Faith is not a one-time event for the Christian. It is not merely something that we did at some point in our past. Certainly, there was a time when we moved from unbelief to belief. But that moment of initial believing ushered us into a life of faith. A Christian is someone who, having initially trusted Jesus as Lord, goes on believing. We continue depending on Christ. This trust is not perfect. Sometimes it may grow dim and waver, and other times it can be strong and sure. But faith, for the Christian, is continuous. It is ongoing. It is a way of life.
The Apostle Paul calls this way of life a fight. He encouraged his young colleague in the ministry to “Fight the good fight of faith” (1 Timothy 6:12a). Faith is a fight for the Christian in that we must work hard, discipline ourselves, and sometimes struggle to keep on believing. The seeds of unbelief remain in our hearts and sometimes it seems as if they have so successfully sprouted that real faith is almost choked out. At such times I take comfort in that heart-broken father who asked Jesus to heal his son. With his demon-possessed boy writhing in the dirt at his feet and foaming at the mouth, this man looked at Jesus and, with tears in his eyes said, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). He had faith (“I believe”). But he was lacking in assurance (“Help my unbelief”).
These words have been my prayer many, many times over the course of my life. When trials come, when it seems that God’s promises (what He has pledged Himself to do) are being contradicted by God’s providence (what He actually is doing), our faith can be severely tested. At such times the person who is trusting Christ needs to remember that the Christian life is a fight, and we are called to “fight the good fight of faith.”
One good way to equip yourself for this fight is through Scripture memory. What makes faith hard and unbelief easy is losing sight of things that are true. Storing up your mind with God’s own Word makes His truth more accessible to you than if you only had a general idea of it. Scripture that is committed to memory can be readily called to mind by the Holy Spirit who indwells every believer. The Psalmist testified to power of Scripture to work this way in his life when he wrote, “Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You” (Psalm 119:11).
What makes faith hard and unbelief easy is losing sight of things that are true.
Another good way to wage war against unbelief is by heeding the specific counsel of God’s Word. The Bible records the real life stories of people who faced all kinds of trials and challenges. God taught them important lessons through these experiences. And by recording their stories in the Bible, He also can teach us through them. Often the Bible gives us the counsel of men and women who have gone before us in the fight of faith. By both their example and words, we are encouraged to keep believing.
This is true of King David and his instructions in Psalm 37. He wrote this Psalm when he was an old man (v. 25). It reeks of the wisdom of long experience. David knew what it was to be “on top of the mountain.” At one time he could do no wrong in the eyes of his fellow countrymen. Songs were written about him. Foreign kings respected him. His enemies feared him. But by the time he wrote Psalm 37 he had lived long enough to experience the reversal of fortunes. He had sinned grievously against his God and his people. He had experienced the death of a baby and inconceivably wicked conduct by other children, including the murder of one son by another and the betrayal and execution of that murderous son.
David had seen wicked people prosper and good people suffer. And out of the wisdom of long experience with God he encourages us to “Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for Him” (v. 7). This is sound counsel for people who really know God. The Lord never hurries and is never late. Furthermore, what is sometimes easy for us to forget, He is always working for eternity. We often become anxious and wonder where God is or if He really cares. It is good to hear the God-inspired counsel of an experienced man like David, who also had those thoughts: Rest in Him. Wait patiently for Him.
What exactly does it mean to rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him? It means to give our burdens and concerns over to Him. To trust Him to do what is right and what is good for us. It means to remember heaven, to remind ourselves that we are in this fight of faith for the long haul. God’s sense of timing is not limited to our clocks and calendars. To rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him means to orient your heart with such determination toward Jesus Christ and His death on the cross that the bloody scene of Calvary begins to melt your fears and anxieties as you gaze on it and are enabled to say, “For me.”

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Our love for Jesus flows directly from our awareness of how much he has forgiven us. I do not minimize the compelling nature of his attributes when I affirm this. His excellence should move us to love him in and of himself apart from any favors we receive. In forgiveness, however, we see all of his excellence in action; all of his wisdom, power, righteousness and holiness as well as the revelation of a number of tender mercies conspire to produce the truly divine disposition of passing over our abundant offenses. All of them were necessary in order to find forgiveness from the One who is “forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty”(Exodus 34:7). Luke illustrates this gospel principle at a memorable dinner party (Luke 7:36–49).

Simon the Pharisee had invited Jesus over for a meal with his friends. Luke does not say if the invitation is sincere or a trap, but when Jesus arrives, Simon’s greeting is less than enthusiastic. He provides no water for Jesus’ feet, gives him no kiss of welcome, and neglects to anoint his head with oil—all basic tokens of hospitality. Is Simon’s inattentiveness to Jesus calculated, or just careless? In either case, his love for the Savior is underwhelming.

Soon, another figure enters the room, as different from Simon as we could imagine. She is an unnamed “woman of the city,” known to all as “a sinner.” She was likely not invited to Simon’s distinguished home. But, apparently, she has met Jesus before; at least she has heard his message about God’s grace. When she learns Jesus is at Simon’s house, she shows up with an alabaster flask of ointment. Finding Jesus reclining at table, the woman kneels behind him. Weeping, she bathes his feet with her tears. She wipes his feet dry with her own hair, kisses them, and anoints them with her oil. It is an extravagant display of love.  

