We are now talking about the nuts and the bolts of believing in Jesus. After winning on October 30th, Notre Dame’s football coach Lou Holtz announced that during the days until their big game his number two ranked team would work, not on some sophisticated aspects of football as one might expect from such a top coach and team to do, but rather concentrate just on the fundamentals. I didn’t play football myself, but I asked Larry Allen, whom I mentioned last night and some others who did play football in school, what are the fundamentals? I learned that they are blocking, tackling, remembering your play assignments, and then conditioning (aerobics, isometrics, and diet). So it comes down to four fundamentals.

The thought occurred to me if the message that we preached can be characterized as the obedience of faith, that all the nations of earth, all the people groups of earth are to come to an obedience of faith as Paul puts it in Romans 1:5 and Romans 16:26, I wonder if there’s some way we might not boil down this obedience of faith, this believing in Jesus, the Son of God who loved us and gave himself up for us. I wonder if there might not be some way we could boil this down to four fundamentals. If we could, then the teaching of it would become simpler. It would be easier to train those lay leaders in these as yet unreached 11,000 people groups, the basic fundamentals that would be minimal for conducting a small group and teaching them how to believe in Jesus as the Son of God.

So I want to try to break these down into four fundamentals. The first fundamental I’m going to give today and then tonight I’m going to give the last three. And the first fundamental is going to be that if our confidence looks ahead to Jesus whom we’ve given the controls of our lives and upon whom our hope for the future is banked, that he will now run our lives in a way that will be for our benefit and for his glory, then there has to be some way that Jesus tells us what to do, how to be guided, how to know God’s will, how to know what’s the way we should go. And each one of us of course has a different way to go because God has a special plan for each person. We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus under good works, which particular good works, God has preordained before the foundation of the world that each of us should do. So there’s a plan for each of us and how do we find it?

A Caution for the Life of Faith

Now, as I consider this fundamental and the other three that will come on tonight, I have to be very, very careful. I’ve said that sanctification is by faith alone. Now as I start to tell you about the nuts and bolts, my danger is that I’ll start adding supplements to faith, supplemental things to do that are necessary and helpful alongside faith. And if I do that, then I’m guilty of the Galatian heresy because sanctification is to be by faith alone, I’ve argued from Galatians 2:20 and from Galatians 3:2–5. So as I unpack all these nuts and bolts, you see I’ve got a job, I’ve got to keep always pulling it back and showing how everything I’m saying is nothing more than what would necessarily be involved in believing in Jesus — “The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.”

Calvin failed to understand that the law is the law of faith. Romans 9:32, I was teaching this passage in an attempt to be a Berean searching the scriptures to see whether or not the way things had been taught me were true or not. The Reformers said we constantly had to be reforming, but that had gotten bogged down because the tradition of the reformation has locked in and it’s very, very hard for those that are really deep in that tradition to do anything that would call it into question. I know this from long talks with many of them. I remember at Basel talking with a person of the Reformed Faith as we were both babysitting our children to give our wives a little rest, and this person of the Reformed Tradition kept saying, “Well according to my tradition . . . ” I kept saying, “Well, according to Scripture,” but everything for him was the scripture as seen through the eyeglasses of tradition.

So Bereanism didn’t get very far apparently in that tradition, but the Bereans were more noble than the Thessalonicans because a certain group of them searched the Scriptures day by day, checking up on Paul’s interpretation of the Old Testament to see whether the way he was exegeting it really was the way it should be done. And since they were more noble to do this, therefore it’s right to do it and it’s sinful not to be a Berean. So let’s go to the scriptures and constantly keep checking up to make sure that we don’t deviate from them. We can pound the pulpit all we want about believing in inerrancy, but if we don’t have a hermeneutic that is presuppositionless and allows us to come to the Bible to hear it as though we’d never heard it before, our doctrine of inherency isn’t going to help us very much because we’ll very quickly substitute the tradition of humankind for the word of God, which is what the Pharisees did. And Jesus said, “You’ve made void the word of God by your tradition.”

The Law of Faith

It’s terribly important to be a Berean, but it’s very difficult to find anybody on the face of the globe that is being one. I was teaching Romans 9:32 where it said, “Israel failed to attain the righteousness of the law.” Although she pursued that righteousness, she did not succeed in fulfilling the law. Why? Because Israel did not pursue it through faith, but as if the law were based on works. And a cranky Berean student, as I trained him now to become a cranky Bereans, put up his hand and said, “Look, if the law can only be complied with by faith and if it’s a fiction for it to be based on works, then all this talk about a covenant of works that Adam was supposed to live up to and Jesus lived up to is wrong. The law has to be a law that’s complied with by faith. Covenant theology is wrong.”

