Sermonette for Saturday
This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Galatians 3:2
I spoke with a Christian man one day who surprised me with his testimony. This was a man who was living the way you and I normally perceive a victorious and happy Christian life, reading His Bible, praying, fellowshipping with other Christians, and doing what he could to advance the Gospel message where he was. But he didn’t get saved like you and me, by hearing the Gospel preached, and being taught the Scriptures by a godly Sunday School teacher. He had been brought up in the Roman Catholic church. And one day, feeling the weight of his sins before God, he made his way through the Roman fog of tradition, rituals, and outright blasphemy, and grasped the truth that Christ died for his sins. Soon after, he left that organization and joined an evangelical fellowship where he received spiritual nourishment. But his story got me to thinking, if that man was saved in such circumstances, how many others have been? How many of them found the same salvation as my friend did, and never were able or motivated to leave that church? Seeing them, you or I might write them off as religious non-Christians, declaring that there was no sign of divine life about them. Oh, I think that you and I are in for one incredible surprise when we get to Heaven and see who is there!
Does an absence of divine life, as we understand it, prove that a person is not saved? No, although it means that they are probably not saved. But there are untold multitudes who are living in religious confusion despite having at some point actually trusted Christ as Saviour. There are others, who the Bible calls carnal Christians (1 Corinthians 3:1), people who trusted Christ but who fell into sin and allowed the world to stifle any evidence of divine life that they might have exhibited. By their sinful lifestyles, we assume they are not saved. But many more of them are saved than we realize. So how did they get saved? For that matter, how did any of us get saved. Our text tells us: by the hearing of faith. And only by the hearing of faith.
To listen to many so-called Gospel preachers today, you would think that the repentance required to precede salvation is an adoption of good works. They say such things as ‘Give your heart to Jesus’, as if Jesus would want our deceitful and desperately wicked hearts; He wants to create in us a new heart. Or those preachers might tell us to forsake our sinful ways and turn to the Lord. Nowhere in the Bible is a sinner told to forsake his sins. Forsaking our sins is something that we do because we are Christians, not something that we do to become Christians. If our salvation depended on us doing something of ourselves, it would not be of faith in Christ. And it would be something other than the grace of God. It would be a merit reward from God, not a free gift. Am I condoning those Christians who remain in religious darkness or whose lives are mess of sin? Never! But we must avoid the false doctrine of the neo-evangelists who would require an element of works to be combined with God’s grace.
The Gospel is God’s Good News to be believed, not good advice that we are to follow. – Jim MacIntosh