Viewpoint Brief Bible Study #75 |
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JESUS calls US to be |
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The Christian religion is the worship and service of Jesus Christ. It’s not Mary we worship, but her Son. We worship neither saints, angels, a law code, nor even God’s Spirit. It’s JESUS who is to be honored. The Bible is our guide. |
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Faith
ALONE Cannot Save Us
God's gift spoken of in Ephesians 2:8-10
is GRACE, Not Faith
Part 1 ~ Click to move directly to
Part 2 or Part
3.
From: "Marc A. Todd" To: "Ray Downen"
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997RAY said And don't think of baptism as a work anyway!
Does a baby work to get out of the womb? Yet the baby does manage to get born, because others are working to accomplish
the feat (the mother most of all, of course).Marc says -- Correct analogy.. bad explanation. Neither the mother nor the doctor nor the baby have anything to do with the event. They only react to it. Birth happens in spite of them. If the birth is directly a work of anyone, it is of the father. So it is with salvation.
Marc, I understand you, but you're wrong. Except in the case of rape, which surely isn't the case for spiritual rebirth, the two parents are both actively involved in planting the seed, but the mother is the one whose continuing "work" allows birth. Ask any abortionist whether the baby is being carried by the mother or by the father, and you'll then know from whom the fetus is removed at any time prior to the actual birth of a baby. You object to this truth because you want to say that God is totally responsible for new birth. He isn't. We are NOT robots who have no choice in what we think and do. Sorry, but you're wrong on this one.
Marc -- Is "receiving Him" not a **result of faith**? Would you "receive" the Person and work of Christ on your behalf if you had no faith in His Person and work; if you didn't believe that His death on the cross was true and efficacious? And what is the source of our faith (per Eph. 2:8-10)?
I do not see that faith is a gift of God. What Paul says is that GRACE is a gift of God, that it's totally unearned by anything we could possibly do. But faith is NOT thrust upon some and denied to others. The availability of grace is to all. That's why Jesus can invite ALL to come to Him for rest. That's why the Spirit and the bride (the church) are to invite all to come. Grace is available to all. Anyone who hears CAN believe, and accept God's grace by appropriate response. In Acts 2:38 we see this fact fully laid out and demonstrated. The correct answer we are to give any seeking sinner is that they are free to repent and be baptized (which brings them into Christ) in order to have their sins taken away and in order that they can then receive the gift of God's presence within.
No, faith is NOT the gift of God spoken of in Ephesians 2:8. Or else the Bible contradicts itself and makes God a liar. It doesn't and it isn't. We just MUST rightly divide the word, which means that Ephesians 2:8 must be understood IN HARMONY with Acts 2:38, et al.
The source of our faith, according to the Word, is HEARING about Jesus (Romans 10:17). Any person is capable of accepting (or rejecting) the truth of what was heard.
Marc says, Neither do I think that the gift of the Spirit is given during baptism in water:Acts 10:44-48 "While Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word. And they of the circumcision which believed were astonished, as many as came with Peter, because that on the Gentiles also was poured out the gift of the Holy Ghost. For they heard them speak with tongues, and magnify God. Then answered Peter, Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we? And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord..."
Marc, you've picked up a text that may not be teaching what you're seeing in it. Note that the first ten years (or so) of the existence of the church of God found the gospel being preached only to Jews. In a SERIES of miracles, God chose to open the eyes of Peter and other Jews to His desire for the gospel to be preached to ALL nations.
One was the vision on the rooftop. What HAD been unclean was no longer unclean. Then God sent an angel to deliver a message to Cornelius. That's also a miracle. Then, when Peter and his fellow Jews showed up at this Gentile house, God sent a mighty and unusual miracle by replicating the events in which Peter had participated on Pentecost (Acts 2). This was NOT done for the purpose of saving Cornelius!
This is the second and final time that Holy Spirit baptism is seen to have occurred. The first time, it was done as a sign to Jews that JEWS could be baptized into Christ (Acts 2:37-42). The second time, it was done as a sign to Jews that GENTILES could be baptized into Christ (as you quote above).
