To guide us in our thinking about sanctification by faith is Daniel Fuller who is winding up 40 years or so of teaching hermeneutics at Fuller Seminary. The last 20 years of those 40 have been devoted, I think, mainly to this issue in his mind and heart as he has meditated on how the Bible all hangs together under God’s glory for the sake of his name as people, by faith, become sanctified from all the peoples of the world. We believe so much in what’s in this book that we made it available to you this year for 10 dollars.

We wanted this book into everybody’s study that comes to this conference. And if you didn’t get one because you registered at the 70 dollar price, then I hope before it’s done we’ll have some left over for you to buy. But this is the climax of the present 20 years or so, and maybe another one like this will be out in a few more years if I can get Dr. Fuller to speak at conferences and continue to develop his thoughts. One of his other books, Gospel and Law: Contrast Or Continuum? was the beginnings of the thinking that resulted in his other book.

I still find Gospel and Law book indispensable for understanding the hermeneutics of Dispensationalism and Covenant Theology and why Dr. Fuller does not see himself at home in either of those camps. And you should be asking yourself the question as you hear him, “Why? I thought he was a covenant theologian,” or, “I thought he was a dispensationalist,” and, “What am I hearing and why is it different?” I paid my tribute to Dr. Fuller in the forward to this book and I won’t rehearse in public all those accolades again. Suffice it to say that in 1968 when I was 22 years old and walked into hermeneutics in Fuller Seminary, I experienced a Copernican revolution in my life, and I document that in the forward to this book.

I took every course I could with Dr. Fuller in those seminary years. I corresponded with him extensively over the 26 years since that first day in seminary. He has proved to be, I think after my father and after the Bible, the most influential person in my life. And therefore, it is fitting that finally he comes to the Bethlehem Conference for Pastors and sows some seeds that might transform your ministry as well. Dr. Fuller, thank you so much for your willingness to come. We welcome you.

It’s wonderful to be with you ministers and Christian workers for this conference. I’ve never been to this church before. I’ve had a vision of it in my mind’s eye, but then I find the real thing is quite different from what my imagination cooked up. I look forward so much to spending a few minutes with you tonight and tomorrow talking about sanctification by faith alone. That’s taken from the last part of Galatians 2:20, where Paul says, “The life which I now live in the flesh . . .”

The Ongoing Life of Faith

We’re talking about what his ongoing life and the sanctification that is developing is like, growing in grace and in the knowledge of God. It’s becoming less carnal and more spiritual. He says, “The life which I now live . . .” How does he do it? He lives it by faith alone “in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.” I argue that we should add the word “alone” to the text because of what’s found over in Galatians 3:2–3, where he’s rebuking the Galatians and says, “Since you began the Christian life by faith, are you so foolish as to think you can go on to perfection by reverting to something other than faith? Of all things, to the flesh which profits nothing?”

And then in Galatians 3:5, he reminds them, “Do you want to leave the God who is pouring out his spirit upon you abundantly and is working miracles for you by faith and not by the works of the law? Do you want to leave faith and supplement it with what these Judaizers want you to do in taking on some of the Jewish distinctives so the people back at Jerusalem won’t feel that you Gentiles out here in the northeastern part of modern day Turkey will think that you are so completely out of it all?”

No, stay with faith alone. If you’ve got a faith that pours out God’s Spirit upon you and works miracles for you, do you want anything else to supplement it? Absolutely not. I should begin by defining my terms.

Defining Terms

Sanctification comes from the Latin word sanctus, which is translated “holy” or “holiness” using the Anglo-Saxon. In English, we talk about being “sanctified” or being “holy.” English is such a wonderful language, drawing from at least two streams of language and melding it into one great language. We have this richness of vocabulary. What do we mean when we say something is “holy”? Well, the first thing the lexicon says is that something gets separated. And there are verses in Leviticus about how separated Israel is to be from the other nations. But that isn’t the basic idea of holiness. Just to be separated and off by myself doesn’t necessarily make me very excited. I don’t know what good I’m going to be being a person that is separated.

The clue to what it means came to me in a teaching on the Sermon on the Mount, the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed be thy name.” Now, we never use the word “hallow” in English except for Halloween. It meant a sanctified evening back in pagan times when ghosts used to be running around. And here in the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer, we say, “Hallowed be thy name.” Pascal said, “The world is content with words, but only just a tiny few people ever bother to search into the nature of things.” When I see that word, “hallowed be thy name,” I want to understand what it means and the basic textbook that I’ve used when Dr. Piper took hermeneutics with me back in the fall of 1968, I believe, and I’ve been using ever since 1953, is Mortimer Adler’s book, How to Read a Book. How many have ever heard of this book? Raise your hands. Oh, that’s good. The rest of you realize that beside the Bible, this is the most important book in the world.

In fact, if you don’t know how to read a book — and you can only learn it from reading Adler — you can’t read the Bible. And that’s the book I’ve used for a hermeneutics textbook for 40 years and more. It’s not that it has anything to do with how to interpret the Bible, but just how to interpret words coming at you from newspapers and whatnot. Everything that it says about interpreting Shakespeare will apply — necessary changes being made — to the Bible. I believe in general hermeneutics, I do not believe that there is a special biblical hermeneutics. The Bible is to be interpreted like any other book. I better get off this hermeneutics road and stay with my, “hallowed be thy name”.

