What Have They Done with Faith?

Introduction:

Too often we hear preachers today thunder out the message--that is, if they preach with authority at all--that salvation is by grace alone, misquoting Ephesians 2:8-9 with no qualms. But I always want to shout back, "What have you done with 'through faith?'" Yes, what have they done with it? And, even when they do include "through faith," what have they done with faith? Like so many things these days, salvation, grace, and faith don't mean what they used to mean in your grandmother's church.

Arminian Roots:

When I was growing up in the Free Methodist Church, I heard many a clear and wonderful sermon on salvation, delivered by my father, who painstakingly wrote out his sermons by hand. Grace was God's part, and faith was your part. It was all pretty simple. And the means through which you got saved--"through faith"--was the means by which you stayed saved--"through faith." For, after all, God's Word teaches very clearly that "the just shall live by faith" (Habbakuk 2:4; Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11; and Hebrews 10:38). "Without faith it is impossible to please Him" (Hebrews 11:6), and "faith without works is dead" (James 2:26). The evidence of your salvation ten years ago was the fruit you bore today. If you didn't bear fruit, you weren't saved (John 15). That was pretty clear, too.

I attended a Free Methodist college--Spring Arbor College in Spring Arbor, Michigan--and everything I heard in the college church there matched exactly what I read in my own Bible through the years. I never had a time where I thought I understood something in my devotions but somehow it turned into something different when I went to church--"Oh, that really means. . . "--or "Well, you can't think this text means. . . ." Everything wasn't rewrapped in a system of "doctrine"; it was allowed to breathe on its own just the way it was. There wasn't all this "embroidery" around a simple text to persuade me (to "gaslight" me) that I had not, in fact, read what I knew I had read. And, being an English major and a lifelong reader, I rather took it for granted that I knew how to read.

I knew of "once-in-grace, always-in-grace" from some of my friends, but that teaching was always taboo in Free Methodist circles. I never found it stated like that anywhere in the Bible, and it seemed to me that if it was as clear as these people said it was, it ought to be all over the place, certainly in the places that said otherwise. Besides, how could something as dynamic and beautiful as my growing relationship with God be reduced to a static cliché? There must be a better way to understand the believer's precious security in Christ. Judging truth by our own experience is a notoriously weak practice, but, then again, if it doesn't work in practical life, does it work? Repeating "once-in-grace, always-in-grace" to yourself seemed like just a big excuse to sin without confessing and repenting. Who would do that?

And yet thinking you had to become resaved if you ever felt distant from God didn't make sense, either. To me, it seemed like the two extremes--eternal insecurity and unconditional eternal security--didn't either one make sense. It seemed like trying to be perfect was like balancing yourself on the head of a pin. You might be able once in your life to make it happen, but you would spend the rest of your life wondering how you did it. Anyway, being preoccupied with your own spiritual health didn't seem very healthy to me. And then, there it was, right there in the Bible. I knew it all along, but as I practiced it and experienced it, I stopped reading all those books that weren't the Bible--almost all, that is--and trusted the Lord Himself to show me what was true. I will explain what I mean a little later. Meanwhile, I must say, if you are a perfectionist anyway, and somewhat of an introvert, and an overly conscientious person, you will drive yourself nuts if you overthink your spiritual life.

That doesn't sound very spiritual, I know. But one book that helped me so much that I think I highlighted or underlined almost every paragraph was Hannah Whitall Smith's Christian classic, The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, recommended to me by both of my parents. I need to point out here that my father did not teach sinless perfection, and neither of my parents lived in a state of unresolved anxiety, even though they were godly people whose walk before the Lord was above reproach. So, I read this book and scanned it scrupulously for the misconceptions I had gathered in my soul like lint on black pants across the years. Her answer was so practical it almost seemed too easy, but she found the way to be happy in Christ--and not by fooling herself that anything she did was irrelevant to her status as a believer.

Being happy in Christ while maintaining your salvation was entirely a walk of faith. If you slipped and disappointed yourself, run to Jesus--immediately. Confess and be forgiven; shut the door on whatever might have beckoned you away, and go on. Don't keep looking over your shoulder. My own mother's practical advice was as good as gold, also: "Holiness is showing love under pressure." Love and faith. It doesn't get any more basic than that. I am not oversimplifying the Christian walk, but what I am saying is that faith played a vital role in my daily knowledge that Jesus Christ was with me. Without this knowledge, life just wasn't worth living. Now, back to the once-in-grace, always-in-grace. Were those people happy? If they were, they were probably living in some pretty heavy-duty denial because I don't know how anybody could be happy with unconfessed sin in their life.

