s law in our inner man, and we want to obey. Because we hear the gospel and we see how good it is, and we’ve considered the mercy and the privilege and all that that is ours in Christ, we want to go and love and preach Jesus, flee from sin, and pursue righteousness. Yet the flesh remains, it’s real, and the flesh at times overcomes the saints. But yet the confidence that we have is that at the end of the day, Christ is victorious because he brings judgment to victory.Jon Moffitt: Which is not a justification for sin.Justin Perdue: No. That’s a huge disconnect and a non-sequitur.I, for the life of me, don’t understand it. Because we’ve got to have this conversation when it comes to sin: what is your motivation to flee from sin and pursue righteousness? Is it fear? Is it dread? Is it merit? Because if you’re talking in those terms, those are legal terms where you still, in some way, are thinking that you’ve got something to escape or something to earn before the Lord. But God has told us that Christ has handled that. So the motivation has to be something else: and it’s love, peace, security, and knowing that the wrath that was due me, Jesus took it.Jon Moffitt: As we’re talking through this, there’s been all kinds of failures in the last five years. My wife says it’s inevitable.Justin Perdue: It’s never ending. From various theological streams.Jon Moffitt: There’s a reason why Paul says, “Take heed lest you fall,” because it doesn’t matter what your theological knowledge is; if you find confidence in yourself in any part of your journey with Christ, whether it be your assurance or your fight against sin, you are priming the pump for Satan to come knock you off that stool, buddy.Justin Perdue: What causes sin? The flesh and the tempter. It’s not theological positions. Granted, we care a ton about sound doctrine and theology. It’s why we do this podcast. Doctrine matters a ton for our peace before the Lord and for our lives in the local church and all of those things, but good theology has never made anyone immune to sin. And sin does not directly come—in every case—from bad doctrine. It comes from the flesh and the cravings of the flesh that overcome the saints at points. It comes from the work of the enemy, even, in his is battling and waging war against us.Jon Moffitt: Dare I say, if you have good theology, you probably have a bigger target on your back because you’re doing greater work. You think about some of the things that Paul even experienced and suffered. If he wasn’t preaching the gospel faithfully, he probably would have been left alone. In some ways, you’re going to be targeted even more if your theology is correct. I just think it’s foolish to think your theology is what makes you immune to temptationWe have things in our lives—protections and fences and gateways—because we know that our flesh is weak. We can be Abraham. We can be the disciples. This is why Paul says these are examples for us. The strongest are the ones who fall the hardest, so don’t take your faith in your strength; you put it in Christ.Justin Perdue: This is why we preach, on the one hand, our weakness and the strength and faithfulness of Christ: because it is the only hope for sinners. I imagine that every one of us have all done things that we swore we would never do, and we’ve all certainly thought things that terrify even us. Personally, I think that has to be true. It’s true for every Christian I know, and every member of our church, our pastors included. We all see this in ourselves and realize that were it not for the grace of God, there go I. But the point of all that is, my goodness, Christ is our only hope. This is why we need the church and we need each other, and we need to be in one another’s lives talking honestly about the cravings of our flesh and our battle against sin, so that we have people in our lives that can look at us and say, “That’s really hard, brother, but don’t go there. That will destroy you and it’s going to destroy all these people who love you. It will dishonor God. That doesn’t please the Lord. He has told you that’s terrible. This over here is a good thing—you know that. Keep pursuing this and let me help you walk that way.”We come back to this: If we’re saved not only by our faithfulness, but even by the quality of our faith, may the Lord help us. This is a little teaser for what we’re going to talk about next week. We started by talking about Abraham and we mentioned how Paul calls him the man of faith and how he is held up as the model of justification by faith and Scripture. Yet his faith faltered big time at several points in his life that are recorded on the pages of holy Scripture. In light of that, I think the takeaway should be Abraham’s faith is just like mine and just like yours. It isn’t always strong. Sometimes it’s like we can’t even find it.I said this in the sermon on Sunday, and I said this to you earlier: we need to talk honestly, and well, and accurately about faith. We ought not make too big a deal about faith itself because sometimes evangelicals, in wanting to not preach salvation by works, will emphasize salvation by faith—and that’s good, but you gotta gotta be accurate about this because faith has never saved anybody. Faith in and of itself has never saved anybody. That is the conversation that we’re going to have next week. It’s actually something else, someone else who saves us and we’ll talk about how faith relates to that.Jon Moffitt: And what the confusion looks like.Justin Perdue: What the confusion looks like and why it has everything to do with our assurance and our peace before God when our faith is faltering.Jon Moffitt: In our next podcast, Justin will explain what that is. We should talk about some of the objections that we receive when it comes to Old Testament and even New Testament faltering, and how we, as Theocast, have tried to help people walk through these objections as it relates to preaching Old Testament saints.Justin Perdue: And we may riff a little bit on Old Testament saints, redemptive-historical preaching, the “Dare to be a Daniel” kind of mentality. There could be some humor and some lightheartedness, but we hope to be helpful to the listener in trying to be precise about what we mean, and even, like you said, let’s respond to some objections that are really quickly thrown at us. For example: “Would you guys never want to make moral demands of any kind?” And that is not true. We’ll talk about why over on the Semper Reformanda podcast.We’re going over to the Semper Reformanda podcast, sometimes shortened to just SR. What that is a podcast for those of you who have partnered with Theocast and have joined Semper Reformanda, and you have partnered with us, not only financially, but you’re supporting the ministry and wanting to be a part of this community that we are seeking to build where there are many of you who want to continue to be able to have conversations about the podcast, about this kind of theological stuff and the transitions that you’re walking through, and things that you’re learning. Semper Reformanda is a community being built to facilitate those conversations.A piece of Semper Reformanda is this podcast that we record weekly alongside the regular episodes. So that’s where Jon and I are headed. If you want to find out more information about SR and how you could partner with Theocast in those ways, become a part of this pretty cool community of people, and help spread the Reformation, you can find that information over at our website, theocast.orgWe appreciate all of you who have tuned in. We hope this has been encouraging to you. Continue to trust Christ, flee from sin, pursue righteousness.We’ll talk with you again next week.

