How Christ Died for God – The Cross Exalts God’s Grace (Part 2)

Romans 3:27-28

27 Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. 28 Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law.

There are, however, some reliable proofs of saving faith. God does not leave His children in uncertainty about their relationship to Him.

The first reliable evidence of saving faith is love for God. “The mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God,” Paul says (Rom. 8:7). The unsaved person cannot love God and has no desire to love Him. The true child of God, however, despite his often failing his heavenly Father, will have a life characterized by delight in God and His Word (Ps. 1:2). “As the deer pants for the water brooks,” so his soul pants and thirsts for God (Ps. 42:1-2). Jesus declared, “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me” (Matt. 10:37). The true believer will proclaim with Asaph, “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And besides Thee, I desire nothing on earth” (Ps. 73:25). Love for God will be the direction of the true believer’s life, if not the perfection of it. Peter declares, “Unto you therefore which believe He is precious” (1 Pet. 2:7, KJV).  We need to note that we are not talking about warm and gushy feelings here.  We are talking about an emotional response, yes, but a response that affects all of the being.  Our love for Jesus must affect our behavior and our thinking, or it is not true love.  Anyone who proclaims that they love God, yet lives in violation of His Word does not truly love Him Biblically.

A second reliable evidence of saving faith is repentance from sin and the hatred of it that always accompanies true contrition. This second mark of saving faith is the reverse side of the first. The person who genuinely loves God will have a built-in hatred of sin. It is impossible to love two things that are contradictory of one another. “No one can serve two masters,” Jesus declared categorically; “for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to one and despise the other” (Matt. 6:24). To love the holy and righteous God is, almost by definition, to have a deep abhorrence of sin.

“He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper,” the writer of Proverbs declares, “but he who confesses and forsakes them will find compassion” (Prov. 28:13). This verse links the two inseparable parts of true repentance: the confession and forsaking of sin.

When confronted by Nathan concerning his sins of adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Uriah, David’s repentance was genuine, as reflected in Psalm 51. “Be gracious to me, O God, according to Thy lovingkindness; according to the greatness of Thy compassion blot out my transgressions,” he prayed. “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against Thee, Thee only, I have sinned, and done what is evil in Thy sight” (vv. 1-4).

The true believer often hates sin even while he is doing it and always after he has done it, because it is completely contrary to his new nature in Christ. Even though a believer’s humanness sometimes draws him into sin and, like Paul, he does the very thing he knows he ought not to do (Rom. 7:16), he will have no peace of conscience until he repents of it.

True repentance is more than simply sorrow for sin. Judas became bitterly sorry for His sin of betraying Jesus, to the extreme of committing suicide; but he did not repent of his betrayal or ask Jesus’ forgiveness. Paul commended the Corinthian believers for being “made sorrowful to the point of repentance; for you were made sorrowful according to the will of God” (2 Cor. 7:9). True repentance always involves godly sorrow, sorrow that one has disobeyed and offended his Lord.

No Christian becomes completely sinless until he goes to meet the Lord. “If we say that we have no sin,” John says, “we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.” But he goes on to give the beautifully encouraging word that “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8-9).

If a person’s sin does not bother him and increasingly put him under conviction about it, that person’s salvation is questionable. The test for true repentance is not simply sorrow for the way sin harms oneself (as it always does), but sorrow for the sin’s offense against the holy Lord, which above all else leads a believer to implore God’s forgiveness.

Someone has written, “When God touches a life, He breaks the heart. Where He pours out the spirit of grace, there are not a few transient sighs that agitate the breast, there are heart-rending pangs of sorrow.”

A third reliable evidence of true faith is genuine humility. A person cannot be saved as long as he trusts in and exalts himself. This is what the Scripture calls “Self Righteousness”.  Salvation begins by confessing one’s poverty of spirit (Matt. 5:3) and the willingness to deny self and take up the cross of Christ (Matt. 16:24). Like the prodigal son, the true believer who sins will eventually come “to his senses,” his spiritual senses that convict him of sin. He will then, again like the prodigal, go to his heavenly Father and humbly confess his sin and his unworthiness of forgiveness, while pleading for it on the basis of his Father’s grace (see Luke 15:17-21).  This is the crucial problem with men.  We are very willing to admit that we need God’s help to be salved, but we are not willing to admit that we are not capable of participating in our own salvation at all.  Humility does not say that we are damaged, it admits tht we are disabled and that God must do all of the work needful. 

A fourth reliable evidence of true faith is devotion to God’s glory which is closely related to the love of God and repentance of sin. The true believer will say with Paul, “My earnest expectation and hope [is] that I shall not be put to shame in anything, but that with all boldness, Christ shall even now, as always, be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death” (Phil. 1:20). As already noted, although that desire will not be seen in perfection in the true believer’s life, it will always be evidenced in the direction of his life.

A fifth reliable evidence of true faith is prayer. “Because you are sons,” Paul told the Galatian believers, “God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:6). The heart of a genuine Christian cannot help calling out to God, who is his heavenly Father and whose own Spirit is within him to generate that yearning.  That is the impact of this verse.  God’s Spirit, if truly present, continually moves the Christian to cry out to God – his Father.

Every genuine Christian will freely admit that he does not pray as often or as earnestly and persistently as he should. But in his innermost being, communion with his heavenly Father will be the desire of his heart. As Jonathan Edwards succinctly observed, “Hypocrites [are] deficient in the duty of prayer,”.

A sixth mark of saving faith is selfless love, not only for God, as in the first mark, but also for other people, especially fellow Christians. “The one who says he is in the light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now. The one who loves his brother abides in the light and there no cause for stumbling in him” (1 John 2:9-10). Later in that letter John said, “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death” (3:14). The person who does not sincerely care for the welfare of true believers is himself not a true believer, but still abides in spiritual death. Again in that letter John says, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and every one who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (4:7-8).

A seventh mark of saving faith is separation from the world. Believers are called to be in the world but not of it. They are in the world to testify to Christ, a central testimony of which is not to reflect the world’s standards and ways (see John 17:15-18). “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world” (1 John 2:15-16). On the other hand, “Whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. And who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” (1 John 5:4-5). The person who has saving faith has “received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God” (1 Cor. 2:12).

An eighth mark of saving faith is spiritual growth. The central truth of the parable of the soils (Matt. 13:3-23) is that true believers will always grow spiritually to varying degrees, because by faith they have genuinely received the seed of the gospel. “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil,” Jesus said on another occasion; “and [he] goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts up and grows—how he himself does not know. The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head” (Mark 4:26-28). Like the farmer and his crops, the believer does not understand how he grows spiritually, but he knows that because he has spiritual life within him he will grow (see also Eph. 4:13; Phil. 1:6).

The ninth and final mark of saving faith is obedient living. “By this we know that we have come to know Him [Christ],” John says, “if we keep His commandments. The one who says, ‘I have come to know Him,’ and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him” (1 John 2:3a; cf. 3:10). Although no one is saved by his good works, those who are truly saved will produce good works, because “we are [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).