Ask the Pastors S7 E1: “How is faith not itself a work?"
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Well, welcome to the Ask the Pastors podcast, a segment of the West Hills Podcast where you have the opportunity to ask your questions and receive biblically grounded, pastorally sensitive answers from our pastoral staff. My name is Brian. I'm your host, one of the pastors. I'm joined by our lead pastor Will. Here you go, pastor tha Howdy and Pastor Austin. Good afternoon guys. What was the highlight of your summer that was going to give me a better icebreaker? He didn't.
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That's fun.
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What was the highlight of your summer? Austin?
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July 4th start. Yeah, July 4th. That, that was the low point of my summer. Yikes. The high point of the summer though was we went for a couple days on vacation to Grand Rapids. Never been. And people from Missouri seemed to go to Michigan on vacation, having only been to Detroit. I was surprised, but we went and found out it was fantastic and I think it might just move there. Well, I won't do, I was thinking about it. I think about doing all kinds of things.
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He was on Zillow looking at houses already. That's right. What about you? My highlight, I'm going to give two. We did a family vacation early, early summer May, which is just before school gets out with my family to Myrtle Beach, which is just always fun to be with my family, love being at the beach. And my second would be youth camp. We went to the mountains, Chattanooga area and had a great time. It was wonderful. Awesome.
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Yeah. All cool spots. Everyone's highlight was leaving St. Louis. I'm just going to put that out. Mine's not. Mine was also leaving St. Louis and we go to Michigan every summer. Praise God. And even farther north and Harbor Springs. And it was, yeah, as probably the best trip we've ever done there. It was just great. And the highlight, if you want me to be real specific was getting to teach my kids and my nieces to ski and to kneeboard and jet ski and just, yeah, it was hot up there too. So we had the boat out and jet ski out every day and it was great. Love it.
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That's awesome.
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Yeah. How about you?
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I was going to say getting married and then we probably say that which we did leave. We did eventually leave. Unfortunately, the elevation in Colorado got us really good. Another highlight. I got new gums. I'm brand new
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High.
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It was also a low
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Gross. I mean, having gum was a highlight.
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My gums are not receding anymore.
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Getting
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Gums probably. It was a real low, actually, I had a gun graft. Not a fan. Would not encourage anyone to get that. Unless your doctor says you might need it. You should probably get it. Well, it's great to be back. Great to be back. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. If you're on Facebook Live, maybe you have one person. Oh, we might have more. I can't see it from all the way over here. You're the one. I'm the one. I'm watching it on my phone. Well, you have a question today. Who is this question from? I actually didn't write that down.
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Darcy. Darcy. Darcy se.
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Oh, Darcy, thanks so much for your question, Darcy. It's a good one. How is responding to the gospel in faith not work?
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Not in and of itself or work because we talk about salvation being through faith not of works lest anyone should boast. Ephesians two, eight. So if it's something we have to do, believe in Jesus, how is that not a work, something that is performed on? You said you're going to just
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Answer it. Just riff on it.
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Do it and you said it.
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No, I had a different question in the ask the pastors podcast database, which was a one
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Sentence chance that was, oh, this
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One's more. This one has probably more sentence.
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Okay, good. Good.
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I think more than one sentence couldn't be said. Oh good,
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Good, good.
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Let's
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Do it.
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Yeah. I think I wanted to start at Galatians two where you just were this past week will on how we're justified not by works the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ as a starting point. So that phrase there in Galatians works of the law has been a center of a lot of debate in scholarship on Paul. There are at least three options for how to understand what Paul is talking about. Option one, he's talking about the law that is given through Moses at Sinai. So the Torah, the 613 laws that are in those books of the Bibles that the Jews have been following since the covenant at Sinai. Option number two might be a vague legalism. So for example, virtuous acts that do more good in one's life end up on one side of the scale and then bad and harmful deeds end up on the other side of the scale so that we could appease the divine.
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Option three, and I just bring this up because there has been more debate on this in the past 50 or so years, is that works of the law doesn't require, I'm sorry, referring to the law of Moses, but is referring more to cultural identity markers about being ethnically Jewish. That's been especially popularized since 1977 when a guy named EP Sanders wrote a book called Paul and Palestinian Judaism. So first of all, depending on how we define works, both in Darcy's questions just in general or in this case in Galatians, I think helps us answer the question a little bit more carefully. Because on the one hand in Galatians we see that works of the law, and I'm going to say that and argue that in Galatians that Paul is talking about the law according to Moses, throughout, he's making contrast between the law given to Moses versus faith in Christ Jesus based on his completed work, therefore not the legalism option and not the ethnic or cultural boundary markers option.
