Among the scariest words in the Bible are the words of Jesus
recorded in Matthew 7:21-23. The scene is the final judgment when some will
stand before the throne of God and say, Lord, we prophesied and performed
miracles and exorcisms in your name; and he will say to them, “Depart
from me you workers of lawlessness!” “I never knew you!” These are
people who apparently trusted that Jesus would save them but will undoubtedly be
shocked and terrified to find that they are rejected because of their
lifestyles.
Not too long ago, there was a very influential and well-known,
conservative evangelical seminary professor and editor of a best-selling study
Bible. In one of his popular books, he wrote that you don’t even have to have a
willingness to obey Jesus in order to be saved![1] You just need to believe that Jesus is God who died for your sins
and rose again.
There was also a pastor of a very large and influential independent
Baptist mega-church, with a reported membership of 100,000 people. This pastor placed
a huge emphasis on evangelism in his ministry. His website tells people that in order to be saved all they have to do is
pray this prayer: “Oh God, I know I am a sinner. I believe Jesus was my
substitute when He died on the Cross. I believe His shed blood, death, burial,
and resurrection were for me. I now receive Him as my Savior…”
No mention of repentance. No indication of love for Jesus. No
intention of turning from the sin or idols in our life. Just acknowledgement of
some key doctrines and a statement that I receive Jesus as my savior.
They are just a small, but influential, tip of a very large
iceberg. Numerous churches and denominations all over America have used prayers
just like this to assure people that they are saved.
One problem with this, however, is that many, MANY people who
prayed prayers similar to this, go on to live a lifestyle characterized by the
kind of lawlessness Jesus says will result in him disowning them. And in Galatians 5:19-21 Paul gives a list of sins or what he
calls “works of the flesh” and says, I warn you, as I warned you
before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
So important is this warning that Paul repeats it in his letters to the Ephesians
and the Corinthians: Those who practice such things will not inherit the
kingdom of God.
A 2021 Pew survey said that 63% of Americans claim to be
Christians.[2] How is it that so many people claim to be Christians and yet seem
to live lives of total indifference to Jesus, or even delight unrepentant lifestyles
that Jesus and Paul say will result in hell? For example, I’m quite sure that
if you went to churches where they proudly and actively promote behaviors that the
Bible condemns, they would say they believe in Jesus and have a relationship
with Jesus!
The problem is our definition of saving faith.
Unfortunately, what so many Bible teachers have done is to begin
with what Paul says about being saved by faith, but then come up with their
own definition of what they think saving faith is—for example, saying
a prayer to receive Jesus like you would receive a gift, or trusting Jesus like
you would trust a chair to hold you up.
The problem is that they started at the wrong place! Paul was a servant of Jesus Christ—as Paul himself insisted—not the other way around. So if we want to know how to be saved, we need to start with Jesus first and let Jesus speak in his own context without re-interpreting him in light of Paul. When we do that, we find that Jesus and Paul are in perfect agreement, and all the “problem passages” about sin and works, make perfect sense! If none of what I just said makes any sense to you, I hope it will by the end of the sermon.
There are two places in
the Gospels where someone specifically asks Jesus how to inherit eternal life.
The first one is in Mark chapter 10. This story is also recorded in Matthew 19
and Luke 18, but I’ll just focus on Mark.
In Mark 10:17-22, Jesus was specifically asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life.” Let’s start reading in Mark 10 verse 17:
And as he
was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good
Teacher, what must I do to inherit
eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is
good except God alone. You know
the commandments: ‘Do not
murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not
defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” And
Jesus, looking at
him, loved him,
and said to him, “You lack
one thing: go, sell all
that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow
me.” Disheartened
by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
So someone comes to Jesus saying, “Good
Teacher what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus responds, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”
As we will see from the context, Jesus is actually testing the man, as if to say,
“Why do you call me good? Are you coming to me as a good teacher who
can answer your question, or are you coming to me as the Good One (God) who can
give you the eternal life you seek?”
Jesus doesn’t wait for an answer. After Jesus recites some of the commandments,
the man responds by saying “Teacher, all these I
have kept from my youth.” The text
says, Jesus “loved him” and told him he
lacked one thing: He needed to sell what he owned, giving the money to the poor,
and then follow Jesus.
Jesus’ instruction for the man to sell everything is puzzling
because Jesus didn’t tell other people to sell all they had in order to follow
him. Why was Jesus asking this man to sell everything?
