Yes! There is a massive difference between believing that your ultimate acceptance before God will be on the basis of your whole life lived and the biblical teaching that just as fruit trees bear fruit, so Christians grow and do good works.
This question is a good one. It will never go away and it makes a massive difference in the way we live. If you take Wright's approach you are left wondering if God loves and accepts you. To take the biblical lordship view is to trust in Christ's death and resurrection alone for your standing with God. We are free in Christ from having to establish our own lives before God. Those who live and breath justification by faith alone are those who are born again. Now, let me make a crucial point: new birth is effective. The person who is born again becomes a new being who does, ever so slowly and slightly, new things. We are justified and promised glorification on the basis of faith alone apart from any works. The faith alone that saves will never stand alone. By its very nature, true saving faith produces works.
If we don't get this distinction right we will lost the gospel and begin trying to establish ourselves before God on the basis of works. If we don't get this distinction we will not soar with joy at what Christ has done on our behalf! If we miss this distinction we lose the extravagant love of Christ and, consequently, will lose our vision for extravagantly loving our wives.
Yes...there is a big difference! Thoughts?
2 comments:
Driscoll jokes a lot about sleeping like a Calvinist. He's on to something though. Jesus said in John 8:31-38 that He sets us free from slavery to sin. Without regeneration and death to the law there is no practical freedom. For 2 years I tried to live in obedience without a new heart, and being one who is keenly aware of sin, I was absolutely miserable under the burden. Even after I was regenerated, I placed myself under such a burden for a time. If you have any inkling as to the holiness of God and the reality of your sin, you cannot "sleep" well under it. If I'm justified by my Christian works, then I won't be with Jesus in heaven. I'm just not good enough; none of us are.
The fact of the matter is that the heart means more to Jesus than the works anyway. Scripture is pretty consistent that "good works" done by a heart apart from God is sinful. I'm not super familiar with Wright's assessment, but it seems to be nothing more than modified legalism...another way to be enslaved to actions without regeneration of the heart. Works are the evidence/fruit, not the means, of salvation, and I thank Jesus that it is so. I thank Jesus that He perfectly obeyed and fulfilled the law and imputed it to me, because my performance lacks.
At Calvary Baptist Church in SC we recently finished a the summer series on James. As Pastor Dan Nold preached through the book he encouraged the church to follow along in their own studies, making the teaching of God through his servant James the Biblical focus of the summer. This was extremely insightful. I bring it up because when we got to chapter 2:14-26, we encountered God's words about the interaction of faith and works. This is surely not a new text to any of us, and in a casual reading of it the logic is straightforward, as it remains in any light. But after staying on this passage for some time and really attempting to grasp the faith that Abraham displayed by his works I was moved to stand in awe of the higher ways of our heavenly Father. The simplicity of understanding that a fruit tree produces fruit in the way that a regenerate life brings glory to God by works through so much grace was, for a brief and desired moment, a great wonder to me. Thank God for His Word, without it we would starve.
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