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It's to say the contrast is occurring between the law of Moses versus faith in Christ. In that sense, we still receive the gift of Christ by faith. Faith in this case, in the sort of reformed understanding of salvation is an instrument. So think of it by analogy. If you're going to join an orchestra, you got to play in the orchestra, you're given the trombone to play, you still have to play the instrument, but you've been given the instrument. So for example, then Christ gives the instrument of faith to us that we might exercise it. He is still the content of the gospel. So in the one sense, do we do a work by exercising faith? Yes. Is it a meritorious work? No. Anybody want to respond to that? Will's
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Typing away.
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I'm still thinking taking notes. Go ahead. I got another spam phone call. Just so you all know, somebody in Guatemala really needs a sponsor, needs a compassionate
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Sponsor. Step up. I'm sorry everyone. I yeah, I agree with how Austin laid up a lot of that in engaging with it, and I think I'd bring it back a little bit with how it is we think about salvation as a whole will reference for by grace you've been saved through faith. It's not of yourself, but also we know that we are dead in the trespasses of sins. That to take your illustration further is Matthew Barrett in an article puts it like this of when you walk into a room in the light comes on, the reason the light comes on is because a switch has been flipped and therefore electric currents go through and the light appears in the same way. Putting that to our salvation, that in and of ourselves we are dead in our trespasses and sins that it takes as Jesus says, no one comes to the father except the Father call him, draws him to myself that there is a effectual calling as referred to it. A the Holy Spirit gives new birth, gives regeneration because even faith is considered a gift that takes a work outside of ourself, inside of ourself. That then brings about a response in our hearts that even the work of faith, as we call it, is a divine work of God inside of ourselves.
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Can you connect that to the work of the Holy Spirit so people can see how that kind of comes together? Because I think that the, for some people is that well then how much faith do I have to instrumentalize? How much faith do I have to do to then be saved? And that's kind of missing the point. So the work of the spirit then in this process would be
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To cause regeneration, illumination in our heart to our own deadness in new life that the Holy Spirit, if we think about it in how it's referred to our hearts of stone become a heart of beating flesh, that the spirit causes new life to be in our hearts and our response of faith is in light of the work that he has already done inside of us.
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So faith, I'm sorry, is faith a work in one sense? Yes, but not a meritorious work. Correct. It's an instrument that we exercise by which we receive Christ and all his benefits which are sufficient to save us
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Because even an act of true faith, salvific faith is a admission of our own lack of ability to earn any sort of salvation. We cannot in our own flesh achieve this that instead the opposite. It's a admission of we can do no saving work in and of ourselves.
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I'm also thinking to the listener who then it might be asking, well how do I know if I've had faith or true saving faith? And my thought would be to reflect on how repentance and faith are two sides of the same coin. So when we talk about faith, it's probably helpful for us to clarify that what we don't merely mean is an intellectual
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Ascent
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Upon Jesus of Nazareth. It's not less than that. We certainly have to believe that Jesus Christ is in fact Lord, that he did as the second person of the Trinity take upon flesh, live an obedient life, die a sacrificial death in our place and be raised on the third day and then ace to heaven. We believe all of those things at the same time that is indicated by a life that practices repentance over and over. So the act of turning from sin and turning to him
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A couple texts that are most convincing for me that faith itself cannot be a work of ours but rather must be a gift given from God. First of all, forgive me if I'm restating anything that y'all said yet, but Ephesians two eight is really the one that is I think at the crux of all this where Paul says is explaining, saving faith. And actually if you back up even before that and look at the first part of Ephesians two in particular verse one where Paul just starts out and says, and you were dead in your trespasses. So if we just start with that in whether you want to call that a metaphor or whatever, dead people don't work. So we'll just start with that then you fast forward to verse eight where he explains it is by grace that you're saved through faith and this is not of yourselves lest anyone should boast. It's a free gift of God, not by works. And so a couple of things to point out there and we're formed thinkers like us point out that this pronoun
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In the Greek in that verse eight is in the neuter case, grace is a singular feminine noun. In Greek you have feminine nouns, masculine nouns, neuter nouns, grace is feminine, carries faith, pieties is feminine. And then this is a neuter pronoun, which means it can't just refer to the grace that is the free gift. That's not by works or specifically he says this is not of works. So it can't just be the grace that is grace is literally a free gift. So it can't just be well the grace is the free gift part that's not of works that God brings to the table by sending Jesus and that the faith is something he calls you to do and it's your part. It's like you got to meet in the middle and he puts up his part and you put up your part. It can't be that because this is not singular feminine, it's neuter.