You note that the text words it that Peter sees that these Gentiles had "received the Holy Spirit AS WE DID," which convinced the Jews that Gentiles also could become Christians. But if it had MADE them Christians, they would not have needed to be baptized in water, as I read the Word. I believe the gift of the indwelling Spirit is NOT identical with baptism in the Spirit which only a few ever received, for that seal of the new covenant was for EVERY person who joined in the covenant, and this unique baptism was extremely limited in application -- only representative Jews and representative Gentiles, whereas water baptism was for ALL.
I don't agree for one moment that Peter didn't know what he was talking about when Luke quotes him in Acts 2:38 (which agrees with all the other scriptural teaching about baptism, even if it disagrees with much that is said about it today).
Peter says that the purpose of baptism in water is "for the remission of sins" and in order to receive the gift of the indwelling Spirit of God. In those early days certain spiritual gifts were also transmitted by the laying on of the apostles' hands, which we can read about in connection with events in Samaria and other places. But the INDWELLING Spirit is associated with the act of baptism into Christ (Acts 2:38, and especially also in 1 Corinthians 12:13).
That this event in Acts 10 is unique can be seen in the response of Peter as he pointed out that it was unlike every other baptism which had happened since that first Pentecost in the history of the church of Christ.
MARC writes -- I don't know why you think that I think that baptism is not commanded or has no purpose or benefit whatsoever. I don't believe that it is strictly required for salvation, however, because the first Gentiles to be converted received the Holy Spirit (the seal of the inheritance) prior to baptism. If they became inheritors, they were obviously saved. Nevertheless, I don't believe that God would have granted that salvation if He knew they would refuse baptism.
Marc, How strange that you would think they were saved and then Peter thought they should be baptized. That's not what the text says as I read it.
By assuming that the miraculous sign was given to save these Gentiles, you seem to ignore the purpose for which Peter saw it was given. It was to convince, not the Gentiles, but the onlookers, the Jews, that God wanted Gentiles to be saved. Peter did not in chapter two think that baptism (in water into Christ) was for salvation, and then in chapter 10 think it was NOT for salvation. Why would you think so? Baptism in chapter 10 was not just some useless sort of show that saved people could go through if they wanted to for some reason. That's surely not what Peter thought or what we should think!
Baptism in the Holy Spirit did NOT save Cornelius. It did NOT empower Cornelius to heal the sick or raise the dead. The signs were given solely to persuade the Jews that Gentiles also could be baptized into Christ just as Jews had been being brought into salvation for these many years now.
And that's what it did accomplish. It did NOT save the Gentiles. If it had, it would have been foolish of Peter to suggest that now that they had seen the sign they should baptize the Gentiles! Don't set aside all the scriptural teaching which shows us what the purpose of baptism is in order to believe that here's proof that it's NOT for what the Word clearly says it IS for.
Marc -- Can you enumerate for me the things without which a person will not be saved? If a person has repented and has faith, will God condemn him for not having been baptized? Will God condemn him for not obeying His will after he has been saved?
Yes I could make a list of many things God says are required in the salvation experience, but why should it be needed? I'm simply pointing out that faith is only ONE of many things involved in a saving response to the gospel. Once you see that repentance is no less needed than is faith, that's all it takes for you to understand that I'm right. An exhaustive list is redundant. Those who are in rebellion against God will learn that He knows and rejects sin. Yet grace covers all sin for which the sinner is truly repentant. Please note that I do not believe or teach that faith alone will save or repentance alone will save or baptism alone will save. If faith does not put us on the path of RIGHTEOUSNESS, it's not saving faith.
I see that we are not made perfect because of faith alone. Peter urges us to ADD to our faith certain characteristics of godliness. Surely neither you nor I want to deduct any ONE of the things on Peter's list.
It's God who will judge. We will be judged by our gracious God who loves us. God knows our hearts. If we are in rebellion against Him, we'll perish. If we're seeking Him in obedient faith, we'll be saved.