Often in Scripture, the faithful falter. For example, Abraham is called “the man of faith” by Paul, and he is upheld as the model of justification by faith in all of the Bible. Yet, he sold his wife into defilement and adultery–twice. Or, consider the disciples. In the aftermath of Jesus’ death and resurrection, they are hiding together in a room, terrified. What do we make of these things?Semper Reformanda: The guys talk about preaching the Old Testament–and in particular, preaching on the lives of Old Testament saints. What are better and worse ways to do that? What are some common objections raised against redemptive-historical preaching?Scripture references:Genesis 12:10-20John 20:19-23Resources:Justin’s sermon: Faith, Fear, and God’s Faithfulness | Genesis 12:10-14:24Jon’s sermon: John 20:19-23 – When Jesus Says “Peace”Giveaway: “Night Driving” by Chad Birdhttps://youtu.be/qLMvAPUdvMcSemper Reformanda TranscriptsJon Moffitt: Welcome to Semper Reformanda.Justin Perdue: We’re going to talk about redemptive-historical preaching, and Christ-centered preaching even, and what that means when we preach the Old Testament. In particular, we’ll talk about what it means when we preach like I’m doing right now in Genesis where we are in narrative sections, where there are people who have been significant in redemptive history, and we see things about their lives, some of which are good and commendable, but many of these things are not.I can at least say it this way for me, Jon, and I know that you had similar experiences, probably maybe even more extreme ones given that you grew up in fundamentalism and all that. There is a tendency in evangelicalism to moralize the Bible wholesale, but that certainly rears its head in an obvious way when it comes to preaching the Old Testament and preaching about the lives of Old Testament saints. There are a number of comments that I could make here. Two things immediately come to mind for me; one may be more fundamental than the other. I think when you preach the Old Testament in such a way where you’re going to study the lives of Old Testament saints, and we’re just going to look for ways that we can be like them, I think that’s a tremendous misunderstanding of the point of Scripture. I think that’s a very, in one sense, a law-centered mentality. We’re trying to look through every passage to determine what we need to do. I think that it ends up going in a number of bad directions because we end up having to whitewash the lives of Old Testament saints if we’re really gonna be able to say a ton of things about imitating them. What about all the ways that I really don’t want to be like Abraham and the other saints? Because those things are rarely, if ever at all, talked about. People don’t have a category for that because what we need to preach is faithfulness. That’s one significant issue.Another issue that I want to touch on at some point is how even when you get into some circles where the theology is a little better, and we understand that Abraham was saved by Christ and his merits, there still is a tendency to preach 90% of your sermon about the life of Abraham and then just tack Jesus on, rather than having Christ and the plan of redemption being the focus, the foreground, and the lens through which you even see the whole thing. I think there’s just a fundamentally different orientation that we have as we come to the text.So those are two different things that are in my mind. Let’s start off with the more obvious low hanging fruit thing. We’ve moralized the lives of these people and the bottom line is their lives, like ours, are quite mixed. Dare I say it, there are some men in my congregation that I could just as easily do a three lesson series at a men’s retreat on their life as I could Abraham. There are guys in my congregation who are super godly husbands and dads, and who are virtuous in their jobs, and have not committed some crazy heinous sin like Abraham did at multiple points. This is not to throw Abraham under the bus, but again, it’s just to ask what the point of Abraham is; the point of Abraham is Christ, the one who would come from him, his promised offspring, who would save him and us. And that’s what Abraham would be preaching—not his life but he’d be preaching Jesus.Jon Moffitt: Yeah. And the argument that people throw back at that is that, “Well, they’re in the Bible and John Calvin or John Wilson and your church are not.” That’s the argument. They’re still humans whether they were put in there or not. Let me throw some psychology on this. I think that Jesus is unrelatable because he’s perfect. So we look at that and say nobody can be like Jesus so we need the next best thing. We need something that’s close. And we all love a personal redemption story. We all love to see that. In the movies, a guy destroys his life and then he rebuilds it back up, or someone else destroys his life and he builds something out of it.I watched a movie recently with my wife called Fatherhood. It was this story of how he lost his wife and he was kind of a mess. Then he raises his daughter for seven years by himself. It literally was this personal redemption to prove to his mother-in-law that he is a good father. And we love that. We want to hear sermons that say, “Well, Daniel was human like I am. He struggled with sin, but he overcame his sin this way.” We like it because it’s relatable. The problem is when you allow the text of Scripture to drive the narrative, it doesn’t make that application; Paul makes application in the exact opposite. He said these were examples so that you don’t follow them. You don’t want to do what they did. And yet, somehow we miss 1 Corinthians 10, do the exact opposite, and use them as examples.Justin Perdue: And it’s not that there are never commendable things that we would want to imitate. And when those are in the texts, we can happily talk about them.I made comments this past Sunday about how Abraham deals very equitably and fairly in the aftermath of the battle between the two different groups of Kings in Genesis 14. You get this whole situation where he takes 318 guys under the cover of darkness, rescues Lot, and brings back all the people in the stuff and everything. And then he’s talking to the king of Sodom and says, “I’m only going to take what I’m due. I don’t need to be given anything else.” He’s very equitable. He’s very fair. We can commend that. He’s going to obviously commit a deed of great faith in how he’s prepared to sacrifice Isaac. So it’s not like we can’t talk about that stuff, but we need to talk about all of it. We need to not only point out the virtuous pieces, but point out the failures, not to slam these people, but to actually, like I said earlier, to see the treasure that Scripture really is to those of us who want to be honest in our battle against sin. I take heart in observing Abraham’s life and how he absolutely blew it like mightily, but yet the Lord saved him and has kept him, and he is held up as the model for all of us of those who will be justified by faith in Christ. And he did this. It doesn’t make me want to go sell my wife out; it makes me thankful for God’s grace and for what Jesus did for me.Jon Moffitt: This is dangerous. Who knows but we need to take this out: we do this in a modern day context.It’s Martin Luther King, Jr., President Donald Trump. We tend to want to ignore that which is a massive failure in their life and uphold that which they have done good. They’re a sinner; you can’t ignore that fact.Justin, let’s just be real. You and I have to keep our lives in order, otherwise we cannot be pastors.Justin Perdue: We’re disqualified from office.Jon Moffitt: We’re not like nonchalant and just doing whatever our hearts desire. We want to maintain the office of the Shepherd because we want to serve Christ in that way. But we don’t take pride in it. We don’t walk around our congregation and put our finger down their throats and say, “You better pay attention when I have to say, because I’m qualified and you’re not.”Justin Perdue: Sure. And if there’s anything in my life or yours, Jon, that’s worthy of imitation, praise God for His grace to us. Because we are wretches just like anybody and granted the Lord has done something in us; not only has He gifted us to preach and teach the word of God, but also, in our lives, like the Lord has sanctified us and has worked in us in such a way that we meet the qualifications to be pastors—and praise the Lord for that. I never planned on being a pastor. May have for longer than me, but I never thought I would be, and here I am. And if anything, I find being a pastor is a means of God’s grace to me because it is yet one more thing that is in my mind all the time as a deterrent from sin. I speak for the Lord and this congregation, people’s lives are attached to me and the other elders of this church because we guide this church, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to harm these saints.Jon Moffitt: But every saint could say that. You realize that when Paul says consider how to build one another up to love and good works, or consider how to build one another up—Hebrews 3—that