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In other words, it must refer to the whole process of salvation is God's doing the whole thing. The grace is his doing the faith is his doing the by grace, the through faith. It's all it his doing. And if you want to push that even further, you can cross reference and look at Romans four, four, Romans 11, six where Paul says in those two verses he says Now to the one who works, his wage is not credited as a favor but is what is due. And then he says in Romans 11, six, but if it is by grace it's no longer on the basis of works otherwise grace is no longer grace. So Paul there is just helping us understand that grace and works are mutually exclusive for something to be grace, to be a gift, it by definition cannot be earned if it was earned at all.
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If you contributed even a penny then, and I use the analogy in a recent sermon about this where we had a church in our denomination that was buying, well they were given a building by another old dying church, but for legal purposes it couldn't be a gift. It had to be bought. So they bought it for a dollar. Everybody bought a brought a penny church and well that's technically, I mean Paul's point is that is technically now not no longer a gift. Technically they bought it and that was the whole point of legally why they had to do that. Paul saying that the opposite thing here with grace, and specifically if we go back to Ephesians two now he will say the same thing about salvation again, this is not of yourselves, it's a free gift of God, not by works lest than anyone should boas.
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So this is not just grace but salvation, the whole thing, the whole process is a gift from God. A couple other passages that I think are telling Philippians 1 29 and 30 Paul writing in the church in Philippi says, for it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake. So Paul's saying it is granted to you, it's been given to you, read in there a gift that you should suffer suffering as a gift. So that's kind of his point there. But the thing that he slips in there with when he is talking about suffering is he says not only that you should believe in him. So again, the suffering is a gift, but for our conversation here, the important thing is the believing in him has been granted to you.
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It's been given to you as a gift that you should believe in him. You can't take any credit for I'm really great, I decided to believe in Jesus. You think about what Jesus says in John six, I think it's 44 or he says, no one can come to the father or come to me unless the father draws him. So none of us can just wake up one day and decide, I think I'll decide to follow Jesus today. God has to draw you, call you, grant that to you. Again, it's a gift. All of this going back to bring it back to Darcy's question about is faith a work? No, it's a gift. It's something that has to be granted given to us. Another one second Peter one, one, Peter starts out, second letter Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ. And he says, writing to those who have obtained a faith, now that word obtained in English could be misconstrued as I did something to acquire this for myself, but really obtained just means you got it right.
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So it's kind of neutral, certainly in the Greek it's had you get it and Sam storms actually points out that it's even less so neutral that it's it's it is obtained by no merit of your own. The Greek court has that connotation, but all we have to do is keep reading on and Peter clears it up for you, he says to those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours, and then he says, by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ. So how did we obtain the faith equal to even Peters, even the apostles, we talked about this last week too, just one standard and we're all sorry, one merit, we're all on equal footing at the foot of the cross. God doesn't make distinctions between the really saved and the kind of saved. So an equal standing, how do we obtain it?
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How do we obtain this faith by the righteousness of our God and savior Jesus Christ. He doesn't say you've obtained a faith by doing a great thing, deciding to believe it's like it is by the righteousness of God, the goodness of God and your savior Jesus. That you get it, you obtain it, you acquire it. And one more Acts 13 verse 48. So the context here is Paul first missionary journey and he's preaching to a mixed crowd. Some Jews, some Gentiles, the Jews get angry and want to throw 'em out. I think that the Gentiles are jazzed up about hearing the gospel. But here's the verse, how the kind of passage there're ends is it says, and when the gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying, glorifying the word of the Lord. And it says, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed.