I don’t remember all of the processes of thought I went through to come up with this conclusion of what it meant for God’s name to be hallowed in my heart. I remember I was at the Young Life institute in Colorado Springs teaching inductive Bible study on the Lord’s Prayer. And I asked people, “Have you ever used this word hallowed? Is there anything in your life that’s hallowed?” And a real sharp Young Life worker said, “My daily diary is hallowed. I keep it locked and in a drawer because its contents are so important and valuable to me. I don’t want anybody messing around with them.” That gave me an idea. Things that are of great value then have to be moved away from the common flow of things and set apart so their value won’t be destroyed or contaminated in some way.

When I visited the Tower of London, I went over a moat and through three or four bulletproof safe-like doors, down several flights of stairs, and you see the crown jewels, and there’s nine inches of glass and it’s bulletproof and bomb proof and every other kind of proof. And there sit the crown jewels signifying the sovereignty of England, what is most precious to the United Kingdom regarding their ability to be sovereign and to determine their own destiny according to their own interests. And because of this great value, it’s separated off inside the Tower of London and down at the most inaccessible part of the Tower of London because of its value. So when I say, “Hallowed be thy name,” what am I saying? I am saying, “Lord, help me to wake up and stop worshiping my idols, the creature, and help me to start worshiping you because of the great benefit that you want to bestow upon me, chief of which is the knowledge of you yourself.”

Because my heart is a God-shaped vacuum, to borrow Pascal’s phraseology. There’s only one way for this God-shaped vacuum to be filled and to be satisfied and that’s for me to have knowledge of God, to have fellowship with the Father and the Son, as John put it in 1 John 1:3. That’s the great benefit. Give me something that fills up this God-shaped vacuum and I’ve got something valuable because nothing else will do that. Everything else rattles around and leaves an empty ache because of its insufficiency to satisfy.

God’s Holy Love

And then God is valuable because he loves me so and wants to do me so much good. He finds his greatest delight in doing good to his people. He rejoices over them to do them good with his whole heart and soul. Here’s the one thing that God does in which every ounce of his being goes into the doing of it:

I will rejoice in doing them good . . . with all my heart and all my soul (Jeremiah 32:41).

So goodness and mercy pursue after us relentlessly like a California highway patrolman. They had a race down from Fresno and they finally caught somebody down in Los Angeles. Relentlessly, they raced that person with helicopters and highway patrolmen picking them up and they got him. God is pursuing after each of us to do us good because that’s what makes him fully happy, when he is doing us good. Even Jesus, who is very God of very God, said, “It is more blessed for me to give and be loving and beneficial than it is to receive” (Acts 20:35).

So that is holy, which is of great worth and God is holy because of his great worth in wanting to do us all this ultimate good beyond which nothing more can be done. And he wants you and me to be holy by being people who become part of the solution and not part of the problem — people who can go out and start to bind up the heart aches of the world and to bring the good news of the gospel, the power of God unto salvation. Paul was so excited about what that gospel could do in changing lives, he said he could hardly wait to get to Rome and likened himself to a person deeply in debt who would be a deadbeat if he didn’t pay his debt of sharing with the Romans, and then on into Spain, the blessings of the gospel. When we’re going all out to get other people to know what God wants to do for them, then we’re holy people. We’ll come back and talk more about holiness.

Faith in the Son of God

Now let’s shift to faith. What do we mean by faith? “Faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.” Now as I try to think what Paul is meaning by that, and Adler says you understand something if you can always say it in other words and then you can illustrate it by bringing in some analogy. The two tests of whether you understand something. That’s mighty helpful when it comes to preaching sermons if you can say things in other words, and if you can give an apt illustration. This book by Adler — pick it up, buy it, underline it. I’ll send you a test on it and tell you just how well you know it if you want.

As I try to construe this verse, the faith that Paul has is a faith that is future oriented. It’s a faith that is looking confidently to the future in joyous prospect and anticipation of what Jesus Christ is going to do for him in the next timeframe, the rest of the day, the next day, the next week, the next month, and on throughout eternity. He has faith in the Son of God, and then he switches back away from the future to the past to what Jesus did for him when he went to the cross and died for him.

Paul has confidence in Jesus because of the great love that he is convinced that Jesus has for him — a love that was demonstrated in the way Jesus was willing to go to the cross. In Gethsemane, Jesus contemplated the unimaginably extreme anguish of receiving the full force of his own Father’s wrath against him for all the sins of the elect. This was so hard to face that Jesus came very close to backing out from going to the cross. He said, “Father, if it’d be possible, let this cup pass from me.” Our sins had greatly infuriated God because our sins were basically the unbelief involved in saying, “I don’t really value your desire to serve me by doing me good. I know you want to do that, but I can serve my heart better than you now by the ego lift that comes from sharing this juicy morsel of gossip with somebody.” Sorry to say I know the feeling only too well. I’m trying to get to the place where I have this as a distant memory. Or it could be by savoring this lustful fantasy or by taking this opportunity and I now have to get even with that person who hurt me. In California, we have bumper stickers, maybe you have them here. One says, “I don’t get mad. I get even.” These are just some of the ways in which we, sinful people, prefer to find a lift and some joy in sin in preference to the joy which God has for us in Jesus Christ. And our preferring such tawdry things to what God has available for us, infuriates him.