you may not be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin, if you’re given into sin and you’re not building your brother, you’re now affecting the church where Ephesians 4 says the body isn’t building itself up as it should. So not only the elders, but every person in the congregation sees that. I got to fight against sin because it doesn’t only hurt me, it hurts everybody around me. But we don’t think about it that way.Justin Perdue: No, because we only think about ourselves. Even when it comes to our battle against sin, we only think about our own personal holiness. You need to open your eyes to the fact that when you sin, your neighbor, your wife, your kids, your husband, your brother, your sister suffer. Because you sin. And it’s terrible.I think we’ve sort of answered, in one sense, the objection that we never make moral demands. That is just not true because we are clearly upholding things as warnings, and we are upholding things that are good. Even thinking about Abraham—take God at His word and believe the Lord like Abraham did. That’s something. And like I said, when it comes to some of these heinous sins, I’m not trying to be punchy or sarcastic or ridiculous in saying this, but for real, if you need a pastor to open up the Bible to Proverbs or wherever chapter and verse to demonstrate to you that you ought not sell your spouse out to adultery, then I don’t know what to say. We clearly need to have a different conversation because some of these things are just so obviously wrong. I don’t think we need to have two points in our five point sermon about the dangers of adultery. This is terrible. A man literally has sold his wife to adultery and defilement to protect himself and for his own personal profit. If you think that’s a good idea, then we need to have a conversation at the door after church.The only explanation for such a thing, like we’ve already said, is that the flesh is real. And that we’re afraid sometimes and we’re selfish. We act out of those things. But what we want to be pointing people to is to trust Christ, believe God, and then live accordingly.Jon Moffitt: I think that Justin, you and I, the way I would describe our mission, I feel like we’ve been commissioned by Scripture to preach in this manner: we want people to be daily putting less and less trust in their flesh and more and more trust in Christ. That’s all we’re doing. Abraham is a man of the flesh. The disciples are men of flesh. The flesh is weak; Christ is strong. Literally Paul says, “when I’m at my weakest moments,” his flesh is at the weakest moments, “then I am strong.” We don’t want to build confidence in discipline in self or flesh. What’s scary is that’s what people do. They build confidence in what they can do for God. They build confidence on what they have done for God or what they have not done in sin. I’m over here yelling, “Take heed in your confidence lest you fall.” Your confidence has to be in Christ. You should be terrified of your flesh. You should be terrified of your past. You should never point to your past. You should always point to Christ. And then people call me an antinomian. No, our confidence is always in Christ.I’m going to just go to 1 John: what we are, we are not yet. We will be one day and while we wait, what does he say? We focus our eyes on Christ. We then are transformed into the image of what he is. The emphasis is not on self; the emphasis is on Christ.Justin Perdue: And the emphasis is not on Abraham or David or Daniel or Jeremiah or Isaiah. The emphasis is on Christ always because that’s what those people were about. Like I said in the regular portion of the show, and I said this on Sunday, if Abraham were alive today and we’re talking, he would be like, “First of all, if you want to be like me, I don’t think that’s a good idea in so many ways. But if you want to be like me, there’s maybe one thing worthy of imitation and that’s to believe God; believe in my promised offspring who has rescued us from our sins.” I think that would be his message. And that’s what David would be saying: trust in the one that he wrote about. “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand,’ who is a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. Trust him because that’s what I’m doing.” And David, “Blessed is the man whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered against whom the Lord counts no iniquity.” Not that there isn’t any, but the Lord doesn’t count it. That’s the testimony.Jon Moffitt: We’re demonstrating how if you want to talk about a faithful person, faithful people faltered all throughout Scripture and Christ never did. So what are the New Testament writers doing? They point you to not your flesh, but they point you to Christ. Here’s an example: at the end of the Colossians 3, he says all of these things that are being handed to them, this asceticism, beating of their body, and starving yourself, they all have an appearance of being beneficial but they’re of no value of stopping the indulgence of the flesh. What does he say? Look to Christ who is seated at the right hand of God. “Seated at the right hand of God” means redemption’s over. There’s nothing left for you to do. But he isn’t saying give into sin; he’s talking about how you battle sin.I think what people hear us saying is rest in Christ means sitting down and not fighting sin; no, resting in Christ is the only power you have to fight sin. So when I say things like, “Be careful of spiritual disciplines,” it’s mostly because they’re all fleshly in nature. They’re pointing you to fleshly things that have nothing to do with Christ. Your focus is on your quietness, your journaling. And you can say, “Well, I’m thinking about Jesus in these moments.” Yeah, but you’re really trusting in the moment that you were quiet or that you did something. This is why we have our ordinary means. This is why we’re Reformed Baptists. We trust in the ordinary means of grace to be that which helps us fight against the flesh—and it’s been that way for hundreds of years within the church.I know I’m a little worked up right now. People call me crazy, but the entire Bible says not to trust the flesh and trust the preaching of the gospel administered to you in the sacraments and building one another up in love, and through singing and fellowship. That’s how our church fathers did it.Justin Perdue: Trust the ministry of the Spirit through the means of the church. And yet trust Christ; don’t trust yourself.Jon Moffitt: I could go on and on, but hopefully the listener is hearing that the emphasis the Scripture presents us is humans should never trust their flesh; they falter. We should always trust Christ in the Spirit.Last thing I’ll say about John 20: right after he’s commissioned, he says, “Peace be to you. I’m going to send you out to do my work.” What does he do? He gives them the Spirit. And what did the disciples point to as the reason why they’re successful? They point to the power of the Spirit.Justin Perdue: They boast in the Lord, which is what God has always told us we’re to boast. Good conversation. I feel like there’s a lot more to say. I know that we went a little bit here, there, and everywhere, but that’s sort of what we do in SR—we just talk. Hope that this is useful to you. This is Jon and myself. We’re pretty unfiltered here. This was a good conversation, at least for me, just thinking about the legitimacy of preaching Christ from all of Scripture and the foolishness, frankly, of preaching human models as the thing we need to strive after. No, Christ is it.Jon Moffitt: Do not let the world convince you that Christ alone is not enough. People are going to go out there and say you’re antinomian—don’t listen to that; listen to Paul, listen to Peter, listen to 1 John. “I write these things that you may not sin, but if you do sin, you have an Advocate with the Father.” The Scripture’s clear. Don’t be afraid to trust in Christ alone. Don’t let people come rob you of that and tell you to go back to the flesh.Justin Perdue: Or go back to the law. The letter of Hebrews is about that—don’t neglect the great salvation that Christ has accomplished and go back to the things that were just pointers and shadows. Don’t do that.Jon Moffitt: Yeah. And Justin may fail and I may fail because we’re men, but Christ will not fail.Justin Perdue: He’s paid for every failing. Amen.Friends, we appreciate you. We appreciate you more than you know. We even appreciate the ways that you reach out to us personally and send us emails and encouraging things. Life in this fallen world is no joke, and the battle against the flesh and sin is real. We all know that. And we all, I think, have bonded together from near and far because we know that Christ is our only hope.We love you. Continue to partner with us, we ask, and pray for this ministry. Pray for the Lord to spread this message of the sufficiency of Christ; Christ alone being the good news. That’s what we want to see. We know you do too.As SR is really getting going and the groups are happening, we hope there’s a lot of encouragement and sharpening that can occur. We’ll talk with you guys again next week.