4/17/98 -- Today I'm inserting here two notes sent by Asian-American Christians to a fellowship list named Chinese-American Christian discussion list. The question that triggered their comments was whether or not a Christian is able to sin. We all agree that a Christian SHOULD not sin, and will seek to NOT sin. Some say, despite every evidence to the contrary, that the Christian is UNABLE to sin (regardless of what vile acts he/she might commit!). First, thoughts from Ken Fong who is one of the leaders in a Baptist church --
Date sent: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 10:52:50 -0700
From: Ken Fong <kenfong@earthlink.net>Subject: Re: CAC_Mail: I am a Christian
Thanks, DJ, for narrowing the focus of this ongoing debate about whether Christians are still 'sinners.' Both from my interpretation of Scriptures and from my own real life experiences, I definitely believe we are paradoxically in tension, being 'saints' who still 'sin.'
Now, on to the question of where we think this impacts Chinese Christians. Let me frame my response this way: rather than make a blanket statement to cover all Chinese Christians, I think it's more a matter of where individuals are in the course of their development as human beings.
The people from Minirth-Meier [Ray remarks -- this is the clinic to which Doug Williams sent his daughter Sabra when her need became obvious and urgent] came out with a developmental model that, while still just a paradigm, I have found extremely helpful in charting human development. It has helped me appreciate and even understand why different people, Chinese or otherwise, embrace different views on life, God, etc.
First stage: BONDING
All human beings need to experience significant attachments, esp. to significant others. Obviously, the most significant are one's parents and siblings.
Acceptance, closeness, "oneness" are all essential ingredients of this stage of development. Failure to BOND produces all kinds of insecurities and problems. I believe that AsiAms in general, given our strong familial cultures, are particularly good at this. To belong to one's family, to belong to one's church community, these are highly-valued dimensions in most AsiAm Christians' lives. This group acceptance can also be used to threaten any dissenting voice, though. Shame, in a way, is an outgrowth of BONDING.
Second stage: BOUNDARIES
Just as the Holy Trinity enjoys an incredible oneness (bonding), each member is also distinct and separate from the rest. There is a natural need for each person to develop a healthy sense of separateness or, as Martin Buber would say, "otherness." "I am not God, I am not you, I am just me."
M-M believe that many AsiAm families, while pretty high on BONDING, are pretty shaky when it comes to BOUNDARIES. I tend to agree with them. Given the strong residue of Confucian hierchical relational values, it is extremely difficult, say, for younger ABCs to differentiate themselves publicly from their parents, teachers, or even pastors.
Here's where the threat of disenfranchisement (unBONDING) is very real and often employed to keep everyone in line.
Third stage: INTEGRATION
Human beings also need to reach a point where they can recognize paradox and complexity and learn to live with the resulting tensions rather than reduce everything to being either entirely good or entirely bad. This doesn't mean never taking a position, but positions are taken with a healthy dose of humility. Thus, imho, our discussion about whether Christians are still sinners seems to speak in particular to this third stage of development. In other words, those who take the position that in some mysterious way we're BOTH saint and sinner may be able to come to this conclusion, not just because we find biblical evidence for it, but also because, developmentally, we're more able to take this position without it causing us undue problems.
Fourth stage: ADULTHOOD.
This is probably the stage where I believe many AsiAm Christians, let alone the Chinese ones, really are stunted. True ADULTHOOD involves becoming a PEER with other adults. Which means being able to disagree with each other without condemnation.
It also means relating to one another as brother and sister in Christ now, not as a child to a parent figure, for the realization here is that we all have only one God and father and his name is Jehovah, not Pastor So-and-so or your dad or mom. Armed with this value, while I still hope my congregation will submit to me in my role as senior pastor, in my own mind and hopefully in theirs, we all know that they're really submitting to God, not me. Thus, if they question my decisions or positions, that is not tantamount to questioning or doubting God.
I realize I might be taking this CAC discussion down a different path with the above, but I've always wondered how this model -- however linear and imperfect -- might shed light on where our pastors and churches are.
Personally, I tend to believe that many of our families and churches are stuck somewhere between stages 1 and 2. Thus, when God matures individuals into stages 3 and 4 many of them find the typcial Chinese church too stifling, so they leave.
One of the aims of our current ministry is to be a the kind of 'family' where each person is encouraged to mature fully through all the stages.
But that requires that the leadership of the church is sufficiently developed, too. M-M insist that, just because one grows older, one doesn't automatically move through the stages of maturation. If, for any number of reasons, a person gets 'stuck' at a stage, he or she must go back to that stage and get 'unstuck' before being able to handle the challenges of subsequent stages.
