How do you know that you are saved? That you are truly trusting in Jesus? Do you have doubts about your salvation for a variety of reasons? Not fully sure whether you are saved or not? One thing that can help us evaluate if we have been graciously given saving faith from God to believe in Christ is to understand what saving faith actually is. My goal in this month’s article is look at that with you.
First, we could say that SAVING FAITH IS A TRUSTING FAITH. It is a trusting in Christ alone for your salvation and that He has done everything necessary for it. That nothing else needs to be done or could be done to put you in a right relationship with God in spite of your many sins. Jesus truly has paid it all. This faith is more than an intellectual acknowledgement of the facts of who Jesus is and what He has done. It is more than just believing that He actually lived and died for sins. Remember James tells us that the demons believe and even shudder over what they know to be true about God (James 2:19). They know the reality of it but clearly aren’t saved. Saving faith is a resting in those facts and what they mean. It’s a reliance on Jesus to have taken care of everything for you to be saved, forgiven, and accepted by God into His family. A man by the name of Charles Blondin became famous back in 1859 for walking across a tightrope 160 feet above Niagara Falls several times between Canada and the United States. He did this once on stilts, another time on a bicycle, once in a sack, and one time he even carried a stove across and cooked an omelet. Crowds gathered to watch him “ooohing” and “aaaahing” when one day he came across on the tightrope pushing a wheelbarrow blindfolded. He asked the crowd if they believed that he could carry a person across in that wheelbarrow. After all that they had watched him do, the crowd shouted “yes!” He then posed the question, “Who here volunteers to get in this wheelbarrow?” And of course, no one did. Just knowing that someone can do something is not the same as trusting and relying on them to do it. Saving faith in Jesus is trusting and relying on Him so much to save you that you “get in to the wheelbarrow” so to speak confident He alone can push you across the chasm which separates you from God.
All of us more likely can relate to the man who responded to Jesus with “I do believe; help my unbelief.” (Mark 9:24). We can confess that we believe but at the same time recognize that we don’t believe as we ought to. The good news for us is that it is not the power or size of your faith that matters but the presence of it. When Jesus’ disciples asked Him to increase their faith, He told them that if they had faith just the size of a mustard seed, the smallest of the seeds, then they could move a mulberry tree (Luke 17:5-6). As the Puritan Thomas Watson put it, “A weak faith can laid hold of a strong Christ.” It’s not our faith itself that makes the difference as much as it is the object of our faith. Keep in mind that it is not faith itself that saves us but faith in Christ. Jesus is the One who saves us through His perfect sinless obedient life, sacrificial death, and victorious resurrection in our place. Faith is just our latching on to Him, fully assured that He has done all that is necessary for us to be saved and to become a part of His family. Think of Jesus as being like a life raft thrown out to you while drowning. You believe it will save you. But you must reach out to grab a hold of it for it to do so. Faith is simply our grabbing a hold of Jesus to be our life raft and our holding on to Him as the only One who can save us from drowning in our sin and God’s wrath. Are you holding on to Him for dear eternal life, forgiveness, and to be seen as righteous in God’s sight?
Saving faith is also AN OBEDIENT WORKING FAITH. Not that our faith consists of obedience or that obedience and works contribute to our salvation in any way. Just that true saving faith always inevitably leads to obedience or produces obedience in the life of the one who possesses it. It will ultimately result in works. We could say that obedience is not the root of salvation but its fruit. Or, to put it another way, obedience is not the cause of our salvation but the consequence of it. The Reformers would say, “We are saved by faith alone but the faith that saves is never alone.” John tells us that a clear sign that we truly know God through faith in Jesus is that we obey or keep His commandments (1 John 2:3). In fact, he even goes so far as to say that the one who claims to know Him but does not keep His commandments “is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps His word, truly in him the love of God has been perfected” (vv. 4-5).