What is the gospel? Rightly, many people point to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus–through which we are forgiven of sin, absolved of guilt, counted righteous, and promised to be raised from the dead. Praise God for that! But, there are parts of the gospel that tend to be left out or assumed. Jesus intercedes and advocates for us at the right hand of God. He has given us his Spirit. He reigns from the throne of God. And he is coming back for us. All of these things matter for our assurance and peace!

Semper Reformanda: The guys talk pointedly about the return of Christ. We discuss the implications of this for the mission of the church, as well as why Christ’s return is such good news for us.

Scripture references:
Hebrews 1:3-4, 7:23-25, 10:11-14
1 John 2:1-2
Romans 8:9-11, 31-34
1 Peter 3:22
Revelation 21:3-5
John 5:22-27, 16, 20

Resources:

Sermon: John 20:11-18 – The Missing Part of the Gospel (Jon Moffitt)

Giveaway: “The Gospel Driven Life” by Michael Horton

SUPPORT Theocast: https://theocast.org/give/

https://youtu.be/9ehbEjVx06k

Semper Reformanda Transcripts

Coming soon…

What is the gospel? Rightly, many people point to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus–through which we are forgiven of sin, absolved of guilt, counted righteous, and promised to be raised from the dead. Praise God for that! But, there are parts of the gospel that tend to be left out or assumed. Jesus intercedes and advocates for us at the right hand of God. He has given us his Spirit. He reigns from the throne of God. And he is coming back for us. All of these things matter for our assurance and peace!

Semper Reformanda: The guys talk pointedly about the return of Christ. We discuss the implications of this for the mission of the church, as well as why Christ’s return is such good news for us.

Scripture references:
Hebrews 1:3-4, 7:23-25, 10:11-14
1 John 2:1-2
Romans 8:9-11, 31-34
1 Peter 3:22
Revelation 21:3-5
John 5:22-27, 16, 20

Resources:

Sermon: John 20:11-18 – The Missing Part of the Gospel (Jon Moffitt)