He has 10,000 degrees white-hot anger against us for our insult of not believing and trusting him. And so as Jesus was there in Gethsemane, he realized in a few hours he had to undergo what would propitiate this white-hot anger of God against his elect for their hundreds of thousands of votes of no confidence in God’s love and their sins of unbelief. He had to cool down God’s 10,000 degrees white-hot anger so it was down to the room temperature of this room. Our saying such things to God and our votes of no confidence is to scorn and insult God in the worst possible way.

Unbelief as the Foundation of Sin

To prove that we’re totally depraved, just argue from this starting point. The worst thing you can do to another person is say, “I don’t really trust you so I can’t really have any further dealings with you.” Once you’ve said that to some person, it’s virtually impossible ever to make up again. You can be nice and have a smile and say hi, but you pass quickly and go on your way. This unbelief is the root of all our sins. The early Luther clearly saw this. He said, “Unbelief is the sole cause for sin.” That’s found in his preface to Romans, which Wesley read in the Aldersgate and his heart was strangely warmed. I’ve often wondered what parts of that preface to Romans struck home. It could well have been that.

Luther also grasped that there is no way we can show greater contempt for a person than to regard someone as false and wicked and to be suspicious of him or her as we do when we do not trust the person. There is no way we can show greater contempt for a person, and this is the way we acted towards God and therefore we have been as sinful as we can possibly be. The early Luther illuminated things greatly in grasping that all sin stems from a refusal to trust God’s overwhelming desire to extend benevolence to us. And tomorrow morning we will look at the Bible being a part of the law of faith like a doctor’s prescription and not a job description. It’s how all of these commands depend upon faith that’ll be part of our working things out tomorrow.

A former student of mine, the Reverend Larry Allen, who’s just got a church planted and growing in Columbus, Ohio, has the striking example of the utter contempt involved in not entrusting another person. He was doing some prison ministry in a former pastorate. He went to the prison and queried a big giant of a man in prison for life for murdering six people. He asked this murderer, “Which would make you angrier, if I called you some very, very bad names or if I said, ‘I really can’t trust you to carry out what you promise’?” This brutal criminal replied, “You can call me every bad name there is without upsetting me very much, but if you say you don’t trust me, I’m going to break every bone in your body.”

So in Gethsemane, Jesus sweat drops of blood thinking of the horror of his bearing God’s wrath and fury against the elect for their most insolent sins of unbelief. They’re voting no confidence in God tens of thousands of times. They’re saying, “God is a deadbeat. He has no credit rating. His checks bounce.” It’s no wonder that God is infuriated and outraged against humankind for their sins of unbelief. And so in Gethsemane, Jesus sweat great drops of blood at the thought of having this 10,000 degrees of white-hot anger directed against him who had never once distrusted God during his life on earth. And Jesus’s sinlessness on earth consisted of his obedience of faith and not his keeping of the covenant of works in meriting by works our salvation, because God is not served as though he needed anything.

And so he sweat great drops of blood at the prospect of having to placate God’s anger against us elect sons and daughters of hell and to cool down that anger to 70 degrees of room temperature. It’s no wonder then that Jesus almost turned back from going to the cross. He said, “If it be thy will, let this cup pass from me.” But his desire to uphold the Father’s glory in being merciful, and his love for his own even to the end, finally prevailed against the horror of dying for our sins. And he said, “If this cup cannot pass unless I drink it, thy will be done.” Jesus loved us enough to go through the anguish of propitiating our sins, my hundreds of thousands of times of voting no confidence and of your hundreds and thousands of times. We vote no confidence in God’s word, which is worth so much to God that he exalts it above all his name (Psalm 138:2).

And now we live by faith in the Son of God who loved us enough to go to the cross, and the anguish that he faced caused him to sweat drops of blood. I have read that there is no analogy for this in medical literature, so the stress that Jesus was under was unique in human experience.

Much More Now

But now Jesus has risen from the dead. That terrible night in Gethsemane is behind him and that love which enabled him to go through the horror of burying God’s wrath against himself, that should have come against me and you, that’s all behind him. And now Jesus is able to pour his full energy of his love into doing us good. None of it is now diverted to overcoming the horror of dying for our sins and nothing now gives him greater joy than doing us good (Jeremiah 38:41). He rejoices over us to do us good with his whole heart and soul.

There’s that argument in Romans 5:10, which says:

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son . . .

If God’s love enabled us to be reconciled and we were enemies, that’s one big hurdle. And it had to be accomplished by the death of his Son, another big hurdle, and he cleared both of them. He continues:

Much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life (Romans 5:10).

So what confidence we have that as we look forward we are going to go on being saved. Now being saved in the Book of Romans isn’t basically being forgiven for your sins. On the basis of justification, you’re forgiven. Romans 1:17 that talks about justification is the argument for Romans 1:16 that the gospel is the power of God into salvation. So the salvation there is something based upon justification and forgiveness and it talks about all that God does to give us a rich and full and satisfying and God-glorifying life. And we have to be careful when we use this word “salvation” what we mean by it.