This is what James means when he says that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:14-17). It is only a living faith that produces works of obedience. If someone claims that they have faith but there is nothing in their life to show it, James says that such is a dead false faith that cannot save (v. 14). There is nothing to it. One of the examples he gives in that passage proves this. He points to Abraham’s obedience to do the unthinkable and kill his son, Isaac, for a sacrifice (vv. 21-23). Exactly what God had told him to do. That is recorded for us in Genesis 22. It is important to realize that Abraham’s faith preceded this act of obedience as earlier in Genesis 15:6 we read, “Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.” His righteous standing before God resulted from his faith and not his obedience to God’s commands. It was his obedience which revealed the reality of his faith. It showed that he didn’t have a spurious or false faith in God’s promise to provide for him descendants and, ultimately, the One who in whom “all the families of the earth would be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-3). His faith that God would do as He said could easily have been all talk with no substance to it whatsoever. However, this willingness to sacrifice Isaac which would have put the promise he believed God for in jeopardy, showed that not to be the case. In fact, what we see is that he trusted God so much to keep His promise that if He would have him to sacrifice the child through which the promise was to be given, it must mean that God intended to bring Isaac back from the dead afterwards somehow (Hebrews 11:19). It wasn’t just wishful thinking when he told the young men who had accompanied them that he and his son would go on from there and that “we will worship, and WE will return to you” (Genesis 22:5). He was fully convinced he would not be coming back alone after the sacrifice. God somehow was going to bring Isaac back, even from the dead if necessary, in order for Him to keep His promise.
It is important to point out that we are not talking about the perfection of obedience here but the direction of obedience. This does not mean that a true Christian will never sin. Far from it! But the believer will be striving, with the help the Holy Spirit inside him or her gives them, to walk in obedience to the Lord’s law, repenting all the many times we fall short of it and then seeking to get back on the horse yet again we could say to labor to be obedient again. However, the longer one walks in unrepentant disobedience, the greater cause of concern he or she should have when it comes to the reality of their faith. As Joel Beeke points out, “One cannot enjoy high levels of assurance [of their faith and salvation] while he persists in disobedience.” And the remedy to that is repentance. Another way true faith is shown.
Finally, saving faith is A PERSEVERING FAITH. A faith which remains to the end without ever fully and finally falling away. Scripture is clear that a true sign of real genuine saving faith is that it continues and lasts. Jesus told a group of Jews who had believed in Him, “If you abide in My word, then you are truly My disciples” (John 8:31). In the parable of the soils, it is the seed which lands in the good soil, with deep roots which grows up and bears much fruit that represents the true Christian with real faith. The other three were characterized by either never starting to grow as in the case of the seed which fell along the side of the road and was snatched up by the birds or devil or grew but did not continue such with the seed in the rocky and weedy soils. Both of them picture the one who appears to believe at first but over time falls away due to troubles, persecution, the worries of this world, desire for riches, and other things so that they do not bear any fruit (Mark 4:1-20). The reason for their failure to continue and produce was due to them having no root in themselves. No true saving faith. We are assured to belong to Jesus’ household and to have become a partaker of Him “if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope” (Hebrews 3:6) and “if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end (Hebrews 3:14). We have been reconciled to God on account of Christ and can be sure that we will one day be presented before God holy, blameless, and beyond reproach “if indeed you continue in the faith firmly grounded and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel” (Colossians 1:22-23). On the other hand, we are told about the group of false teachers in the church which John wrote to that “They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for it they were of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be manifested that they all are not of us” (1 John 2:19). Their very leaving proved that they never belonged to the church because their faith did not remain. And “Anyone who goes too far and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God. The one who abides in the teaching, he has both the Father and the Son” (2 John 9).
The question should not be whether you have trusted in Christ sometime in the past but whether you are trusting in Him now. Past faith is never the best barometer for one’s relationship with the Lord. Present faith is because it means you are still believing and trusting in Jesus. You are continuing in that faith. While a true believer with genuine faith will falter and fail at times, he or she will not ultimately and finally fall away from the faith. And this is not because of their strength and power but God’s. When Paul calls the Philippians to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling”, he is quick to next point out, “for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13). The only way any believer with true faith can persevere in that faith and make it to the end still believing is because of God working in them in His Holy Spirit to ensure and enable them to.
If you are concerned that you do not have this trusting obedient working persevering faith, the solution is not to try to drum up some faith from within yourself but to focus more on the Lord Jesus Christ and all that He has done for believers, praying that as you think more deeply on Who He is and His work that the Spirit would bring you to put your full trust and faith in Him as your only Savior and enable you to continue on in that faith no matter what may happen in your life or comes your way. Look to Christ as your only hope of salvation today and keep looking to Him.
Love in Christ,
Pastor Lee
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