Giveaway: “The Gospel Driven Life” by Michael Horton

SUPPORT Theocast: https://theocast.org/give/

https://youtu.be/mMzJgj6EAGA

Podcast Transcript

Coming soon…

The guys talk more on uses of the law–and how confusing the first and third use of the law is particularly damaging. Justin also offers thoughts on how some Puritan theology is unhelpful.Resources:Podcast: Law/Gospel Podcast: Are You a Legalist or an AntinomianFREE EBOOK: Safe in Christ – A primer on restGiveaway: “Christ the Lord” by Michael HortonSUPPORT Theocast: https://theocast.org/give/ https://youtu.be/wysSDKhHk6MSemper Reformanda TranscriptsJustin Perdue: Welcome to the Semper Reformanda podcast.Let’s pick back up on that part in particular, the first and third use of the law, and how they’re confused and collapsed. We may talk a little bit more about Paul Washer’s famous sermon as an example of this kind of frightening Christians to death.Jon Moffitt: You can go read his sermon. It’s available online. You will see that a lot of the content is the first use of the law, and there is not a lot of gospel, and there is not a lot of grace in there. If he genuinely thought that those were unbelievers, then he should have concluded with Christ. But I think the way in which he approached it is that he approached it like they are believers, but they’re just not taking their faith seriously. He comes in and uses the first use of the law to get them serious, which is a very Puritanical way of using a sermon.I know I’m gonna get myself in a lot of trouble because I know people love, love, love, love, love Paul Washer. I’m not impugning the man’s motives. The man wants people to love Christ. He wants them to obey Christ. So does John MacArthur. How do you impugn those motives? Those are not bad motives. I’m just saying that I think the way in which they have approached it has been demonstrated in the past as not being the accurate way of doing it biblically. They are not the first to make this mistake.Justin Perdue: No, they’re not. And I’ll just speak very personally. I feel like this is something that I still am recovering from personally. My tendency so often, because of my conscience and the way I’m wired—and I’ve been pretty open about that in the past—I rededicated my life probably 150 times as a younger guy. I just have always been haunted by that idea of not being good enough for God. I think my default posture is to always revert back into this kind of economy of fear and dread—that God is not pleased with me, and there’s something not right between me and God. I think a lot of it has only been undergirded and that flame has only been fanned by preaching like we’re talking about. Because even as I encountered Calvinism, I was encountering this kind of stuff alongside the old good stuff, and it was confusing to me. So when I hear things like this, my immediate response is not, “I love Jesus and he loves me. I am safe and now I want to obey.” It is, “Oh my Lord. I’m afraid for myself.” Then Jesus and God don’t feel safe. The last place I want to go is the “throne of grace” when I sin. It’s just bad.That’s just me personally, brother. And I have to fight that instinct even still and remind myself. That’s why I pray for mercy all the time, that God would take away shame and guilt and fear that I carry around all the time.Jon Moffitt: For every podcast, that’s what we pray.Justin Perdue: I pray that for myself all the time. And I pray for faith.Jon Moffitt: Instead of running into the throne room of grace because mercy is waiting for you, there’s this need to get myself in shape or prepared or ready; it’s a penance type of Christianity. It is very confusing. Listeners that are coming out of a lordship context, they will contact us and they say, “For the first time in my life, I actually feel like a child of God and that I am safe in His arms,” versus wondering, “Have I done enough?” What do you mean? Done what? He’s done enough.Justin Perdue: Amen. No, it’s the greatest news in the world. And this message of lordship salvation, like we said so many times, is at best confusing and at best throws some clutter on top of the gospel. We just don’t want to see that happen because it really does rob the saints of peace. And it hinders us, we would say, in real growth and sanctification. We might get really good at doing the right things and being disciplined in the right ways because we’re afraid, or because we think that somehow this is earning God’s approval, and that he’s like smiling upon us because we’re doing this stuff. But in terms of real growth in love of neighbor and in fighting sin from good motivation, it’s not happening when we have this kind of frame.So don’t collapse the first and third use of the law. Don’t scare Christians into obedience.Jon Moffitt: Can I say one thing, too? If and when you have Christians who are in sin, it’s interesting how you hear Paul use words like, “You who are spiritual, in a spirit of meekness and gentleness, go to such a one and restore them.” Even when Paul is dealing with the Corinthians—he says, “I’m coming to you to preach to you the gospel.” The tenor and tone of a Christian should always be with gentleness and meekness and patience. Even when Paul says in Romans 15, “You who are spiritual, bear with the weakness of those who are in sin.” So anger and frustration and malice and just brashness towards sinning Christians is not the tone that you see from the New Testament.Justin Perdue: I’ll caveat that even more. I do think there’s a time and a place for stern warning to Christians who are living in obstinate, hard-hearted sin. But listen to the words I’m using: it’s stubborn and hard-hearted sin. It’s very much like, and you see it at a couple of points in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where people are being arrogant and comfortable in your sin, and we are now going to challenge that with the law. That’s clear. That’s not at all what we’re talking about.We’re talking about people who want to obey the Lord, who find themselves having a hard time doing that, and they’re struggling against sin. Has anybody experienced that this week? I have. I am battling my flesh in my inner man. I want to obey yet I feel this very Pauline experience of there’s this other law waging war against me. And we’re talking to those people here where we want to preach Christ and guide one another with the law. But it’s not this fear and dread business and so, in condemnation and the like. That distinction makes all the difference in the world.Let’s talk about Puritans. Like we said as a parting shot from the podcast, the real issue here is not that any historical category of doctrine has been denied, but that the emphasis and the accent has been moved from Christ to the Christian. So at the end of the day, what’s being done in the lordship camp is akin to what was occurring in some of the bad Puritan writing and theology where the sheep are effectively being pointed back to themselves. It’s not that justification is denied. And justification, being the declaration of righteousness from God upon us, it’s the judicial verdict that we are right and just, and we’re in a right relationship with God. Justification is not being denied. It’s just that the emphasis is on something else: it’s on moral transformation, it’s on the renewing of your