As Jesus goes on to explain in a story about debt, our love for him is always proportionate to our sense of how much he has forgiven us. The notorious woman knew that her sin-debt was massive. When Jesus canceled her debt and sent her away in peace, she loved him much. Simon is, of course, every bit as spiritually impoverished as this woman. But his external righteousness has blinded him to his crushing need before a holy God. He does see himself as a debtor; he feels no need for mercy. He assumes that he requires little forgiveness, and it shows in his little love for the Forgiver. 

Our story suggests that few practices can yield greater spiritual fruit in my life than considering just how much and how freely Jesus has forgiven, is forgiving, and will forgive me (cf 1 Tim 1:15). As our story suggests, such reflection produces humble gratitude to God, loving commitment to the Savior, sympathy and tenderness toward my fellow sinners, and unshakable peace in my heart as I reenter the world. 

What Does Genesis 1:1 Have to Do with John 3:16?

In a word, everything. Soteriology is based on ontology. Salvation occurs in creation. Redemption takes place in reality. This should be self-evident but in our post-modern world more and more reality is being judged as simply social constructs or determined by the almighty self.

Let me explain. Ours is day when the very idea that absolute truth exists is judged outmoded, offensive, and hateful. This, of course, means that moral relativism dominates the thinking of many people. You can have your truth and I can have my truth and the two need not even approximate each other much less agree. What’s right for you may not be right for me. Ultimately each person (the self) is the determiner of is true and false, right and wrong, and good and bad.

It’s all relative, except, of course, the fact that it is all relative. That, my friend, is absolute. If you doubt me just try to live as if it is not and see how quickly you are charged with hate speech (or thoughts), bigotry, or violence. Such heresy must be canceled. The guardians of the left will not tolerate any questioning of their orthodoxy a person’s identity is precisely what [insert preferred pronoun] says it is. Biological sex has nothing to do with gender. Today when anxious friends ask brand new parents if their baby is a boy or girl, the only politically correct answer is, “We won’t know until they tell us.”

Ours is day when the very idea that absolute truth exists is judged outmoded, offensive, and hateful.

What is going on in the LGBTQIA+ revolution through which we are living is fundamentally a rejection of “Nature and Nature’s God.” This is the Apostle Paul’s point in Romans 1:26-27 where he describes the end result of those who “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (25). “For this reason,” Paul writes, “God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (26-27, emphasis added).

Paul is talking about female (v. 26) and male (v. 27) homosexuality. Both are not “natural.” The word he uses is φυσικόςis (physikos)” everything which by its origin or by observation of its constitution seems to be a given. To call it ‘given’…is already to go beyond the sphere of naive description and implies a judgment on its actual constitution or true nature.”[1] In other words, male-male and female-female sexual relations are unnatural—against nature; against what is “a given.”

To put a fine but biblically and theologically fine point on it, such relations are a denial Genesis 1:1 and the rest of the creation account in chapters 1 and 2. It is a denial of creation and, therefore, of the Creator.

Here is where the connection to John 3:16 comes in. The God who “so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life,” is the same One who created the world in the beginning. To be reconciled to that God a person must lay down the arms of rebellion against him. That is, a person cannot continue worshiping the creation rather than the Creator and experience the saving grace of Jesus Christ, who is the Creator’s Son.

To make sure I am being clear—there is no such thing as a “gay Christian” or an “LGBTQIA+ Christian” or any other reality-denying-hyphenated Christian. You cannot deny the Creator and his creation and have his salvation at the same time. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus took place in the real world. He is a real Savior for real sinners. The salvation he gives is a real salvation. It is impossible, therefore, to experience this salvation while denying reality and the real God who both created it and accomplished salvation in it.

You cannot have the God of salvation while continuing in rebellion against the God of creation. He is the same God.

What this means is that Tim Keller’s would-be aphorism, though readily parroted by J.D. Greear and Ed Litton (and who knows how many after them) is as spiritually dangerous as it is disingenuous. Said Keller, “I know homosexuality doesn’t send you to hell because heterosexuality doesn’t send you to heaven.” While progressives and homosexuals readily applaud Keller’s cleverness, the Apostle Paul begs to differ. He wrote, “For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 5:5–6). Homosexuals do are not excluded from the “sexually immoral.”

You cannot have the God of salvation while continuing in rebellion against the God of creation. He is the same God. You cannot have the real Jesus while you insist on living in unreality. An inevitable component of true repentance is the renouncing of every relation that is “contrary to nature.”

Soteriology is built on ontology. You cannot have the grace that saves while rebelling against the nature that is. We should never mislead anyone by suggesting they may savingly believe the gospel of Jesus Christ while living in the unreality of LGBTQIA+ identity or the contra-reality of homosexuality.

The good news is that those who are enslaved to such false ways of living are not beyond hope. The gospel really is the power of God to salvation for all who believe. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). The Corinthian church was a living testimony of this. In his list of the kinds of people who will not inherit the kingdom of God, Paul includes “the sexually immoral,” “adulterers,” and “men who practice homosexuality.” But then he reminds the church that “such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).

By all means, let us proclaim the amazing grace that is announced in John 3:16. But let us never do so to the exclusion to the undeniable reality that is revealed in Genesis 1:1.

[1] Helmut Köster, “Φύσις, Φυσικός, Φυσικῶς,” ed. Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964–), 253.