Biblical Branches:

Over the years, I found that the joy in my Christian life came straight out of studying God's Word. If without faith, it is impossible to please Him, and I wanted to please Him every day, then I had no business living either in perplexity or presumption. The surest way to living the holy life--a life of unique faith in Christ to sanctify me daily--is to forget all about yourself and live for others. JOY--Jesus, Others, You, so the Bible school saying went. And it worked. I didn't have to worry about whether or not I was still saved because I wanted to live so close to Jesus it just wasn't an issue. And the anchor for living this life of faith is, of course, God's Word. But when you do walk in His way, He leads you down some very dark paths where you discover things about yourself that you never knew before. Those are the new upgrades in the spiritual life that require ongoing crises of surrender. All of this begins with that first true letting go of your cherished self, but from there you just keep growing, as long as you stay in God's Word.

So, what does faith have to do with it? When I hear or see people preoccupied with reassuring themselves on their state of grace, I tend to think to myself, "They've lost it. They are gaslighting themselves into false assurance." If we are saved by faith and sanctified by faith, then as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, we are secure by faith. And what happens when our faith takes a tumble? Make sure that we always "fall on Jesus," as that beautiful song, "Come to Jesus," says. So, whenever I hear someone trying to tweezer faith out of the equation of spiritual happiness or pulling a clever trick of saying it's a package deal with grace, I know they aren't being honest about their spiritual life. They have something to prove. Or something to hide.

If we just stick with God's Word, it's always right there. My faith isn't in myself; it isn't in a one-time commitment I made when I was three. It is in the Lord Jesus Christ, whose mercies to me are new every morning--which means, why shouldn't my faith be new every morning, too? But that brings me back to how I ever got here and to why I am writing about this topic anyway. After I had left home and finished college and moved out on my own, I lived in areas where there wasn't a Free Methodist Church or even a decent Wesleyan Church or even a really good Church of God church, so I attended a "Bible-believing" Baptist church. I wanted the solid Bible teaching. I could filter out the "unconditional eternal security" part. But then I started noticing across the years that things shifted--a lot. There was a new interpretation, and it seemed pretty lawless to me. If you had ever prayed the salvation prayer, you were saved, regardless of how you lived now.

It used to be in these churches, such as GARB or, later, even SBC churches, that they taught that if you weren't living for the Lord now or fell into sin and didn't repent, you were never really saved. I couldn't really figure that one out, either, because what about David? Did he write all those amazing Psalms not even being saved? It just didn't make sense. It all rotated around free will. It didn't seem to me that God would take your free will away from you just because you got saved. And I could go on and on about that one, but I want to come back to faith.

Calvinist Controversies:

Then I went to Bob Jones University to earn my master's degree in English and landed right in a hotbed of fundamentalism combined with Calvinism. The entire time I was there, I tried to hide my theological misery, for fear of alienating my "always-right, twenty-two-year-old" friends. Still, I never purposely avoided theological discussions and even found a camaraderie with my supervisor in the university library where I worked. He was a particularly kindly, practical man with an irrepressible sense of humor and a streak of mischief. I rather thought he enjoyed, being head librarian and a secretly free thinker, that I wasn't the cookie cutter graduate student. Not only had I been out on my own for a decade, I could think for myself. And I wasn't a Calvinist. I think everyone I knew knew that. One day, with a particular twinkle in his eye and a jovial grin, he asked me, "So, is your name written in the Book of Life in pen or in pencil?" I had never heard that question before, but quick as a bird on the wing came my reply, "It's written in the Blood of Christ."

He looked at me in amazement and never said another word. And at that moment, I knew exactly what I believed. The Lord had shown me what I didn't even realize myself: my security in Christ is like His Blood. If you've ever tried to remove a bloodstain, you know how hard it is. You have to use cold water and scrub and scrub, and it still always shows a little. I John 1:7 promises us that, if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. That means that I am continually being cleansed by the same Blood that saved me, and when that's the Blood in which my name is written, it's not a spooky thing wondering if you're saved from day to day. The Lord Jesus isn't going to let you go without your deliberate effort to expunge yourself from His Book of Life. But those who have ridiculed those of us who do not believe in unconditional eternal security like to make a caricature of what we believe, asking which sin got us into hell? It's always the last one--the one you couldn't confess.