mind, it’s on obedience, and those kinds of things.This is why I think, as I read many Puritans… Now there are some who are really good, just to be clear—John Owen, John Cotton, Thomas Boston—I could keep going. These guys were great, but some of them were not so good. Why? And they can hardly be recognized as heirs of the Reformation because the emphasis is so much on moral transformation and obedience and introspection and holy living. Even though they haven’t denied justification formally, it’s sort of shoved off to the side or it’s pushed into the background, which is exactly what we talk about all the time with respect to pietism, and it’s exactly what we were pointing out today with respect to lordship salvation.I would just say this: in reacting to antinomianism, which is what John MacArthur was doing in writing this book in the first place, what you don’t want to do is drive the sheep back to themselves and away from Jesus. That’s not effective. I think that our forebearers have gotten it right when they understand and have articulated plainly that we have to keep justification and sanctification distinct, even though we agree that sanctification flows out of justification, and we just have to continue to beat that drum with clarity. Also the fact that assurance of salvation has to be grounded in something objective. It can’t be grounded in performance.A couple of quotes here. John Calvin says this from The Institutes: “The grace of God and the certainty of salvation and faith neither arise from nor depend on our obedience.” That’s really good. Then John Cotton—who is an American Puritan, who as a younger man was an Arminian and becomes a Calvinist, and has really, really good thinking and well-developed categories of covenant theology and these various things—says effectively this, paraphrased: “We do not build our justification on our sanctification. Doing so we enter into a covenant of works.” He’s exactly right. When we are building assurance of, of the fact that we are saved on how we’re living, we have effectively entered into a covenant of works. That’s a mic drop statement.Jon Moffitt: At the very heart of what Piper has been confusing with the final justification is that you are building your justification based on your sanctification.Justin Perdue: You’re building your salvation, in some sense, on your sanctification.Jon Moffitt: Right. John Piper is not confessionally Reformed. He does not hold to a covenant of works. He does not understand a law-gospel distinction. He does not hold to the three uses of the law. And these are all categories that we draw from the texts that give us lenses to appropriately interpret the text. We aren’t using these to put them on the text—they come out of it, and then we use them for all of Scripture. For instance, the Trinity is one of these lenses that we pull up out of the text and then we use it to look at every port of Scripture. It prevents you from being a heretic. You want to use those lenses. You want to know what all of Scripture has to say about the Trinity so you don’t make inappropriate conclusions. All we’re saying is that all of Scripture has a lot to say about the law and the gospel, all of Scripture has a lot to say about how to use those. Now use that to interpret every single passage.When it comes to guys like MacArthur and Piper in these particular instances, they aren’t using those categories, and because they aren’t using those categories, they’re collapsing them and they don’t even know it.Justin Perdue: That’s a podcast in and of itself. I know we’ve talked about some of that stuff lately, but covenant theology and law-gospel distinction, for example, are two great illustrations of things that come up out of the text that we then can go back to the text with those frameworks, and it helps us understand the whole Bible. It’s so critical. It’s important.This conversation today, if anything should encourage the listener to continue to grow in our understanding of these kinds of things—the distinction between the law and the gospel, to grow in our understanding of even confessional theology and the definition of what faith is, and to also grow in our understanding of covenant theology and the redemptive historical framework of the Bible—because so many of these errors can be seen pretty quickly and clearly when you have some of these categories in view. That’s really all we’ve done. We’ve read the book and interacted with the material. We’ve got alarm bells going off because it doesn’t seem right.Jon Moffitt: This is the most accurate description. If he didn’t mean to say those things, he had the opportunity in his republication of the most recent one. And I understand things that Justin and I have said in our younger years as pastors, we’ve adjusted there. But you listen to recent sermons of lordship salvation guys, and the books that are being written; they definitely have adjusted their languages, definitely more Reformed and informed, I would say. So they don’t make the same mistakes that they’ve made in the past where it’s flat out Roman Catholicism.So when someone tells me that Lordship salvation is another gospel, dispensationalism used to teach another gospel when they taught two forms of salvation: the old one and the new. But most dispensationalists reject that today. If you listen to the lordship salvation guys, a lot of them do reject a lot of the craziness that was taught back in the day.Justin Perdue: That obedience is faith and these kinds of things. They’ve rejected those things full-stop.Jon Moffitt: I’m glad conversations are being had and we’re moving more and more and more to this direction. Sometimes when I hear someone describe lordship to me, I don’t know what to call that, but historically that’s not lordship salvation, not according to the debate.Justin Perdue: This is just me reacting to this on the fly. I think that really a lot of what this lordship stuff is a lot of Calvinistic Evangelical pietistic thinking.Jon Moffitt: I would say lordship is pietism.Justin Perdue: It’s pietism, which is what the bad Puritans were. They were pietistic. So a lot of this goes back to those same categories that we continue to talk about over and over again.Thank you to the listeners and to all of our members.Jon Moffitt: Jump in the app and talk to us. It’d be a great place to continue. The rule is we are going to practice sanctification in that app. We are going to practice on one another. Think about what you’re saying, give someone the benefit of the doubt, everyone’s in transition, everyone’s thinking through things differently, they come from a different background. The goal is to not be unified for the sake of unity, but the goal is to unify around Christ. Christ draws us in, and that’s where we find our point of unity.Justin Perdue: I would even say that if you guys have thoughtful feedback on episodes, the SR app is a great place to give that. It’s a way better place to give it than the Facebook group just because that’s a broader audience. But for you guys and gals in particular, who are members and part of this ministry, we want to hear your feedback. What it may do is show us that we need to do another episode on lordship and clarify some stuff. Anyway, give us feedback.We love you. We’re grateful for you. We will talk with you again next week.