The answer is that because the man had claimed to have kept all of
the commandments, Jesus was testing him on the very first Commandment— “You shall have no other gods before me.” Jesus was
asking the man to demonstrate that he valued Jesus (the Good One, God) more
than he valued his possessions. In this man’s case, if he wanted to “have treasure in heaven,” that is, to have eternal
life, he had to demonstrate that he had no other gods before God by abandoning
his possessions and following Jesus. Jesus doesn’t test everyone that way, but
if he did, would you give up everything to follow Jesus?
The man’s response indicated that he valued his possessions more
than he valued the Good One, God, who was standing before him. Contrary to the
man’s claim to have kept all the commandments, Jesus demonstrated that the man
failed on the very first one. He did not love God more than he loved his
possessions and he would not sell his stuff to help the poor. So how,
according to Jesus, does one inherit eternal life? By having no other gods
before Jesus and loving your neighbor as yourself, which, after all, is a
summary of the Ten Commandments.
The other time Jesus was specifically asked how to have eternal
life is recorded in Luke chapter 10. Luke
10:25 and 26 say, And
behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher,
what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” Now I want you to
notice that in both this passage and in the one we just discussed, when someone
asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life, Jesus pointed them back to the Law of
Moses; and that makes perfect historical sense, since Jesus was thoroughly Jewish,
and the Old Testament was his Bible.
But Paul
says we are not saved by the law! Is Paul contradicting Jesus? Not at
all. Paul is addressing an entirely different situation. He is arguing against
those, like many Pharisees, who think they are saved by what they do—by their
good works or their meticulous obedience to all the Law’s commands. In Titus
3:5 Paul insists that we are not saved by works of righteousness that we have
done, but according to his mercy he saved us.
Anyway, the lawyer or expert in Jewish law
asks Jesus how to inherit eternal life and Jesus puts the question back in the
man’s lap asking what the Law of Moses says. In verse 27 the man answered Jesus
by quoting two Old Testament passages, Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18: “You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all
your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” In verse 28 Jesus told the lawyer, “You
have answered correctly. Do this and you will live,” in other
words, you will have eternal life.
But after reading
Paul’s letters we might have expected Jesus’ to say you have eternal life by
faith. Instead, Jesus says that the way to have eternal life is to love God
with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength—and love your neighbor as
yourself! Is Paul contradicting Jesus? Of course not!
Darrell Bock is a conservative, Evangelical professor of Bible and
theology at Dallas Theological Seminary, and one of the world’s leading experts
on the Gospel of Luke. Bock says that Jesus’ approval of the lawyer’s answer
is, quote, “because at its heart the answer is an expression of total
allegiance and devotion that in other contexts could be called faith.”[1]
Bingo! According
to Jesus, saving faith is a
heart attitude of total allegiance and loving devotion to the
Lord! Jesus’ teaching that eternal life comes through a heart of loving God
with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself is supported throughout the
Gospels. For example, in Mark 12:28 to 34 a scribe asked Jesus, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus
answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our
God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and
with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You
shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater
than these.” And the scribe said to him, “You are right,
Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other
besides him. And to love him with all the heart
and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one's
neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and
sacrifices.” And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely,
he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
In other words, Jesus
says, in effect, You’re right! If you indeed love God with all your
heart and your neighbor as yourself—you will inherit the kingdom of God and be
saved.
Now many scholars would say that
it is impossible to truly love God with all your heart and your neighbor as
yourself, therefore Jesus is simply pointing us to our need for him as a
savior. But that idea is entirely foreign to the context of any of the Gospels.
That is re-interpreting Jesus to fit our interpretation of Paul. In other
words, they are trying to force Jesus to fit their own made-up definition of
faith. Judging solely from the context of the Gospels, Jesus seems to expect
that people can love God with all their hearts and their neighbor as
themselves—certainly not perfectly, of course. No one is perfect. Christians
still sin—sometimes terribly!
But when Luke chapter 1 says that Zechariah and Elizabeth observed “all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly”
that does not mean they were sinlessly perfect! No one is. It means that God
was first in their life. They had no other gods before God. It is entirely
possible to love God—to Love Jesus—in such a way that he is first in one’s life
so that there are no gods coming before Him.
This idea of faith being a heart
of loving devotion and dedication to Jesus above all else is also found in Matthew
10:37-39 and Luke 14:26-27 where Jesus demanded allegiance to him even above
family or one’s own life. In fact, in John 12:25
Jesus says, “He who loves his life will lose it,
while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal
life.” The idea of hating one’s life in this verse is a Jewish
figure of speech for being willing to give up your life for Jesus. When Jesus says those who love their life will lose it, if he was just talking
about physical life, he was clearly wrong. Many people down through the ages
have truly loved their life and did not lose it prematurely. No! Jesus is
saying that if you value your physical life more than you value him, you will
lose your soul. “Life” and “soul” are the same word in Greek.