I was completely taken aback, and I didn’t know what to say. I was speechless. I had no answer. Providentially, I was just stepping down from being the Dean at Fuller and they were giving me a whole years leave of absence. I had two summers in a year, think of it, 15 months to do nothing but to go into my study and study. And believe me, I needed it after that question because the more I began to probe, the more I began to see that yes, indeed the law is a law of faith. And then I said, “Well, I’ll have to see what John Calvin said about this.” And so there followed lots of reading and indexing of the Institutes and of the commentaries. And when you undergo a paradigm shift, believe me, you don’t undergo very many of such shifts in a lifetime.

I think you can just stand about one, emotionally, in a lifetime. Because I was completely shook up during all that sabbatical trying to find out where I was going to land now that all the old traditional way of looking things had been swept out from under me by, as Martin Luther put it, “One little word shall fell it.” Not quite the way the hymn reads, but you understand the point. It’s just that little “as if.” It’s a fiction that the law is to tell us how we are to obey God by works. The law is to be obeyed only by faith. It’s the law of faith.

But what on earth is the law of faith? Adler says if you’re going to use new terms that nobody’s ever heard before, you have got to be able to say them in other words. And you have to be able to give an analogy for them before you can understand them. And Dr. Blackwell, my homiletics professor at Princeton used to say, “When you’re in the pulpit you can be sure if you don’t understand something you’re preaching, nobody in the audience is going to understand it.” So it does help for the preacher to understand a little bit about what he’s saying.

Patron Providers

He came up with this idea that a law of faith is like the rules that a doctor lays down in giving the patient a health regimen or a prescription to follow in order to regain health or in order to maintain health. It’s the rules that a patron provider gives. It’s like a doctor or an automobile manufacturer who along with this new car gives an instruction manual of the things you need to do in order to get the full benefit of this car. The oil needs to be changed every so many thousand miles or after so many months have elapsed. The transmission fluid needs to be changed, and these rules of the automobile manual are not meant to constrict us and to keep us back from the pleasures of this new car. Not at all. They are given for us to enjoy the full benefits of that new car and that’s why the manufacturer wrote them up so carefully so they would be unambiguous and we would get the full benefit of this car.

That’s the same thing a doctor does and a lawyer, another example of a patron provider. He tells the client, “Now in court you do exactly what I say. You follow me and I think I can get you through this jam you’re in.” I could go on and on and on because there are so many examples. There are 28,000 kinds of jobs that people can have in the world according to the Directory of Occupations put out by the Department of Labor. In the 1977 version, there are 20,000 ways people can be employees and therefore patron providers for their poor, needy, client bosses. Now in saying that you’re going to have to do a little bit of changing of your habit of thinking. We usually think of the boss as somebody up there and the employee as some lowly person down here, but it’s the other way around. If you’ve ever had anybody in your employ, you know how much you depend on them not to let you down. So to be a boss is not some great exalted privilege where you’re getting all the benefits.

What we’ve got to understand now with the law is that God is the work person performing work for us. This is the unique thing about the Christian religion, about the unity of Scripture, about the message of the 66 canonical books of the Bible. Isaiah 64:4 says:

From of old no one has heard
     or perceived by the ear,
no eye has seen a God besides you,
     who acts for those who wait for him.

You examine the religions of the world and you find everybody is working so hard for Allah in Islam. Read the Koran, everything is earning wages from Allah. Obviously Allah is the poor needy client that needs all kinds of service and my, how he has helped by you taking your life savings and going to Mecca. Even though your elderly parents are destitute, Allah needs that trip to Mecca. When you stop to think about it, the supreme being is by definition, one who is completed himself and who is not served by human hands. As Paul puts it in Acts 17:25, God is not “doctored” (therapeuō) by human hands. None of us is ever able to think that we are acting as employees of God, to be his patron providers, to provide necessary services to him for which we then receive a reimbursement of some sort.

That notion is widespread in evangelicalism. Our hymns are full of it: “Were the whole realm of nature mine that would be an offering far too small.” I have to give God some great gift. He needs nature. No, “All I want from you,” he said, “Is for you to call upon me when you’re in trouble and I’ll deliver you and you shall glorify me.” And this is the uniqueness of the Bible. This is what makes Christianity absolutely, 180 degrees, opposite from every other religion in the world. This is the urgency for getting this message out because everybody is trying to work for God. Nobody ever thinks that God works for them because it’s too hard on the ego. People love to think that they’re doing something for God. Nothing causes the ego to feel better about itself than to think I have served God well today. You think if you’ve served God that you must be quite good to be able to pull that off. I think Karl Barth said, “Man in his religion is at his farthest ebb from God.”