We have gotten a number of questions regarding Lordship Salvation and the historic, reformed position on it. So, today, that is what Jon and Justin talk about. We talk about concerns over the definition of faith, the collapsing of law and gospel, and confusion on the uses of the law. We interact with John MacArthur’s book, “The Gospel According to Jesus,” as well as Michael Horton’s “Christ the Lord.”Semper Reformanda: The guys talk more on uses of the law–and how confusing the first and third use of the law is particularly damaging. Justin also offers thoughts on how some Puritan theology is unhelpful.Resources:Podcast: Law/Gospel Podcast: Are You a Legalist or an AntinomianFREE EBOOK: Safe in Christ – A primer on restGiveaway: “Christ the Lord” by Michael HortonSUPPORT Theocast: https://theocast.org/give/  https://youtu.be/rpm-qPBEuBgPodcast TranscriptJustin Perdue: Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we are going to be talking about lordship salvation. Many of you have asked us questions and have even asked us to give the historic Reformed take on lordship salvation—and so that is what we are going to offer in today’s episode. We hope you enjoy the conversation.Today we’re talking about lordship salvation. The title of this episode is A Critique of Lordship Salvation. That’s what we’re going to be doing from a pastoral perspective. Hopefully with grace and clarity, we’re going to raise some concerns that we have, as Reformed guys, with so-called lordship salvation. For many people at the pop level, at least, in the church, a figure that is most often associated with lordship salvation is John MacArthur. This podcast is not a review of John’s book that’s entitled The Gospel According to Jesus, but we will be interacting some with that content and some of the other things that MacArthur has said and written over the last 30 years or so.We will also be referencing Christ the Lord, which was edited by Michael Horton. There were a number of guys that contributed to that volume: Robert Godfrey, Rod Rosenbladt, Kim Riddlebarger, and others had chapters in that book. That’s a response from a Reformed and confessional perspective to the lordship salvation debate that was really, really heated back in the late eighties and the nineties. Inevitably, we’re going to interact with some of that material. This podcast is not a review of that material specifically. We’re going to be talking about lordship salvation in a more broad way.If we were going to define it just very simply for people, lordship salvation is this conversation about the idea that you can make Jesus your Savior but not your Lord—or is it even possible for Jesus to be your Savior, but not your Lord? There’s this distinction that’s introduced between those two things as though he can be one or thought of as one without being the other.And of course, the argument from the lordship salvation side or John MacArthur’s side, and guys and gals who agree with him, is that you cannot make Jesus Savior without also consciously making him Lord of your life. And so we’re interacting with that idea and that language that’s often used about submission to the lordship of Christ; what we understand that are at best confusing things that are said from that camp.Maybe we want to start by outlining the debate as it took place historically just to give people a little bit of context. In the eighties and nineties, there was a debate between John MacArthur and Zane Hodges. Zane Hodges was articulating a kind of theology. His book Absolutely Free articulated this theology that a person is justified by a single act of faith. Now, Hodges is coming at