So on the subject of how to inherit eternal life, Jesus gives a very
consistent answer: Have no other God’s before God; Love the Lord your God with
all your heart, mind and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself. In other
words, have a heart of total allegiance and loving devotion to God—and Jesus
includes himself in his definition of God—and love your neighbor as yourself.
The Gospel of John refers to this heart attitude as “believing in Jesus.” Paul
refers to it as “faith in Jesus.”
BUT in both Matthew
and Mark, the very first words of Jesus’ public ministry were a call to
repentance. And in the book of Acts both Paul and Peter called people to repentance
in order to be saved. So are we saved by faith or by repentance?
The Greek word for repentance literally
means “a change of mind,” or as we might say today, “a change of heart.” Repentance
is a change of heart in which we no longer want to live in rebellion
against God. We want to turn TO Jesus FROM our sin and the idols in our
life. If you’re not sorry for your sin and don’t want to turn from it,
you don’t have biblical repentance.
So repentance and faith are two sides of
the same coin. Repentance is a heart attitude that turns FROM our sinful
rebellion against the Lord, and faith is turning TO the Lord with a heart
attitude of total allegiance and loving devotion.
This explains why Jesus, Paul, Peter,
John and Jude all insist that people who delight in unrepentant sinful lifestyles,
will not be saved unless they repent. In other words, you cannot truly have a heart of total allegiance and loving devotion to
Jesus Christ, and at the same time unrepentantly delight in a lifestyle of
rebellion against him. That is as incompatible as hot is with cold, as light is
with darkness, as love is with hate. And that’s why Jesus will tell those who
practice such lawlessness to depart from him. And why Paul would say that those
who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Those who
unrepentantly delight in their sin, demonstrate that they have no true faith or
allegiance to Jesus.
The idea that faith is a heart of total allegiance and loving devotion to
Jesus also explains passages that seem to teach we are saved by works. For example, in Matthew 7 Jesus says it is the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven who will enter heaven. Or Matthew 12:37 when Jesus says, by your words you will be justified, and by your
words you will be condemned.” Or in Matthew 13, Mark 4, Luke 8, and John 15
where those who do not bear fruit are thrown into the fire where there will be
weeping and gnashing of teeth.
If you are totally committed to Jesus and truly love him with all your
heart, that loving devotion cannot help but bear fruit in your life. Sometimes the Bible looks at the faith or believing as the means
of salvation. Other times the Bible just looks at works as the result or evidence
of faith or salvation.
The bottom line is that
saving faith is not just believing that Jesus is God who died and rose again
for our sin—as important as those doctrines are. Faith is not just trusting
Jesus to take us to heaven like we would trust a chair enough to sit in it. Faith
is not just about receiving salvation like we would receive a gift.
Saving faith is about a
Holy-Spirit produced heart of repentance which abhors the sinfulness and idols
in our life, coupled with a heart of total commitment and loving devotion to
Jesus above all else. I’m sure Paul would agree, since
in First Corinthians 16 he says, “If anyone has no love for the Lord,
let him be accursed!”
Notice that faith is about the attitude of our
heart and not about any good works that we do. As Paul says, “For it
is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from
yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can
boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do
good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Genuine faith, a
heart of loving devotion and total allegiance to Jesus, always produces fruit.
Unfortunately,
pastors and Bible teachers have produced generations of people who have no loving
devotion or commitment to Jesus, and yet they think they have faith, often
because they said a prayer. John Calvin would say that all Scripture cries out
against this notion! This doctrine of salvation I’m preaching is not just mine.
Godly pastors and theologians have been teaching it for hundreds of years—just
not in most of the churches I’ve attended.
If you don’t have
a heart of faith or loving devotion and total allegiance to Jesus, I urge you
to renounce your sin and commit your heart and life to Jesus Christ in faith. Then
if you are truly serious about this commitment, you will publicly declare your
allegiance to Jesus as your king, by baptism. Baptist doesn’t save us, but the
New Testament knows nothing of an unbaptized Christian.
As I’ve said before, this faith does not guarantee freedom from trouble or tragedy in this life—in fact, it may sometimes make life harder—but it does give forgiveness of sins and peace with God, a purpose for living, a sense of stability in a turbulent world, and a bright hope for life after death.