The God Who Does Us Good

Now the Bible then is a God who is working for us, who wants to do us good. And so the commandments he gives in the Bible and the aphorisms of wisdom that he gives in the Proverbs, anything that tells us what we would be well advised to do or not to do, all of these things are to be understood on the analogy of a doctor’s prescription or of an automobile manual. It’s so that we can get the full benefits and blessings of God and in no way are we ever to think of the fact that we are doing something for God. Those kinds of works in which a man can boast are excluded (Romans 3:27, Ephesians 2:8–9). But as Kittel’s Dictionary in the article with a Greek word for work makes clear, Paul used work in two different senses.

I don’t think Calvin and the Reformers had the access to biblical theology that we’ve had ever since its rise around the turn of the century. There are places where Paul uses works in a very positive sense, like 1 Thessalonians 1:3 where he talks about the Thessalonians “work of faith,” or 2 Thessalonians 1:11 where he talks about their “work of faith” again. There you have it. Faith works and the faith that doesn’t work can’t be called faith. But with the Reformers, works were such a pejorative concept. They were so terribly turned off, and rightly so, by what was going on in Catholicism. They wanted to get a religion that wouldn’t have anything to do with works. So Calvin, whenever he comes against the word “works,” he just wants to pull it away from anything that has to do with Roman Catholicism.

But in this century benefiting from biblical theology, we know that Paul used the word works in two radically different senses. He excludes the works which I do as though I were a patron provider doing services for God. I can think of three passages where he does that, but he surely applauds the works that I perform in order that I might thereby benefit more fully from what the God who was working for me wants to do. And when you understand that there is that distinction in biblical theology acknowledged by the scholars, it makes a great deal of difference.

The Pathway to Assurance

Now in all fairness to Calvin, faith did have one indirect and essential and vital role or sanctification; it gave a person the assurance that God was no longer one’s enemy but one’s Father and one’s friend. And Calvin says that nobody can apply himself seriously to repentance. That’s Calvin’s preferred word for sanctification, which I have great difficulty with. I don’t think he was right to put repentance after faith. In the Institutes and biblical theology, repentance comes before faith, but I understand in Calvin’s system that it would’ve been impossible to put repentance before thar. Repentance for him is sanctification. So it’s impossible for a person seriously to apply themselves to repentance or to sanctification without first knowing oneself to belong to God. And I say “Amen,” because I’ve talked with Roman Catholics who have sought out my services.

I remember one person saying, “If I wasn’t so afraid all the time that God might be against me or that I didn’t have enough in the treasury of merit, I could be a much more loving, happy kind person. But this fear constantly dogs my steps and makes me a bad person and then the more I’m a bad person, the less confidence I have in God and the less confidence I have in God, the worse a person I become. And so it’s a vicious circle downward.”

I heard that long, long ago, and I said to myself, “There’s something very, very significant here.” We’ve got to have that confidence that God is with us or it’s impossible to follow the instruction manual for how to get the full benefits from God because we’re not sure that instruction manual applies to us at all unless we have full assurance. But once we know that God is for us and we know that all of these commands in the Bible are not restrictive, keeping us back from having the fullness of life, as Satan succeeded in getting Adam and Eve to believe, thereby transgressing and eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They’re not restrictive but they are expansive. They open up the vast possibilities for us to enjoy God’s grace.

The End of Faith?

But that’s as much as faith could do for sanctification. That’s an indirect way that faith lays the basis for sanctification. Now there’s a very important quote in the Institutes, and when I read this, the light went on. All of a sudden I caught on to Calvin. He says:

Faith properly begins with the promises, rests in them and ends in the promises. In God, faith seeks life, a life that is not found in the commandments or the declaration of penalties but only in the promises of mercy and that freely given.

Now you see faith ends with justification in Calvin and then when it comes to sanctification, faith only functions with this indirect value that I talked about of giving you that assurance that God is for you. In talking about sanctification, he said:

However eagerly the saints may, in accordance with the Spirit, strive towards God’s righteousness . . .

Now you see the indwelling spirit is there but it isn’t enough to enable you to make progress in sanctification. What do you have to do in addition to the indwelling Holy Spirit? He continues:

However eagerly the saints may, in accordance with the Spirit, strive towards God’s righteousness, the listless flesh always burdens them that they do not proceed with due readiness. The law is to the flesh like a balky and idle donkey to arouse it to work. Even for the spiritual man, not yet free from the weight of the flesh, the law remains a constant sting that will not let him stand still.