The guys discuss a theology of the cross versus a theology of glory. And, we consider the point of our sanctification.

Resources:
Episode: Take Up Your Cross

Giveaway: “Recovering Eden” by Zack Eswine

FREE EBOOK: Theocast.org/primer

https://youtu.be/THpB7373Yp8

Semper Reformanda Transcripts

Justin Perdue: Welcome to the Semper Reformanda podcast.

When we were having the conversation back on the regular portion of the podcast, we alluded to several things: one of them being these principles of a theology of the cross versus a theology of glory; it’s very applicable to the conversation about dying with dignity and hope. The reason that people react quite strongly to a statement like that, that what we’re doing in the care of souls is to help people die with dignity and hope in Jesus, people buck that and say, “No. There is a lot more that we need to be doing. We need to be churning out strong, valiant, fearless, uber mature disciples who look and talk a certain way, and don’t struggle in certain ways. And if we’re not doing that, then we’re failing. That’s what we need to be doing as pastors.” Our response to that is some of what we said in the regular show, but I think we want to unpack this more here.

We actually have been told in Scripture that yes, we will grow and yes, we will be conformed into Christ’s image, and in this life we will still be weak. We, in this life, will not have a strength of our own that we can trust him. We will know that God’s strength is sufficient, His grace is sufficient, His power is made perfect in our weakness, His grace and Christ’s work has paid for every failing, and that Christ has us. And we’re going to learn that more and more and more, and be driven more deeply into the gospel, and be driven more deeply into Christ, and we’ll know ourselves to be more dependent as we grow in the faith. You and I don’t grow in our sufficiency as we mature; we actually realize how insufficient we are as we mature, and so we cling to Christ all the more.

If that’s what you mean by being stronger in the faith then I’m all for it, but I don’t think that’s what most people mean. It’s because we have confused these categories of the theology of the cross and the theology of glory. A theology of glory is very much earthbound. It’s focused on this life and strength and power and improvement now—getting glory now. Whereas a theology of the cross actually says something different: that we are weak, needy, frail, and feeble now. Christ has accomplished our salvation and glory is coming, but it’s a pattern now of weakness and suffering and then glory in the next life, not this one. I think the church, having confused this, is pretty obvious in a number of ways. I know you’re going to make an observation that’s more about teaching and stuff.

One observation I would just throw out there: how many really good songs have you heard written about heaven in the last 50 years? Good theological stuff written in the last 50 years. Not much. The fact that so much of our thinking is centered on improvement now… And I’m not talking about prosperity gospel theology here; we’re talking about improvement in our maturity and strength and stamina and discipline and all these things, but it’s so earthbound nonetheless. It just sounds more holy.

Jon Moffitt: Monday, I turned 40. As I get older, I think that I should be getting better, I should be progressing, I should be overcoming my weaknesses and failures. I am often reminded that everything I struggle with, everything that’s wrong, is all going to be made right. My wife and I were driving on our way to dinner last night through the backfields of Tennessee, because that’s where we live. It is beautiful. Just beautiful.

Justin Perdue: It’s the stuff country songs are made of.

Jon Moffitt: I’m just thinking, as we’re driving, that one day, my wife and I