In 1505, Martin Luther (1483-1546) was traveling by foot when he was struck to the ground by lightning. He cried out, “Save me, St. Anne, I will become a monk.” Luther ended his training as a lawyer and became a monk in Erfurt. He slept on a steel cot to merit salvation by works. He confessed his sins to his priest for three and four hours every day. He would get his absolution only on the way back to remember a sin he forgot to confess and would fall back into despair.
In 1510, Luther was selected by the head of his monastery to visit Rome. Luther knew a pilgrimage meant so many indulgences and so much release from purgatory. Luther went to the Sacred Steps which the crusaders had liberated from the Muslim Turks in Jerusalem. They found the steps once walked on by Jesus during His trials. The crusaders dismantled and brought them to Rome and reassembled them.
Luther knelt on his knees on the first step and kissed it and said his Hail Mary. Then he went to the next step and then to the next. Finally, at the top and while surrounded by others earning their salvation, Luther thought, “Who knows if it is true.”
In 1515, Luther, as a Doctor of Theology, is a preparing lecture and is studying Romans 1:17 which says that God gives His righteousness “by faith.” Luther said, “The doors of Paradise swung open and I walked through.” Justification by faith alone became Luther’s message in the Reformation when the message of the RCC was justification by faith and religious works. If justification is by faith alone what is saving faith?
What are the three aspects of saving faith?
First, there must be knowledge of the Gospel. We must know certain Biblical facts about the gospel of Jesus Christ. Just any knowledge sincerely believed is not sufficient as illustrated by the Jews in Romans 10:1-3. In Romans 10:9-10, Paul states those necessary facts of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection that the sinner must know in order to receive Christ as his Savior.
Second, there must also be agreement or mental assent with the truth of the gospel. It is possible to know the gospel message of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection and not agree with them. Paul referring again to the Jews who rejected his gospel message said, “But they have not all obeyed the gospel” (Romans 10:16). Those Jews had the knowledge of the gospel but did not agree with the facts. It is also possible to have the knowledge of the gospel and agree with that knowledge and still be unsaved. James writes of this possibility in 2:19: “You believe that there is one God; you do well: the demons also believe, and tremble.” What was the content of the demons’ faith? It had to include the first two aspects of saving faith. Saving faith requires more than knowledge of the gospel and more than agreement or mental assent to the truth of the gospel. Saving faith requires a third aspect.
The third aspect of saving faith is trust in the person of Christ and His penal substitutionary death and resurrection. Paul describes this faith in Romans 10:9: “If you shall confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and shall believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved.” This is the act of the will of the sinner who has heard the gospel and has been convicted of sin, righteousness, and judgment by the Holy Spirit of rejecting Christ and has changed his attitude about sin and God and no longer rejects but trusts Christ as Savior. The sinner is saved by grace through faith when he “calls upon the name of the Lord” (Romans 10:13) and he is “justified” and as good as “glorified” (Romans 8:30).
Does saving faith require turning from sin or result in turning from sin?
James Montgomery Boice in his foreword to John MacArthur’s The Gospel According to Jesus writes that the view of faith just outlined “reduces the gospel to the mere fact of Christ’s having died for sinners, requires of sinners only that they acknowledge this by the barest intellectual assent, and then assures them of their eternal security.”
No one is saved if they only have the mere facts and make the barest intellectual assent to the death of Christ. That is only the first two necessary aspects of saving faith. Both Boice and MacArthur add the requirements of discipleship to the requirements of salvation in their view of repentance and faith. MacArthur writes “Those who teach that obedience and submission are extraneous to saving faith are forced to make a firm but unbiblical distinction between salvation and discipleship… Are we to believe that when Jesus told the multitudes to deny themselves (Luke 14:26), to take up a cross (v. 27), and to forsake all and follow Him (v. 33), His words had no meaning whatsoever for the unsaved people in the crowd?” (The Gospel According to Jesus, page 30). Does he mean that bearing your cross, forsaking all and following Jesus are requirements for salvation? This view of salvation is called Lordship Salvation.
While admitting that the Greek word for repentance, metanoia, means “to change the mind” MacArthur then adds that “Repentance, as Jesus characterized it in this incident, involves a recognition of one’s utter sinfulness and a turning from self and sin and to God” (page 32). See Michale Cocoris in his book Evangelism, a Biblical Approach for his definition of repentance: Changing your mind from rejecting Christ as your Savior to receiving Christ as your Savior.