In biblical theology, the emphasis is not on forgiveness but upon the goodness that God does for us. Now we’ve seen the great strength of Jesus’s love. And this one now who loves us with Gethsemane love, who is very God of very God, then what is he going to bring into play? What is he going to do to mobilize his resources in loving us?

The first thing he’s going to bring into play is his wisdom. In Jesus Christ, you hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3). So Jesus knows the way through the wilderness for you and for me. My Lord knows the way through the wilderness and all I have to do is follow because in him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And Jesus, with his great wisdom and knowledge, knows exactly the particular quirks of each one of us. No two of us here in this room are alike. We’re quite different and distinct and Jesus knows all about our particular profile and physiognomy and how distinct it is, and he knows just where we fit. And if we put our confidence in him for the future, we can bank on it that he will guide us into that perfect place where we just fit.

Following God as Called

I was supposed to be an evangelist as the son of Charles Fuller, and I tried giving altar calls and I don’t think there was ever a greater failure at giving altar calls than I was. Just think, 7 times on the 1,200 station network of the Old Fashioned Revival Hour, when it came time for me to sound like Charles Fuller and pull in an hourly friend out there in radioland, as you’re sitting there by your radio, I tried my best to say it like my father, to no success. I said, “Are there any hands here going up that want to accept Christ? Anybody over here?” And my father would go around to the various parts of the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium. And we’d go all around and the red light would still be on. I couldn’t report anything. Never once while I actually was actually live on the broadcast, could I ever report a soul.

There were conversions as soon as the light went off and letters would come in of people being converted. Then there was a letter that came in that said, “Your messages are so devoid of power in comparison with your father’s. You must have some sin in your life.” And so this person proceeded to list 183 possible sins that people can commit. They said, “Get down on your knees and pray through and find out which of these sins you’re guilty of and get rid of them, so the next time you can’t pull the net, your message will be empowered.” And then one Sunday right after one of these phases, my father got up and preached on Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, and he said, “Every time a person preaches in the power of the Holy Spirit, there will be results.”

So I found out early on, I was not made to be an evangelist. I was made to be a hopeless bookworm, an egghead, a teacher. I believe God has given me the gift of understanding, not a gift that the charismatics pray for. At least I haven’t prayed, “Oh Lord, give me the gift of understanding so that I can harmonize responsibility and predestination.” But that’s one of the gifts. Why aren’t they praying for that as much as everything else? I mean that’s the gift God gave me. I had nothing to do with it. These gifts were given sovereignly. Charles Fuller didn’t like it.

Bob Pierce came to seminary after I had taught there for two years and I’d been on a couple of evangelistic tours with him trying to pull the net. I couldn’t do it. He had to come up and pull it so that the fish would come in, it happened three or four times. He said, “What are you doing now, Dan Fuller?” I said, “I’m a teacher.” He said, “Oh, you’re a teacher?” Back in the 1950s, those who could would do something, and those who couldn’t wound up teaching in seminaries. But the Lord understands that teachers have a place and he knew that he made me to be a teacher and he slotted me in and blessed me in a wonderful way with people like John and Larry Allen and Doug Knighton and Don Westblade and others of my students that are here.

There are also former pastors like Ray Ortlund and Lennox Palin. They’re not my students but I just want to acknowledge that two of my former pastors are here and it’s such a blessing to have them. So I just want to encourage you, if you put your trust fully in Jesus who loved you with Gethsemane love, Jesus who has all wisdom, he’ll make you the particular shaped peg that you are, right to fit into the hole that’s just made for you. So you’ll have a connection like God made possible for me as I saw that I did not have the gift of evangelism, but I had the gift of knowledge and of teaching.

So to live by faith in the Son of God is to live in confidence that he who is very God of very God is going to go on loving me from this moment forward, during this next timeframe and the one after it and so on for eternity. Jesus also mobilizes his great power, his omnipotence, so that he works for us.

Commit your way under the Lord and he will work (Psalms 37:5).

He will move things around. He will cause coincidences to happen and he will cause downright miracles to happen. If we believe in the Lord, God will abundantly pour out his Spirit upon us and will work miracles for us (Galatians 3:5). Now, this faith by which Paul lived is a future-oriented faith. It is looking forward to what Jesus will do in the immediate future and the more distant future.

Implications of Living by Faith

I want to talk about three necessary implications of this Galatians 2:20, faith understood as a future oriented faith. First of all, this faith in Jesus as the Son of God is a faith that by no means dispenses with the cross. This faith is possible only because of Jesus’s substitutionary atonement on the cross and his resurrection. If Jesus had not cooled down God’s white-hot anger and outrage against me for the way I have insulted him in my votes of no confidence in all my sins of thought, word, and deed, if Jesus had not shed his blood for my sins and risen again to show they were all atoned for, then it would be clearly impossible for me ever to trust him. All I would have would be a fear of looking forward to falling in the hands of an angry God and there would be no possibility of trust. So the cross and the atonement are in this future-oriented faith and are the basis of it. Please hear that because that is so terribly important.