So I guess I’ve got to think of the law as a whip and somehow swing that whip so it lashes me and drives me forward, and that is not obeying the law of faith. That’s not the way you obey the law of faith. When I proceed and follow the manual of instructions for my car, I do those things because I believe the manufacturer. They have tested things and they know what’s best. It’s because I believe them and because I want the benefit of this car that I go ahead and see that the oil is changed and the transmission fluid checked and various other things that are looked after, so that this car will last me and benefit me. I don’t lash myself, saying, “You’ve got to change the oil then.”

Now a job description is the best analogy I know of for a law of works. A job description spells out for the patron provider exactly what the client wants him or her to do in order to fill this slot, where needed services need to to be supplied. So we say the law is the law of faith in that it’s like a doctor’s prescription or like an automobile manual. It’s not a law of works and it’s not like a job description as though I were in any way working for God.

A Doctor’s Prescription

It took me a long time to find a place in the Old Testament itself, in the law itself, where I could find an open and shut case for the law to be a law of faith. And I found it right in the middle of the decalogue, Exodus 20:6. I discovered it because of the trouble Calvin was having with passages like Exodus 20:6, which states that God shows mercy to thousands of those that love him and keep his commandments. And a verse like this, and there are many in Scripture, where eternal life is made conditional upon the doing of good works. Look at Romans 2:6–10 and look at what God said to Abraham:

Because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven . . . (Genesis 22:16–17).

Paul says that those that are patient in well-doing will reap eternal life (Galatians 6:8), which is right at the end of Galatians of all places. Yes, we have to be patient in the works of faith that we produce by Galatians 2:20. Faith, you have to be patient and persevere to the end if we want to inherit eternal life. But Calvin could bear no such talk. He has 40 pages in the Institutes where he has to answer all those passages like Psalm 15. I could go on with many more. All of a sudden I saw that Calvin has problems here. And then I began to think about Exodus 26. If keeping the commandments brings mercy, mercy is what you get from a patron provider and not the paycheck you get from a client, a needy client who reimburses you for the services rendered. So Exodus 20:6 is an open and shut case that the law is a law of faith, in which God is working for us and his commandments are like an instruction manual or a doctor’s prescription.

The Commands of a Patron Provider

Now let me give you several commands to show you how they’re carried out by faith. Hebrews 13:5–6 says:

Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have . . .

There is a passage in Proverbs which says, “Don’t try to get rich quick.” Too many people in the ministry have made shipwreck of both the ministry and possibly their faith by a get rich quick scheme. Stay away from it. FIrst Timothy 6:10 tells you that if you try to get rich quickly, you will impale yourself. I can’t think of a worst thing to happen and have a six-inch diameter stake driven right through my liver. You’ll have an experience like you’re being impaled. And right after that, he says, “Timothy, flee all love for money (all get rich quick schemes) but fight the fight of faith instead.” Yes, we should be diligent in our effort, in our labor, we should work diligently.

When Wesley applied this to the poor lower class and they were diligent and followed his rules, his methodical rules for labor and trustworthiness, they became the middle class. There’s a whole story I could tell about that. So work hard at your job but be content with it and with the salary it pays and don’t covet anything. Be content with what you have. That’s hard to obey but it becomes easy to obey the moment you hear the promise that is conjoined right with it, with the conjunction “for” which gives the reason for why we should obey this command:

For he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”

Well now if I have Jesus, who is very God of very God, never leaving me but always standing beside me to help me with his almighty power and with all the treasures and wisdom and knowledge, therefore I should be content with what I have and not be afraid that maybe inflation will come and therefore I should build up a nest egg.

We had a Glendale Savings in Southern California. They would say, Get a little Glendale going and everything’s going to be alright.” It showed Doris Day just sliding in her nice comfortable chair as the rain was pattering on the windows — “Because I’ve got a little Glendale going, everything’s going to be alright.” And then the crash came with the savings and loans that went belly up. We thought savings and loans were secure, but no. So trust that Jesus standing by you will keep his promise when he said he would supply all of our needs and if we seek first his kingdom, he will see to it that all of our needs are added to us as separate from our seeking. So we can give all of our attention to seeking first God’s kingdom. So you see, I obey the command not to love money but to be content by trusting in the promise that the writer of Hebrews pulls from the Psalms. That’s a specific way to carry out an obedience of faith.

