Do we actually even want to be saved, in the sense of being freed from the dominion of sin? – Marguerite Shuster, professor at Fuller Seminary, in a 2015 Christianity Today story.
It is a great lie of the world that grace is not enough to save a person from damnation. It is a great lie insofar as it is widely believed. Too many Christians believe any salvation coming their way will ride in on the heels of their works, of their generosity, of their Christian niceness.
To be sure, almost no Christian would admit to this.
Because we lie to ourselves.
And because we don’t know what we believe.
In speech — and perhaps even in conscious thought — most believers would propose that which has been the firm teaching of the Church since the Apostles preached it, that persons are saved by grace through faith. This is a deeply ingrained truth. But, like other things deeply ingrained, it is easily filled in or covered up with the runoff of time, the dross of tradition, the leftovers of false teaching.
And so our problem is not that we would deny with our words that grace given by the Lord’s merciful, wounded hands is enough to draw us to himself. Our problem is that we deny it with our actions, which are usually a better indicator of our beliefs than anything we might say.
What good is it, after all, to repeat after Christ, quoting his axioms, memorizing his sermons, interpreting his parables, if we are not also aspiring to do the things he did? It is a huge and hugely believed fallacy that regurgitating a sage’s speech is equivocal to imitating his actions. But in fact one has very little to do with the other. Surely there are crowds of seminarians capable of reciting whole books of Scripture, and yet remain anything but Christian in their actual living. Surely, too, there were mute men in first-century Palestine or second-century Rome, or some simple corner of twenty-first-century parts-unknown, who, though scroll-less, though without a New Testament to center them, know Jesus better and scurry into the dust of his feet more eagerly because they know who Jesus really is, and not only platitudes about him.
Take away a man’s words, and by their subtraction come to know him better.
Fatherhood may be biological, leadership may be rhetorical, kingship may be divinely-ordained or inherited, but the fruits of the Spirit are purely attitudinal and behavioral. Likewise, the life of the disciple, the servant, the apprentice of Jesus is lived in days and miles and services, and far less in words spoken.
We must not become, as many already have, proclaimers of the Word but behavioral deniers. If we preach truth with our mouths but not with our bodies, we make ourselves out to be liars.
As though are deeds were separate from our faith? As though are words automatically reflect our hearts? As though anything we do could just as easily have been accomplished merely by saying it? No, only God can do that. Only his being is that consistent, that whole. For he spoke, and it was.
It needs saying by now that we do not want to go too far the other way, as though it will be our deeds that save us. This is heresy, long expelled from the Protestant confessions.
No good action — just like no good word — will save us.
We must know, and as a bulwark against inevitable cries of hypocrisy I wish unbelievers know, “salvation does not entail entire sanctification in this life. But surely it entails a reorienting of our hearts’ desires, so that we are at least grieved by our besetting sins.”
I think it is partly true that grace causes the reorientation of our hearts. But I think it is fully true that grace is the continual reorientation of our hearts.
It is neither words nor actions, nor even belief, that saves us. None of these things bring us that grace which is all-sufficient in Christ.
Grace comes first, it came even while we were still dead in our sins, and then begins its long, ruining and rebuilding work on our words, actions, and beliefs.
If none of those things (words, actions, and beliefs) are changing — in fact, if anything less than all three of them are changing — then we must wonder if we really have the grace we claim to have. And, when we discover that we have it, that we too have been the graceless recipients of grace, if we are still not being sanctified in word and action and belief, we must ask if we really know what the grace is, if we really understand what it does and requires, if we really want it at all. We must ask, do we actually even want to be saved?
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