Second, Galatians 2:20 faith has to involve bringing forth fruits worthy of repentance. Repentance understood as a turning to God and away from the idols that gave us a little promise of a temporary happy future, like money or a position of influence and importance. For example, a person who is living by faith in the Jesus that loved him so much in Gethsemane, and marshals all this power and this wisdom, will service a debt, a monetary debt to the person he has borrowed from. Yes, borrowing money is easy, paying it back is not so easy. With each payment, it is easy to think of how nice it would be to keep this money to help pay for my children’s education as tuition costs are skyrocketing, or to put it into an investment hedge against the threat of inflation. But if we believe that Christ loves us, employing all power and wisdom for our benefit, then we will obey his command not to double-back on our promise to repay our debt.

Those who dwell in God’s holy mountain who swear to their own hurt and still don’t change (Psalm 15:4), though, it becomes much more difficult to keep the promise. And if we double-back on our promises and this becomes something that goes on and on and on, we will not dwell in God’s holy hill. Because the person who doubles-back on his promises is a person who is simply not trusting in Jesus Christ who loved him and gave himself up for him, who is not banking his hope exclusively on this Jesus Christ for his future welfare. So when you define faith in Jesus Christ in this way, as banking your hope exclusively on him for the future — and underline that word exclusively — then repentance is just part of the package. There isn’t any problem.

But I’ve been in ordination councils where people have come up and said to be saved that we don’t have to repent because that’s part of works, and we don’t have to accept Christ as Lord because that’s part of works. All we have to do is appropriate the atonement. And this is quite common in evangelicalism today. But if we understand that believing in Jesus is committing your future exclusively to him because he loves you so much and mobilizes all this power and wisdom, and therefore is so completely trustworthy, then repentance from the sins of unbelief is just obvious and part and there is no clash between faith and repentance at all. Surely now if you’re trusting in such a benefactor, he becomes your Lord — a person who loves you so much, who is very God of very God, who has all power and all wisdom.

Someone has said that whatever we hope for in the future, that we worship. This is on page 302 and 303 of Unity of the Bible. It’s in print there. Whatever we hope in we worship, and whatever we worship we will inevitably serve. So we don’t need a movement that was so popular in the 1970s called “Faith at Work” as though somehow faith is a couch potato. It spends the afternoon hours watching Donahue and Geraldo. There’s this couch potato faith, appropriating the finished work of Christ. And that movement said, “We have to get faith to work.” No, we don’t have to get faith to work because if we define what faith is — banking our hope in what Jesus is just about to do for us that is so loving and so good for the immediate and the far off distant future — we’re surely going to serve this Jesus and be very busy and concerned to stay with him because we wouldn’t want to deprive ourselves of the great benefit that he has in store for us.

So when you define faith in the Galatians 2:20 sense, you have a faith that works and it could not be a couch potato and watch Geraldo. So “Jesus is Lord” becomes just part of the picture. There is no problem at all. All this massive debate over lordship salvation between John MacArthur and Mike Chorus. I tried to get into the fray by sending in an article to “Christianity Today,” but it was just a little bit too eggheaded. And I could tell the editors were trying to be nice. “Yes, thank you, but no thank you,” was what they were really saying. But there is no battle. So you see those three things now, this faith in Jesus Christ depends on the cross, this faith in Jesus Christ demands repentance and the works that are worthy of it, and this faith in Jesus Christ makes him Lord and it couldn’t do otherwise the moment you understand faith in Jesus Christ is banking your hope exclusively on him for the future.

Faith Working Through Love

Now, I’m going to draw a sentence diagram because Adler says part of the thing you need to do in order to read a book is you have to be able to diagram sentences. That is, you have to know the syntactic function of all the words. So I’m turning in my RSV to Galatians 5:6, and the third proposition which I’ve called C is what we’re looking at. Here is the way it reads in the RSV:

In Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail but faith working through love.

And then we have to supply what’s called an ellipses, which would say, ““Faith, working through love avails everything, including forgiveness and justification.” If the ellipses to be supplied there should be the opposite of the negative, that circumcision and uncircumcision avail nothing, but faith working through love avails everything, you can’t say, “Well, forgiveness is outside the picture.” Let me try to see what happens now if I diagram this. We have the word “faith” then the line between the subject and the predicate and maybe a participle. This is the way we handle participles that modify substantives. Now I’m going to change the RSV translation just a little bit. In Greek, it’s the middle voice. So it would be “working itself out in love.”

And then I’ll put in the ellipses and supply them — “Faith working itself out in love avails everything.” So the whole sentence would say, “Circumcision or uncircumcision mean nothing, but faith working itself out in love avails everything.”

Breaking with Calvin

In Galatians 5:5–6, it was this group of five Greek words that was the nub of all of the fight at the Reformation. Everything hinged on the way you interpreted this. Everything finally comes down to the interpretation of this. Now here’s what John Calvin said, and I’m reading now from the Institutes book three, the 11th chapter in the 20th section. And here’s what he says:

Of course no other faith justifies but a faith working through love. But faith does not take its power to justify from that working of love.

I hate to say this, but in saying that I believe Calvin was 180 degrees going in the wrong direction. This is an absolutely reverse interpretation of Galatians 5:6, because the faith that avails everything, which would include forgiveness and the lot, has to be a faith that carries with it the power to carry out the works of love. It has to be the faith that is described in Galatians 2:20. That faith can’t help but be loving and good because it has such hope in what God can do.