Putting an End to Slander by Faith

First Peter 2:1 says:

Renounce all slander.

Leviticus 19:16 says:

You shall not go up and down as a tale bearer.

Why do we like to talk about the faults and failings of other people? As I seek for Jesus to help me discern the thoughts and intentions of my heart after I feel that hurt inside of me, having grieved the Holy Spirit in talking and bad-mouthing somebody, the answer I get for understanding my motivation is that tale-bearing gives me an ego lift. It’s a teeter totter effect. If I can push somebody down, my ego goes up. And then if I can share this with somebody else and that person says, “Yeah, I’ve seen that same problem with that person,” If I have somebody else to join with me, then it’s even better. So it is just giving into the demonic desire of the ego to be important, to exalt itself, to become like the most high and it’s totally demonic.

My joy should come instead from walking with Jesus and being confident that he will never leave me nor forsake me. His kingdom is sure, it stands forever. Southern California can shake mightily with an earthquake but God’s kingdom will never shake. It stands and therefore I don’t need the added joy, because it’s not added at all. I don’t need the joy of ego fulfillment. It’s a terribly poor alternative compared to the joy that Jesus can give me. So believing that Jesus will work so that I never hunger or thirst is needed. Therefore by that promise, you see, I undercut the need to be a tale-bearer and to slander.

Undermining Vengeance by Faith

Here’s a third instance. Romans 12:19–21 says:

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Well now notice how this is done by banking your hope on the promise “Vengeance is mine,” and, “I will see to it that every wrongdoing is adequately requited and punished within the proper time limits.” God is saying, “I’ll see to it that everybody gets their just comeuppance, what they deserve.” And that’s why being angry and bitter against someone for the wrong they’ve done to you is such a sin. Because it is saying your promise to see to it that every transgression and disobedience receives just recompense or reward isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. It is saying, “I don’t believe your promise that vengeance is yours and you will repay. I know you said it, but I don’t believe it.” What a terrible vote of no confidence. What an awful insult we hurl against the God of heaven when we choose to be bitter and angry.

I just got through reading Dr. Paul Brand’s book, Pain: the Gift That Nobody Wants, and he talks in there about how doctors say that 85 percent of the pains and miseries that people come to their offices and clinics with are induced from psychological reasons, mainly because of bitterness and anger and an unwillingness to forgive another person.

Do you see how obeying this command to be at peace and leave it to God to give that person their just due for their offense can take away mental illness and an awful lot physical illness? My word, what it will save in the way of doctor’s bills. That’s why Matthew 18:35, when we come to the end of the parable of the unforgiving servant, God says, “If we do not forgive our brother from the heart, neither will he forgive us.” And people say, “Oh, well that’s for the law of dispensation. That’s the way it was while the Jewish remnant was still supposed to preach the gospel of the kingdom.” I’m talking now in terms of the old dispensationalism which is now history because contemporary dispensational preachers don’t preach that anymore. I don’t hear Swindoll saying anything about this, and so it’s gone.

Forgiving As We Have Been Forgiven

Covenant theology has a different way of handling Matthew 18:35. And if I had the time, I’d love to show you the diagram of how it works in Calvin himself. But it’s the idea that justification and sanctification are to go along side by side. There’s a fork off from union with Christ and one branch goes to justification and the other branch goes to sanctification. And in sanctification, we’re supposed to be forgiving, but it has nothing to do with the faith that brings justification. But then Calvin does say if we don’t show a certain amount of sanctification, it’s a very serious thing and we may not be elect. This caused the early Calvinists no end of trouble and was the cause of the rise of the Puritan work ethic. That’s the long story all in itself.

But God will not forgive us for the simple reason that we have hurled at him the greatest insult of unbelief. We can’t persist in unforgiveness. We must come to God and fight the fight of faith and say, “Yes, that person has wronged me and hurt me and the hurt is always going to be there, the injury is always going to be sustained in this life. Lord, help me if I see that person and that person’s in need and I can do something about it, to do it and to harbor no bitterness. I’m so thankful that you are going to take care of seeing that justice is accomplished and I’m going to just move myself out of the justice-punishment business entirely because that belongs to you. That’s not my business at all.”

Now that’s what believing in Jesus means, and if we persist in having an unforgiving spirit, then we’re saying to God, “I don’t believe your promise that vengeance is mine. I will repay.” And this is why in our preaching now, we have to say to people very clearly, “When you pray the Lord’s prayer, ‘Forgive me my debts even as I have forgiven those who have wronged me,’ it means what it says, You forgive me because I have been forgiving, and I won’t be forgiven if I persist in being unforgiving.” And it’s very interesting to see what the Westminster Catechism does with that. It’s a very interesting way of getting around it.