Repentance is Synonymous with Faith
Luke’s rending of the Great Commission uses repentance in the same sense as believing in Christ. “And He said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance for forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem’” (Luke 24:46-47). Clearly, repentance for the forgiveness of sins is connected to the death and resurrection of Christ… Peter said the same thing. God is long-suffering, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. Does this mean just to be sorry for sin? Does this mean that repentance is a precondition to faith? No to both questions. If repentance is not a synonym for faith in these verses, then these verses do not state the Gospel. If repentance is only part of conversion (faith being the other part), then these verses state only a half Gospel.
It is striking to remember that the Gospel of John, the Gospel of belief, never uses the word repent even once. And yet John surely had many opportunities to use it in the events of our Lord’s life which he recorded. It would have been most appropriate to use repentance in the account of the Lord’s conversion with Nicodemus. But believe is the word used (John 3:12, 15). So, if Nicodemus needed to repent, believe must be a synonym; else how could the Lord have failed to use the word repent when talking with him? And there are about fifty more occurrences of ‘believe’ or ‘faith’ in the Gospel of John, but not one use of ‘repent.’ The climax is John 20:31: “These have been written that you may believe . . . and that believing, you may have life in His name” (Charles Ryrie, So Great Salvation, 97-98).
In Romans 3:21-5:11, Paul gives the most detailed account of how a sinner can be justified by faith, and repentance is not mentioned. If repentance was separate and different from faith as described in the three aspects, surely in these salvation sections, repentance would be mentioned.
Saving Faith Results in Turning from Sin
Salvation results in a believer turning from sin (1 Thess. 1:9). And if professing believers are living a lifestyle of sin, according to Paul in 1 Cor 6:9-11, those persons “shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” When a person comes to Christ that person becomes a “new creation: old things are passed away; behold all things are become new” (2 Cor 5:17).
This doctrine affects Counseling
A friend, Deborah mentioned a girl abused from her childhood by her father. This breaks your heart. This girl apparently trusted Christ as her Savior but now is living in sin. I’m glad that Deborah has not rejected her and continues to minister to her. If the girl is a believer, she will be chastened by the Lord according to Heb 12:6. There is no contradiction between 1 Cor 6:9-11 and Heb 12:7. Believers cannot live in disobedience without God’s chastening. Our prayers are with the girl and Deborah as she helps her in the Lord.
Is Lordship necessary to keep a believer saved?
This raises another issue: If Lordship is necessary for salvation, is Lordship necessary to keep a believer saved? Clearly, there are people in the Bible who were not surrendered to the Lord, and yet equally clear, they were declared by Scripture to be believers, such as Lot. Was he still a believer? It is also interesting that Paul does not beseech believers to present their bodies as a living sacrifice until Romans 12:1 and not back in Romans 3:21 where he discusses justification by faith. May all of us present our entire lives to the Lordship of Christ as a result of "the mercies of God."
In Acts 3:19, Peter states that the result of repentance is the forgiveness of sins. John Stott explains what the words “blotted out” mean in his commentary on Acts: Exaleiphō means to wash off, erase, obliterate. It is used in the book of Revelation both of God who wipes away our tears (Revelation 21:4) and of Christ who refuses to erase our name from the book of life (Revelation 3:5). William Barclay explains the allusion: ‘Ancient writing was upon papyrus, and the ink used had no acid in it. It, therefore, did not bite into the papyrus as modern ink does; it simply lay upon the top of it. To erase the writing a man might take a wet sponge and simply wipe it away.’ Just so, when God forgives our sins, he wipes the slate clean.
Is salvation front-loaded and back-loaded with works?
Most teachers of Lordship Salvation also advocate perseverance (see post on Perseverance versus Preservation by clicking) which teaches that a believer must persevere to the end of their lives in holiness, love for God and others, belief in the truth to prove their salvation. Joseph Dillow, however, describes Lordship Salvation as front-loading the gospel with works of submission as part of repentance and the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints as back loading the gospel with the perseverance of works. Dillow quotes several reformed writers who backload the gospel with persevering works: “Arthur Pink has maintained that God requires that true Christians must “‘Keep themselves’ or risk eternal damnation.” John Owen wrote, “Yet our own diligent endeavor is such as indispensable means for that end, as that without it, it will not be brought about… unless we use our diligent endeavors, we cannot be saved” (The Reign of the Servant King, p. 12).
Scripture does not front-load the gospel nor backload the gospel with works. There is only one means of salvation and that one means is “by grace through faith not of works” (Ephesians 2:8. 9).