So it has to be a radical break with John Calvin who didn’t want the works of love to have anything at all to do with the faith that justifies. If I had more time, I could explain how he did feel that works had to always be alongside justifying faith, but they never stemmed from the stuff itself. Faith itself has no power in sanctification for Calvin except that it gives you a confidence that God has forgiven you. And then you’re able to build a happy and holy life by striving to keep the law. But you strive to keep the law not by faith, but by lashing yourself with it. I’ll give you the exact quote for that from the Institutes when I talk tomorrow.

Faith at the Beginning and Faith Through It All

Now, we have been talking about sanctifying faith so far this evening, the faith that’s carried on by Paul now, years after his conversion. He says, “I live by faith in the Son of God.” But I want to point out to you that according to the Book of Galatians, the faith by which you carry on the Christian life is precisely the same faith by which you began the Christian life. The first act of faith is not in the slightest bit different from every subsequent act of faith as you fight the fight of faith and persevere in faith and keep your hope firm on to the end. And my proof for that is Galatians 3:2–3 where Paul says, “Look, you began in faith. Do you think you’re going to go on to perfection now by shifting away from it? How foolish.” And then the same argument is implied again in Galatians 3:5. He is saying, “Look what the faith that you began with has been doing for you ever since. Through it, God abundantly supplies the Spirit and works miracles. And it was that faith by which you first received forgiveness and justification.”

Now then, I believe this has immense implications for how we can carry on evangelism and how we seek to urge people to make their peace with God. The appeal that we give as we call people to come to Christ and turn from their sins. Here’s what we ought to tell people to do. We ought to say, “If you want to become a Christian, you have to be willing to turn the controls of your life completely over to Jesus Christ. You must let Christ now take charge of your life and do with you whatever he wants to do. You can’t run your life anymore. There’s no singing of that song anymore, that Frank Sinatra and others made famous, ‘I did it my way.’”

When we come to Christ, we no longer are doing things our way. We’re waiting upon him to make sure that we’re doing things his way, that we’re following the plan that he has laid out for each of us to follow in fulfilling the will of God for our lives. So we ought to make it very clear to people that if you want to become a Christian, it means nothing less than committing your future to him exclusively. It means banking your hope for happiness and fulfillment and for meaning and for becoming the person you were really intended to be. Only he knows the hole into which you fit as a peg, you’ll never find it on your own. Only he knows the way through the wilderness, you’ll get lost and die. So if you want to become a Christian, the decision you have to make is the decision, “I now entrust my future to Jesus Christ, to do for me what he will do.”

Now of course, that means believing in his shed blood for your atonement and forgiveness of sins. And a person who doesn’t believe in the shed blood of Christ cannot be saved. Leon Morris has told us the significance of the shed blood. Violent criminals were killed in such a way as for there to be a great discharge of blood that indicates the violence of the crime for which they’re being punished. And we have to believe in Jesus’ shed blood because it answers to the enormity of our sin of unbelief. So if you don’t believe in the shed blood, you can’t be saved. So in arguing that this is the appeal we should give to the unconverted, don’t think for one moment I’m leaving the cross behind.

What Must We Do to Be Saved?

We’ve got to unpack what Acts 16:31 means. The Philippian jailer asked Paul what to do. He said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shall be saved.” And Dr. John Piper in his book, in Desiring God, there’s a beautiful paragraph talking about various kinds of people in the city of Minneapolis, all of whom believe in Jesus. The drunks believe in Jesus and the unmarried couples that are living together believe in Jesus. And he has a great litany there of all kinds of people that are believing in Jesus. They are believing in Jesus whether or not they believe him.

Well, in my experience it’s too often, “Yes, I believe he died for my sins,” because that’s what we’ve been told we must do in order to be saved. We say, “Do you appropriate the finished work of Christ in fully satisfying God’s anger against you for your sins?” People say, “Yes.” And we say, “All right, you’re saved.” That’s the way it’s been given and so we get nominal Christianity as a result. Read Operation World, that new edition greatly enlarged over the 1986 edition because of what computers can now do. What saddens me is I go from country to country to country that was once evangelized, but now nominalism is set in. I think one big reason that nominalism sets in is because John Calvin set the stage by what he said about Galatians 5:6, that the faith that justifies does not take its power to justify at all from its ability to work the works of love.

I find it so amusing, even John Wesley is under the spell of Calvin when it comes to what a person must do to be saved. Now Wesley didn’t believe in predestination. He was horrified by Whitfield’s high Calvinism. I’ve been reading Wesley in Volume 7 of the Baker Edition. It’s a pretty good buy. Now, not everything Wesley says is true, neither is everything Calvin or any non-canonical person says true. Only the Bible is inherent. But Wesley says:

Faith in the proper Christian sense is a divine confidence in a pardoning God.

So there you see even Wesley was under Calvin’s spell. But if you take this verse, you can’t come up with that kind of a definition for faith. Faith in the proper Christian sense is faith in the Son of God for the future is a future-oriented faith. It looks back over the shoulder to the cross because without that, there would be no future. But it’s a future-oriented faith in which you have to make the decision that the ego will never allow anyone to make apart from irresistible grace, and that is the decision to let Christ take over the controls of life and to call the shots from here on in. And I would like to urge you from here on in, if you haven’t been doing it already, when you give the appeal to people to be saved, make it very clear, “Unless you commit your future to him exclusively, you will not be saved.”