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And this TGC article that we were both, I think reading the author points out, he says, notice the text does not say, and as many as believed, were appointed to eternal life as if we do the decisive thing of believing. And then your name gets written in the lamb's book of life. We know, I mean Revelation said the names that are there, they've been there since the foundation of the world. So it is God's sovereign choosing names are already written as many as were appointed, your names are in the book. Those are the ones who believed. And so again, I think that goes back to what y'all were saying about again, we can make it a bigger issue of, again, reform theology and the order of salvation and God who does the decisive work and all of that. But at the end of the day, I think all of those, and you could probably pull in, I don't know, we could probably talk more and pull in another half dozen that come to mind of just, again, faith being a gift and God's gift, God's choosing him, giving it not something that we do that we can take any credit for.
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I just don't really know how you, I mean I tried to listen to some Armenians and whatever interpret Ephesians two eight and that's interesting's pretty confusing. So I think again, straightforward, plain reading of the text is it's all God's doing.
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I do have a but what about when? But what about, what about James? What about James chapter two? Because he says was not Abraham, our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar. You see that faith was active along with works and faith was completed by his works and the scripture was fulfilled that says Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness and he was called a friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. So then how do we put Paul and James together? Because Luther as an example, he hated this passage and took all kinds of issues with it. In
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Fact, I wanted to take James out of the Bible
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And some critical it's
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Not too late
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And some critical scholars, I'm saying those that don't believe the Bible would say that this was actually a Jewish text that Christians later added Jesus in or whatever added it to their canon. I'm not saying I agree with that position. I wholeheartedly
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Don't. I was just saying on Sunday that James seemed to be like the Jesus plus nothing holdout of all of 'em. I mean, sorry, go ahead.
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No, so I'm just thinking for the listener that's thinking to themselves, but yeah, but I read James and it says, it it right there, a plain reading of the text pastors. How do I put these two beliefs together?
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What do you think? Go for it. I talked last, somebody else is talking
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And I asked the question, this is how, no, I think what James is getting at in this is that it's not that our well faith without works is dead. That Abraham in doing this, what we could call his work of sacrificing his son and it being counted as righteousness was an act of faith in and of himself that he is seeking to act, believing in God's plan that God is true, that God is doing something. So he in and of himself is responding to a reality about God. And again, the Old Testament, they are saved in their faith what we could call their faith, their belief in a looking forward where we respond in a faith of looking backwards to what Christ has already done on the cross. That as Abraham is working out these things, because right before that you foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless in the NIV? And then he goes into Abraham and even the same way he was not even Rahab, the prostitute considered righteous for what she had did and it gave lodging to the spise of them off in different directions that again, it is a response that is already being done, a belief in God outside of themselves
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That there is a person we being God operating and working outside of ourselves. I don't think James, although they appear at odds with Paul that you should read it within the whole scope of scripture, not just in and of itself.
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One of my favorite New Testament scholars is Kieran Jobes. Pretty much everything she's written is really, really good and she's an expert on some of the later epistles. And so she says Galatians was among Paul's earliest letters, likely written about the same times as James was writing his letter either shortly before or after the Council of Jerusalem. But Paul was writing about observing the law of Moses as it was understood and practiced in the first century. Like we mentioned earlier, it wasn't just works in Galatians two 15 and 16. It's works with the law where while James is writing about deeds of social justice in a life motivated by faith in Christ, James is very clear that God the Father chose to. This is quoting verse 18 and chapter one, James is very clear that God the Father, chose to give us birth through the word of truth and that it is the word planted in you. That is the source of salvation. Chapter one, verse 21, not any type of deeds. So a life of faith naturally motivates to a life of works
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Is
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A response.
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Faith alone saves, but faith that saves is never alone if it's real faith it. And that's his point, like you said with Abraham, it's like what you see is a knife raised, but what you're really seeing is faith and it looks like an action, a work. But what's really on display there is a belief is, and again, to go back to Darcy's thing, the real again, her question for the purpose of this podcast was where does that come from? And I think we would say that that has to come from God, Abraham, otherwise Abraham would get the glory and
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Even Abraham's initial following after God as we read the text, a calling out of
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Nowhere, he had to be called. And Paul will say that later too, did he get chosen? He was this great guy Paul, and he proved after his calling, he wasn't like the greatest guy in the world, but that's true of so many of the heroes in scripture. So yeah, it's got to be that free gift. Anything else we need to cover?