But it’s very simple. It simply means that there’s a refusal to believe Jesus. Now, God will forgive this. God is long suffering, slow to anger, but by persistent unwillingness to believe his promise his anger slowly builds and there will come a time when His wrath will be full. At such a time, there will be no more sacrifice for sins, no more forgiveness of sins as Hebrew 10:26 makes clear, but rather “A fearful looking forward to judgment in the fiery indignation upon the rebels,” and it’s a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. So we ought to warn people, “If you persist in being unforgiving, you threaten yourself with eternal hell. I don’t care how many decision cards you’ve signed.”

Persistent unbelief cannot go on indefinitely. I’m angry at this teaching about unconditional grace and unconditional love that is so much in popularity today. Grace is conditional, highly conditional, but never merited. Grace is conditional but never merited.

Walking in the Light

Now another way that Jesus leads us is by telling us to walk in the light. I was listening to Dr. Ray Ortland on the Haven of Rest a while back and he gave this very helpful advice. He said, “Always aim to be 10 minutes early for every appointment.” Now that comes from having panoramic vision where you walk in the light and take an assessment of the way life works. Things always take longer to do than you think they will. Murphy is always there. It’s always going to take you longer to get to an appointment than you think. You’re going to forget something. You have to go back in the house. There’s going to be a traffic jam. Something will go wrong, so aim for at least 10 minutes. And if you have to wait 10 minutes, that’s time to pray and get yourself ready for this appointment.

Now the Bible doesn’t say be at an appointment 10 minutes beforehand, but it’s one of those commandments that John’s talking about because all of these commandments are spinoffs from what it means to walk in the light and there are tens of thousands of them. How many are there? I do not know. Their number is legion.

But we can’t walk in the light and have panoramic vision if we love some one thing in this world that’s going to cause us to look at that one thing and be blown out of all proportion. We’re going to become fixated upon it. We can’t look away from it and take in an accurate survey of the situation. And so when we love the world, we walk in darkness and we stumble. But it’s not possible to love the Father and not love the world without regeneration, without putting your faith in Jesus and the loving things that he will do for us.

Led by Counsel

The person in the small group is retired now, and has been a white collar engineer. He now needs money to meet his mortgage. He was told, “Why don’t you put an ad in the paper that you’re a handyman?” He can fix anything, a jack of all trades. He said, “Oh no. I don’t want to become a blue collar worker. I’m a white collar worker.” Well now wait a minute. The pride in being a white collar worker, you see that’s a subtle way of yielding to the pride of life. This person is not yet freed up from that love of being a white collar worker. He’s not yet humbled to the point of being a blue collar worker where he can get the money easily with all that he can do to pay the mortgage for his house. He’s not walking in the light.

Read the current “Reader’s Digest,” which is about “The Condensation of Smart Money.” It’s about whether you should lease or buy a car. God’s commandment is if you’re going to keep a car for longer than seven years, don’t lease. You say, “Where’s that written?” It’s simply the way leasing works. And believe me, it’s complicated here. I go on for page after page after page on summarizing this in all of the mathematical equations. Yes, walking in the light sometimes means that you sit down and get the facts for several days. Pick the brains of people. In the multitude of counselors, there’s wisdom. Before you make a decision that’s far-reaching, talk to people about it. Get their feedback. Read books on it, get videotapes, and listen to audio tapes on it. Get all the facts you can until you feel you’re coming back over the same ground again and you’ve learned everything there is to know. Otherwise you’ll act in haste and have years and years and years to repent.

Jesus doesn’t want you to have to suffer like that. You say, “Well, I haven’t got the time to do all that work.” Yes you do. Jesus says, “I have the plan for your life. Take all the time you need to decide whether you are going to lease a car or buy a car outright, take all the time but whatever you do, don’t go off half cocked because I command you to walk in the truth and to walk in the light.”

Led by the Spirit

Then the third way we’re led is through the Holy Spirit. I was smitten and did not want to write my father’s biography after he died. There was so much scholarship I wanted to keep abreast of, I wanted to become. As I walked across the street one day, God just said to me, “You have to write your father’s biography,” even though it meant devoting two years to vary painstaking research, reading through hundreds of microfilm reels down in Orange County libraries to go through the newspapers of his era. I was falling behind on a New Testament scholarship and Dr. Martin shaking his head saying, “My, my.” But God told me by his Spirit that I must do this.