But that's a false scenario because if you believe you are living in a state of constant cleansing by walking in the light--which is the walk of faith--you aren't going to be insecure in Christ. You're going to be radiant. And the same Lord who saved you and who sanctified you will most surely shepherd you from going astray. He will warn you as the ever-vigilant Gardener if you aren't producing any fruit, and He will wait until harvest to doublecheck before He ever lops your branch away. And, of course, we are right back to faith because it's always an active thing, not a static thing. And I have to place my faith in Christ's work for me now just as surely as I did when I was a wee child. And if He has never let me down all these years, what makes me think He's going to disown me now? And the best news is--the surest security is staying away from sin. It's all about wanting to obey Jesus--every day, at any cost. If we get the right things right--faith in the Lord Jesus--we don't have to invent doctrine to save us.

Back to Bob Jones. I heard many a Calvinist teaching there and also at a local church, Mount Calvary Baptist Church. Despite the Calvinism, it was an excellent church. I also had a roommate who was Presbyterian, and once when I requested prayer for my missing brother, she ventured to say that maybe he wasn't among the elect. This really offended me, but I didn't say anything. By this time, I had thought long and hard about all these what I call "manmade" doctrines and was bound and determined to understand exactly what the Bible said. I just could never ever--not even once--make my mind stand on its head to believe that I didn't have free will and that God had elected only some people to be saved. I knew my Bible. I knew it well, and it didn't say that. Why on earth would anyone want to believe that? So, I made it my business to study those "problem" passages, like Romans 7, 8, and 9.

And then, over the years I began to realize that this phrase "by grace alone" was their motto. And I could always echo back in my mind "through faith." But more and more these recent years--and not just from Calvinist circles--I heard what I will call the "street version" of this doctrine. Or I could say the "web version" because that's all you seem to see posted anytime there is a genuine question--people slam back at you that if you think there are any conditions for salvation, that's salvation by works. "No, it isn't," I would say in my mind and heart. "God's Word says--" and I could go to those references, and there they were, every time. Just because somebody had put faith in the cupboard didn't mean I couldn't still pull it out.

And then I noticed what seemed to me like a deliberate sleight of hand to put it in and take it out willy-nilly, as if saying "by grace alone" was the same as saying "through faith alone." And as I listened to what they were really saying, it became clear--and they actually came out and said this in the blogs I read--that faith is a work. What? How on earth is faith a work? The text says "by grace are you saved through faith, not of works, lest any man should boast." Then they would say that it would be a work if you did it, but since God did it, it was a gift. Okay, wait just a minute right there. You mean faith is a gift? Yep. How? "It is the gift of God"--no, no, no. That's not what the text says at all. And when I scrutinized and annotated the Ephesians text and found every single one of the times Paul used the word "grace" or "faith," he never, not even one time, referred to faith as a gift. It was always the grace that is the gift--and the salvation that results from receiving this gift through faith.

So, what's the problem, someone might be thinking? Here's the problem: if faith is a gift and it is necessary for salvation and not everyone is saved, then God gives faith only to some people who are saved by grace. But that's not what God does. He has already given the gift of grace that makes salvation possible to anyone at all. It is our part to exercise the faith to appropriate this grace. That means I have free will to accept this grace. We are not saved by grace alone and saying so does not equate to salvation by works. The answers are always right there in the text. And when you have to abandon the plain sense of the text and keep your finger thousands of years back to juggle something, you know you have overreached and invented "doctrine" instead of accepting truth.

A Colossal Excuse:

I could say much more on this topic, but for now I will leave it with this: the argument that faith is a work and therefore must be a gift of God to avoid salvation by works has become a colossal excuse to welcome antinomianism into the church. You can no longer tell someone that if he is doing such and such a misdeed, he is not on his way to heaven. Oh, yes, he is on his way to heaven because, if he didn't do anything to earn his salvation, he certainly can't do anything to lose it. And his greatest proof of having it is his utter rejection of any hint of works (called obedience) out of a particularly squeamish loyalty to preserve the doctrine of salvation by grace alone. Friends, when salvation by grace through faith comes under attack, all we have left is Calvinism (salvation by decree) or Romanism (salvation by works). This is a problem.

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Note: I'd like to continue this discussion in a later post because I'm sure I'm not the only one who's confused and frustrated by the extremely low bar now put forward these days as "salvation"--a frustration felt by all true believers, whether you are Baptist, Calvinist, Free Methodist, or Catholic.