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I've got just two quotes that Matthew Barrett in that article he quoted, one from John Calvin, one from Herman Vin, from Calvin. Faith is something merely passive, bringing nothing of ours to recovering of God's favor but receiving from Christ that which we lack. And then Bob Inc. He indeed grants us the capacity to believe in the power of faith, but also the will to believe in faith itself, not mechanical or magical, but inwardly spiritually or organically in connection with the word that he brings to people in various ways. Again, it's a response, a granting of the capacity to believe a divine work from God in our hearts that manifests itself in our belief, our faith that he grants to us. It's a gift
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He
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Gives it to us.
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One illustration that I heard someone use that I'm going to actually make it even better I think was they said if you had a beggar on the street and somebody came up to 'em, the person walked to them and said, here, I want you to have this money in the first held their hand out and received it. Who would call that a work that the beggar did? I mean the person walked over, made the money, earned the money, gave them the money, all you did was put your hand out. I'd go even farther. Maybe this hyper Calvinism, I don't know. But I would say in some cases even God opens our hand for us. I don't even know that we open our hand so much as God opens our hand for us. And if you're going to have to do a work at all, it's going to be have to refuse 'em and try and clench your fist or something like that and refuse the good gift, which of course then we can get the whole thing about irresistible grace and can you even refuse it and if he wants you to be saved and all that.
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So yeah, I think it's just another maybe helpful word picture for people of just how silly it would be to think about that being somehow earned or wow, look at how great this beggar
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Is. Can I take it one step further?
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Yeah.
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As though to just change it slightly. Someone walks over, gives the beggar a thousand dollars and then he stands up and says, look at this thousand dollars that I work so hard to get. That's what it is when we say, look at what I've done. I've caused this faith to come that he takes it in claims as his own.
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And I think to this last thing, you think about the natural outcropping of that kind of a thinking. How does that not lead to a kind of self-righteousness on the part of the, I guess if you want it non Calvinist or whatever, the idea that I did something that I worked that faith is my part that I brought to the table here. How does that not lend itself to a kind of patting on the back and also a kind of judgmentalism too toward those? I think that it, putting all of it on God really, he gets all the glory for saving every part of salvation. And it also allows me to have more empathy for those around me that are still lost because, and again, I know they have their agency and hardening their own hearts and all that, but it just allows me to be, I think, more compassionate in even the way that I approach evangelism and prayer is like, God, you have to do this. You have to be the one to soften their hearts. It's not because they're going to wake up and just be smarter one day. So
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Anyway. No, I agree. I want to actually want to riff on that because as I've, I've grown more in my faith and been by God's grace, more inclined to just share the gospel. I'm reminded when I'm speaking with someone that hasn't come to faith of a situation that feels eerily similar to being in a foreign country and speaking a foreign language, you can say all the right things and yet there's almost a glaze across the eyes, so to speak, as which they're not getting this. It's not because as blind, it's not because I can't say it more clearly or six more times. I mean to be sure faith comes from hearing and hearing from the word of God. And so it needs to be spoken. So another instrument in the way that faith acts as an instrument, another hand, the proclamation of gospel acts as an instrument for people to come to saving faith in him, and yet it has to be done in his particular timing.
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That's good. Anything you want to add?
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No, I was curious what the implications are both of believing that faith is a work and also the freedom of knowing that faith is not a work of our own. What are some sneaky ways that can affect our lives? For those of us that do believe that faith is not a work, how does that free us up people that believe that faith is a work, how is that a snare to them?
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So I grew up in a non-REM tradition, and I would say I think the longstanding problem in my soul is that I still somewhere deep down think that faith is a work. And so it robs me of a sense of assurance of salvation because I always have this, one of my besetting sins is to keep returning back to go have I believed hard enough. And I think that would be one of the major downsides to such a position as opposed to resting in the sufficiency of Christ and seeing that the faith itself is a free gift
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That seasons in that vein as well, severely unsettling living in that camp for sure. But we can be free to live in that. Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks Darcy, for your question. Well, that's it for this week's episode of Ask the Pastors. Remember that you can submit your questions by visiting the info bar or by asking them online through our website at www.westhillsstl.org. If you enjoyed this week's episode, hit that like button subscribe, leave a review, share it with a friend. Thanks so much for listening and Lord willing, we'll catch you back here next week.