Now I’m glad that I have because there are certain American church historians that say, Give the Winds a Mighty Voice is a contribution to a certain segment of 20th century church history that tells about radio evangelism before television evangelism and Billy Graham came along. I was the only person that could do it and God just smote me down right in the middle of the street. As I was going over to the Caltech Track to jog, I had to turn back and go home and start to work. So God does lead us by his spirit. “As many as there are sons of God, these are led by the spirit of God.”

But we’ve got to keep our heart happy in God. In the morning, we’ve got to seek the face of God until we’re happy in God. George Müller wouldn’t leave his room to go out and administer his orphanage until he was happy in God and filled with the Spirit because his experience had shown that every time he did, he left a trail of destruction and misery in his wake. He was saying, “Let the orphanage go to pieces. Until I’m happy in God, it is much better off without me.” The command is to be filled with the Holy Spirit so that we can get guidance that way.

That’s the first fundamental then — to teach people how to know what God wants them to do by his commands, understood as faith, by walking in the light, and then by being guided by the Holy Spirit.

Question and Answer

Can you explain the exegesis of Galatians 3:10?

That’s the big tough one. That’s the place where the ball either goes this way or it goes that way. Now obviously it is physically impossible for me to enter into the massive involvement of the interpretation of what Paul means by “the works of the law.” But you can just see from this verse itself, it doesn’t make a bit of sense. If you take “cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law to do them,” that means that people that are relying on the works of the law. But the people in Judea to whom Paul was speaking would think that it should say, “Everybody who does the law is blessed.”

So people have observed that there is no logic at all in Galatians 3:10 unless you add a whole sentence and nobody, of course, can keep the law. That’s what all the commentators add, but that is gratuitous. We have no business adding whole sentences into Scripture. In The Unity of the Bible, in the appendix, there is a lengthy discussion of this passage. But you see you’re raising the big, bad, tough one. How you exegete Galatians 3:10 will determine many other things. But the New Testament world is just about ready to shake to the foundations. The New Testament-ers don’t want to come out and revolt against covenant theology, though they backed off, but the dam is about to burst. And one of these days, some of the internationally famous people are going to say in Romans 10:5 that “the righteousness of the law” is precisely the righteousness of faith and there is no contrast between them.

But the moment you do that, covenant theology is gone. And some of them have told me verbally, through intermediaries, and I just couldn’t bear to say that in my commentary because the whole world will come crashing down on me. It’s going to burst though. Truth will come out. But you’re raising a big question and I haven’t done anything like an adequate handling of it.

You spoke about grace being conditional but never merited. Would you correlate those two to the election?

Well, God didn’t elect you or me because there was something about you or me that he liked more than he liked about somebody else. That’s what unconditional election means. But in using irresistible grace, what does God do? He makes me take the promises of scripture seriously and the threats seriously. He opens my eyes to see that these threats are for real, that if I do not believe God he will cut me off from the olive tree. I will enjoy God’s kindness as long as I remain in his kindness (Romans 11:22), otherwise I will be cut off. Now the elect take that threat with dead seriousness. They say, “If I do not persevere in faith, I will go to hell.” But the non-elect say, “Oh no, I’m eternally secure.” So though irresistible grace, you are given the ability to see clearly what the Bible is saying and not to let the tradition of theology muddy things up.

But doesn’t God’s grace most usually go to the weak?

Yes, God much prefers to choose the weak, the foolish, the poor. The people that don’t have a good genetic code, don’t have a lot of gifts. He chooses just great gobs of those people. The people like David Hubbard and Billy Graham, he chooses a few of those, a very few. He gets much more glory from choosing the losers in life than from those people that are going to be winners just by their genetic code. Yes, you’re right.

As Jonathan Edwards says, election is not arbitrary. Now it’ll take me a long time to unpack that and I obviously can’t do it in the four minutes that are left, but I’ll be glad to talk to you. Read Edwards’s Freedom of the Will. You see the trouble with Calvinists is they say, “Well, it’s just a throw of the dice whether I’m elected or not.” No, it isn’t. God chooses people according to his purpose. It makes for a better world in which he’s glorified more whom he uses. But it has nothing to do with our innate goodness or anything that we could boast about. So when you read Jonathan Edwards, election is never arbitrary and that’s important to say. It’s all done for a purpose and it’s not a throw of the dice. I couldn’t believe in election otherwise.

What are the conditions for a health prescription and the benefits, as you’ve been describing God’s commands? Isn’t that the same as a person who is serving God to get something?