Old Truth with New Language

That’s the topic of tonight’s message: believing in Jesus. We’ve been saying it in other words as Adler tells us to do because we all have to say it in other words. We have to say it in as many ways as possible. Blackwood, who taught me some homiletics at Princeton in 1946, says, “Whenever you say something old in commonplace (and believing in Jesus is surely talked about a great deal), always say it in a new way. And when you say something new, say it in an old way.” That’s what this wise homiletician said. So I’ve tried to say what it means to believe in Jesus in a new way but in a new way that it derives from Galatians 5:6, where I think we must get our basic understanding of what it means to believe in Jesus.

And if we take this understanding, note what happens. Then when John says, “He that believes in me shall never hunger and thirst,” you can immediately see why that faith would keep you from ever hungering and thirsting. Because if Jesus, with Gethsemane love, employing all of his power and wisdom is pursuing after you to do you a good, your hunger or thirst will be satisfied. So this definition of faith fits in perfectly with the usages of the word “believe” in the Gospel of John, and it perfectly helps you to understand those who had faith in Jesus that had turned out to be false faith. Jesus said, “If you continue in my word, then are you my disciples indeed.” Well, they didn’t want to do that. They didn’t want to turn the controls of their lives over to him. Pretty soon they were calling him of the devil and Jesus was saying, “You’re of the devil.”

They believed in him but they had not committed their future exclusively to Him. And the people in the synagogue who believed in Him that would not confess it for fear of the rulers. They didn’t want to lose all of the standing and the benefits they would get from these synagogue rulers. They’d lose all that if they confessed and committed their future to Jesus. They’d be outcast from the Jewish establishment, and they loved their standing in the establishment more than they loved what Jesus promised to do for them. So you take this definition from Galatians and it fits in perfectly with the Gospel of John.

So if we want to win the world for Christ, I think we better start getting busy and start telling the people what to do to be saved. And we have to say the faith that justifies is a faith that will bring forth fruits worthy of repentance and will make Christ Lord and will do the works of love, because you’re turning your life totally over to Christ who now loves you because he’s forgiven all your sins going through the agony of Gethsemane and Calvary for your sake.

Question and Answer

In defining faith, you talked about trust and you talked about unbelief. I’m interested in that linkage there. Are you saying faith and trust are synonymous?

Yes, I’m making no distinction at all. I don’t have anything in my mind at all in terms of any distinction or nuance of a difference between them.

Why did Calvin think it was so important to keep the skirts of faith free from any pollution that would come from works?

You have to go back and understand that as he argued with the Roman Catholic scholastic theologians, this was the passage they argued about and I think it was an overreaction on his part. He wanted so badly to be something clearly distinct from Roman Catholicism that he made this statement, but this overreaction went too far in the other direction so that Protestantism ever since has been crippled by not understanding the true nature of saving faith as you get it from the discipline of biblical theology. There was a question over here.

What is the danger in telling someone that if they believe in Jesus they are free from hell?

Well my own example is probably as good as any. My parents told me all I had to do not to go to hell was to believe that Jesus died for my sins. I said, “fine”. And we were members of Lake Avenue Congregational Church then, and yes, I believed. But I was a hellion. Mrs. Scofield had to let me graduate from the junior department to the junior high department by special permission because I refused to memorize the Beatitudes and the 10 Commandments. Well, I had no fear. I believed in Jesus, I was going to heaven. That’s the way it produces nominalism. That’s the way it did for me anyway. But a faith like this, if somebody had told me that I had to do this to be saved, what a difference it would’ve made.

Are you saying that Calvin was hesitant to speak about faith and works together?

There must be nothing in faith that does anything that smacks of works in Calvin because he was paranoid about letting faith do any work because he felt, at that point then, he would just find himself on the slippery slope and right back into Roman Catholicism very quickly. I have more quotes I’ll give you tomorrow morning to show you what he was doing with faith.

Didn’t the Council of Trent help justify his fear?

Now, that section on justification in the Council of Trent is an extremely complicated thing to read. You and I have to talk. We’ll get his Creeds of Christendom edited by Philip Shaft and we’ll open up to the Council of Trent and you tell me where you think his fears were justified. Let’s get together and talk this one out, but I simply cannot, at this point, reply to it as much as I would like to. But we’ll talk more.

What do you do if a person is struggling in their faith with a sense of guilt that God hasn’t forgiven them? Wouldn’t putting an emphasis on works just make them more discouraged?

Well, that could be all manner of sins. I would like to suggest that you start this person to work in fighting the fight of faith, and the first thing you fight is the false guilt. And when a person starts to feel very condemned about trusting in his IRA and his social security, such as it is and whatnot, just have them confess their sin. But how can anybody worship social security and the IRA? My word, with inflation about to take off at any minute how can you. When I find myself worshiping an idol, I confess it to the Lord. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. Because were he not to forgive them, then he would dishonor the death of Christ and God would be unrighteous. Teach people to fight the fight of faith. I have to fight it all the time.

Do you believe that faith is the gift of God? Is it just not taught there in Galatians 5:5–6?

