The Gospel According To Jesus

By Grace Through Faith


Salvation is solely by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8). That truth is the biblical watershed for all we teach. But it means nothing if we begin with a misunderstanding of grace or faulty definition of faith.

God's grace is not a static attribute whereby He passively accepts hardened, unrepentant sinners. Grace does not change a person's standing before God yet leave his character untouched. Real grace is not,as Chafer wrote, "the Christian's liberty to do precisely as he chooses." True grace, according to the scripture, teaches us "to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age" (Titus 2:12). Grace is the power of God to fulfill our New Covenant duties (1 Corinthians 7:19), however inconsistently we obey at times. Clearly, grace does not grant permission to live in the flesh; it supplies power to live in the spirit.

Faith, like grace, is not static. Saving faith is more than just understanding the facts and mentally acquiescing. It is inseparable from repentance, surrender, and a supernatural eagerness to obey. The biblical concept of saving faith includes all those elements. None of them can be classified exclusively as human work, any more than believing itself is solely a human effort.

Misunderstanding on that key point is at the heart of error of those who reject lordship salvation. They assume that because Scripture contrasts faith and works, faith may be devoid of works. They set up a concept of faith that eliminates submission, yieldness, or turning from sin, and they categorize all the practical elements of salvation as human works. They stumble over the twin truths of that salvation is a gift, yet it cost everything.

Those ideas are paradoxical, but they are not mutually exclusive. The same dissonance is seen in Jesus' own words, "I will give you rest," followed by "take My yoke upon you" (Matthew 11:28-29). The rest we enter by faith is not a rest of inactivity.

Salvation is a gift, but it is appropriated only through a faith that goes beyond merely understanding and assenting to the truth. Demons have that kind of "faith" (James 2:19). True believers, on the other hand, are characterized by faith that is as repulsed by the life of sin as it is attracted to the mercy of the Savior. Drawn to Christ, they are drawn away from everything else. Jesus described genuine believers as "poor in spirit" (Matthew 5:3). They are like the repentant tax-gatherer, so broken he could not even look heavenward. He could only beat his breast and plead, "God, be merciful to me, the sinner!" (Luke 18:13).

That man's desperate prayer, which Jesus said resulted in his salvation (.14), is one of the clearest picture of genuine, God-wrought repentance in all of Scripture. His plea was not in any sense a human work or an attempt at earning righteousness. On the contrary, it represented his total abandonment of confidence in the merit of religious works; as if to prove it he stood "some distance away" from the praying Pharisee. He understood that the only way he could ever be saved was by God's merciful grace. On that basis, having first come to the end of himself, he received salvation as a gift.