I have to meet with my doctor’s conditions laid out in his health regimen to get over my malady, but the benefit I get from that doctor is not a tit-for-tat equality with the conditions that I fulfill. What a client gets from a patron provider by obeying that patron provider is never tit-for-tat. That’s what I mean by meritorious or compensatory, where you get a wage that compensates tit-for-tat, like the worth of the services you have rendered. Grace and mercy are never like that, but they’re conditional. You have to forgive your enemy in order to get God’s grace because you believe God’s promise that vengeance is his, but that believing is not an equivalent of getting eternal life. Does that help?

We have always equated grace with merit.

I know, but they don’t have to be equated at all. And since they don’t have to be equated, I say grace is not meritorious, but is highly conditional and this idea of unconditional grace is just wrecking the church, out in California anyway. I don’t know what it’s doing here in Minneapolis?

Aren’t we simply adding works to faith when we say these things are required to inherit eternal life?

Well adding works to faith is to commit the Galatian heresy where you begin by faith and then you have to add something to it in order to really get on with the Christian life. You have to submit the Foster’s Disciplines, or Faith That Works nostrums, or Keswick’s Way to Have the Victorious Life, and on and on it goes. What I’m talking about is when you bank your hope upon Jesus who loves you so much and marshals his power and his wisdom for you, this faith just can’t help but work. It’s like a Duracell battery, it just keeps going on and on and on and on. It can’t stop. Because how could you possibly not serve the one you worship who’s giving you so much benefit? How could you deprive yourself of this? I think it’s explainable to ordinary people in church. We have to explain it to them because we care for their souls.

What kind of causal relationship is there between works and faith? Shouldn’t we do good works out of gratitude?

Oh, it’s a work of faith. It’s the obedience of faith. It’s the obedience that faith produces. It’s the work that faith produces. But you see now you’re voicing the Calvinistic gratitude ethic. After all he’s done for me, how can I do less than give him my best and live for him eternally? And let me just say, returning God the favor for what he has done is to me blasphemous. They are the worst kind of works. I wouldn’t be caught dead doing it. If I’m grateful to God, I bow down and worship him, but I don’t try to return the favor because that’s unthinkably impossible. So I have declared total war against the gratitude ethic and I interpret Romans 12:1–2 very differently. I’ll be glad to talk to you about how I do it.

He meant by “promise” something very different. He talked about all the unconditional promises of the Bible. That’s what faith rests in. I’ve never been able to find an unconditional promise. I’d love for some Calvinist to show me one. So he’s not talking about the promises that I was talking about at all because he’s talking about something that doesn’t exist.

Doesn’t Calvin apply that to all the promises of God?

No, because so many are conditional. So many are conditional and he can’t stand the conditional promises. He takes 40 pages to wiggle out of all of them. Scripture says, “Oh, how I love the law of God, how I love to meditate on God’s commands.” He says it’s because the third use of the law is the edificatory use of the law. But I read all those commands to flesh out my understanding of what it means to unpack believing in Jesus who loved me and gave himself up for me. I see the law as a law of faith and not as a law of works. But you see Calvin, in talking about the third use of the law, says that the law is always an echo of the covenant of works and it’s so terribly different from faith. Well, Luther is difficult. There’s so much of Luther that you can’t understand. Somebody just showed me a quote that shook me from Luther.

What about Edwards’s understanding of soteriology?

I’m not satisfied with Edwards’s understanding of what a person must do to be saved. I haven’t been helped at all from Edwards’s understanding of soteriology. Edwards has helped me in God’s purpose in creating the world and understanding that election is not arbitrary and yet not because of any merit on the part of anybody. But Edwards is, for me, totally unhelpful when it comes to soteriology. I sometimes wondered if Edwards knew what to tell a person to do to be saved? He was so afraid of telling him to do something according to works.

In fact, he has that one sermon where he says, “You have to wait for God to zap you. And we don’t know how long it’s going to take, but if you try your best to keep the law, even though you’re unregenerate and are a total rebel against it and just try, I think after maybe 20 years or 30 at the most, I’m sure that by that time God will have zapped you.” That’s awful, awful.

I say that as much as I love Jonathan Edwards and his picture hangs on the study of the pastor here and you see what a large debt I owed to him in my book Unity of the Bible. But none of us take non-canonical writers as infallible. If we do, we’re in big trouble, my word.

How can you say that all of these people were wrong and didn’t understand the Bible?

The Bible is our only authority of faith in practice. Shouldn’t we start exegeting it for a change? Let’s go to the canonical people that won’t be giving us a curve. These people are infallible and inerrant. Let’s stay with the Bible. Let’s be a man of one book, as Wesley said.