Well, I’m a seven point Calvinist. The five points are total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the elect. Now added to that is double predestination (my sixth point) and the unconditional reprobation of the lost. And then the seventh I believe that this is the best of all possible worlds, following Jonathan Edwards, that God has ordained the best possible history to glorify himself and therefore the greatest number of people possible are going to be elect and worship and glorify him, and the least number of people are going to be reprobated. So I’m a seven-point Calvinist. And yes, I do not believe it is possible for anybody who is the son or daughter of hell is going to, by their own will, turn the future of their lives over to Jesus Christ. This will not happen apart from irresistible grace and prayer.

But everybody is responsible to believe. Moral inability and a disposition not to believe is no excuse for a failure to believe. And so as a preacher, I urge people, “You must believe in Jesus. You are guilty for not believing in Jesus,” because moral inability does not relieve a person of culpability. So I believe in irresistible grace and people are born again, not of human will, but by the will of God (John 1:12–13). Unless the person is born again, he can’t even see, let alone enter into the kingdom of God. They’ll go merrily on singing, “I did it my way.” That’s what they want to do. So I believe that faith is a gift of God. I think all of salvation is a gift of God and not just the faith part. I think that’s the point I was making there. But I still believe that saving faith is impossible apart from irresistible grace.

How does assurance work in this system?

Now the faith that justifies has to be a faith that works, so does my faith work well enough? This is part of Calvin’s problem. It does sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t work so well. Maybe it doesn’t work well enough for me to claim the “all things” that faith is supposed to avail. Now, this is a very valid question. Do you all understand the problem now? The first thing we have to do, and we have to do it on a daily basis and maybe more than once a day is to get down on our knees and reaffirm, “My hope in the future is built on nothing less than Jesus’s blood and righteousness.” So I claim the forgiveness of sins, not because my works have reached a certain level, but because I’ve confessed my sins. And the ones that I can’t remember to confess, Jesus has forgiven them anyway.

So as Hebrew 6:11–12 urges me to do, the first thing we do is to show diligence to keep full assurance live in our hearts. And we do that by looking to Jesus and not to our works. Because until you have full assurance, you are paralyzed and you can’t do anything for God. You have no confidence. You can’t fight anxiety. You can’t do anything loving to anybody. You’ll hurt them. So assurance comes first. But maybe at this point, the best understanding of assurance I’ve ever found is from John Wesley. Now, how can the seven-point Calvinist find Wesley so helpful? Well, he is very helpful. He says:

That assurance of faith, which believers enjoy, excludes all doubt and fear. It excludes all doubt and fear concerning their future perseverance, though it is not properly an assurance of what is future as in the doctrine of eternal security, but only of what now is.

And you say, “What gobbly-gook is that?” An illustration of an assurance of the future is the certainty of death and taxes. They will come, you can bank on it. That’s an assurance of a thing in future. But an assurance of what now is can be illustrated by the fact that only as we diligently maintain dental hygiene, doing all that my Mormon dentist tells me to do, do I have, from day-to-day, the assurance that I will never have to wear dentures. He assures me, “If you keep this up, you will never wear dentures. You let it go, and you will.” So as I keep fighting the fight of faith, I have full assurance that if I should die suddenly, I would go to be with Jesus. I have full assurance that no matter what trials lie ahead, Jesus is going to enable me to surmount them and I’m going to persevere to the end. But I have to keep fighting that fight of faith. I can’t say, “Well, it’s all set,” and just kick back and watch Geraldo.

I fall into unbelief. I find my heart loving and treasuring something other than Jesus Christ and I say, “Oh dear, I’ve become idolatrous for the last three hours,” what should I do?

Well, I go back to step one of fighting the fight of faith, and I confess my idolatry and claim complete forgiveness and exercise that diligence that we’re exhorted to exercise on a day-to-day basis according to Hebrew 6:11–12. The thing we have to fight for hardest is assurance. I have to brush my teeth and floss them and all the other things every day in order to have assurance of not wearing dentures, so I have to keep fighting the fight of faith on a day-to-day basis and I can’t just kick back. Does that answer it?

I try to do that but I don’t seem to be able to have assurance.

Well, I would then ask, “Why can’t you?” Can’t you believe God when he says, “If you confess your sins, I’m faithful and just to forgive them”? Or Jesus when he said, “All manner of sins shall be forgiven the sons of men”? (Mark 3:29). I mean, all these promises of forgiveness. Don’t we believe in God? Do we want to say, “You’re a fake to make such promises”? But the point is we have to keep fighting the fight of faith, and that fight always has to start out on the basis of being assured that God is for me and not against me. If I’m not assured right now that God is for me, I’m going to be very upset. I’m not going to be able to be loving or to do any good work whatsoever. I’ll become a nervous wreck, so I must keep full assurance and I must keep that as what I am chiefly diligent to do.

But you see the people of eternal security just say, “Well, it’s all settled. See that decision card up there that I signed at the certain rally?” And when people ask me to give my testimony, what do they always want? “Tell me that wonderful day, Dan Fuller, when you took Jesus into your heart and made a public confession of him.” And I refuse to do it. Whenever they ask me for my testimony, I try to tell them about something remarkable that God has done for me recently in his great love. I refuse to go back and talk about that first act of faith, which is such an integral part of evangelicalism. But if we’re going to get the world converted for Christ, that kind of thing has to stop.