Okay, enough rambling. Just thought I'd share one of my operational assumptions with you. Again, let me stress that I realize this is just a model developed by Christian psychologists, but we've found it to be a helpful filter or grid as we try to delve deeper into reasons why people leave churches, won't go to churches, or take different positions.
Ken Fong -- Sr. Pastor --
Evergreen Baptist Church of LA
Rosemead, CADJ Chuang wrote:
> Ben: -- Thank you for your encouragement to work with the Scripture. We do need the Scripture to be our standard and guide to rightly interpret our experiences.
> I do want to caution that we not offhandedly dismiss other perspectives as "weak human reasoning", or based on "experiences", as we seek to understand one another, let's do so with grace (just as we are saved by and live by grace).
> Bill's encouragement to define terms is very helpful. The lexical (dictionary) definition of "sinner" is simply "one who sins." This includes both believers and unbelievers, correct? A believer does commit sin during the course of his life, correct? ...
AND NOW --
From: Joseph C. Wong <JWongCDI@aol.com>
Date sent: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 15:53:34 EDT
To: cac@emwave.netWhew! that was quite a treatise by Ben.
Basically, I am of the same understanding. My attempt to explain the concept differs slightly. Critical to a common understanding are the definition and use of basic terms: Righteous, Sinner
Both those words are used variously. Most common is that both describe persons on the basis of their BEHAVIOR. One who sins is a sinner. One who does not sin, but does good things is righteous.
The other usage is for those words to describe character, or the individual's BEING. Used this way, regardless of the person's behavior he is still a sinner -- or still righteous. When the Bible speaks about the "Righteousness of God," it is refering to this use of the word.
For a sinner to become righteous, God has to "make him righteous." That is the meaning of the greek word, translated "justify." But we prefer to translate it "declare righteous," still the verb form of the word (dikaisuna) for righteous. As Ben suggests, that is implied in the concept of being born again, becoming new creatures, or receiving a heart of flesh.
Most of this I wrote in an earlier memo. Let me attach the balance of my memo, which has some mimmicking of what Ben wrote.
We believe the Bible teaches that in justifying the believer, God has made us truly righteous, not forensically. But the righteousness we've become is not a righteousness describing our behavior. Rather it's a righteousness that describes our being. We have "become the Righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21).
We come to our next question, "What does it mean to be righteous?" If God's righteousness is a description of being, then to define righteous as a "right standing with God," seems rather inadequate. (Bill, your thought, " If we view righteousness as a "right relationship with God" rather than a state of being (holy, godly, perfect,etc.) would that add some understanding")
I hope we can also see that to describe righteous as never sinning, or always doing right is the wrong usage.
Perhaps, like the word "sinner," "righteous" should describe our innate desires, the inclinations of our character. Rather than having a bent to sin, the righteous nature has a bent to do good. This desire to do righteously is not always successful and in Romans 7, the apostle tells us why.
He describes his own struggles with having a desire for doing righteously, but constantly being overpowered by his flesh. Why do the righeous sin?, is answered by Romans 7, and solved in Romans 8. Walking by the Spirit is how we gain victory over the flesh.
There are other causes for a Christian to sin (I've found two others) and we need to know what they are in order to avail ourselves of God's provision for victory over sin and our sanctification.
The second is the "unrenewed mind" in Romans 12:2. Wanting to do good and to do it rightly, we fail, because we only know the thoughts and ways of man (our own culture). (That's why I'm so eager to understand the process for transforming our culture.) What we believe are the true good and right ways are really cultural "lies." The Bible can renew our minds and deliver us from the cultural lies.
Finally, a word for application. Since we tend to treat people according to our perception of them, it is vital to harmony for us to see other believers as ones who have been made righteous rather than as ones who choose to sin.
It seems a great tool for escaping legalism is to distinguish between the two kinds of righteousness. Perhaps we can understand sanctification as a completing, or perfecting of the believer by getting his behavior to match his being.
Done, thanks for responding. -- Joe Wong
Church Dynamics International staff
at the Chicago Chinese Baptist Church
Continued in Study #75-B. Please click to continue reading.