November 8, 2010

• "The just person lives by faith." Luther's assurance received! (letter 87 on assurance & joy)

  On Reformation Day, in my post "the church reformed, always being reformed, lest we become deformed," I reminded us of our need to be always be examining our faith, our doctrines, our teachings, our practices and our traditions in the light of Scripture.

  One of the great breakthroughs of the Reformation was the rediscovery of the doctrine of justification by faith. I regret to say that the doctrine has been minimized or lost in many places today. The glory of the Gospel of Christ is that we can do nothing at all to earn our salvation. Nothing! It is all of God's grace, all a gift to us, all to God's glory alone.
  
  

  Romans 3:21  But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— 22  the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: 23  for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24  and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25  whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. 26  It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
  

  Romans 4:5  And to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, 6  just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works:
  
  

  7  “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
  and whose sins are covered;
  8  blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”

  I could go on and on quoting verses. If you're not already familiar with these verses and others that teach we are justified by faith alone through God's grace alone, that you should go and make yourself familiar with them. (I've written a lot about assurance & joy, please see the links below and/or please message me if you have questions or concerns about this.) If you are a Christian, you must be abiding in the Word of God because it is only as we read the Word of God along with the Spirit of God, that we have food and drink to live the Christian life. Would you go days on end without eating and drinking physical food and drink? Just as you might pick up a diamond or a precious jewel to examine it and to marvel in its beauty and glory, will you not take hold of Christ and the Father's love for you and ponder your salvation anew, ponder Him anew and His love for you anew? Will you not take hold of Christ and gaze upon Him? Is He not infinite? Is He not exceedingly glorious and altogether lovely? Is there not always more to know of Him and His love for us? And know this, if you are not doing these things, the devil will get a foothold and begin to insinuate lies into your head. If you are not girding up the loins of your mind in this way, you will not be able to battle the devil, you sin and flesh and the world's temptations. You will not be able to be radiant (Psalm 34:5) or unshaken (Psalm 16:8) in the trials and temptations of life if you do not continue to set the Lord before you and continue to gaze on Him!

  Oh, do not ever let God's love for you and His mercy and grace shown toward you in Jesus Christ grow old! Do not ever take it or take Him for granted! I admit I had done that. And not even that, but I had not really begun to know the extent of His love, mercy and grace for me in Christ because I did not see the depth of my sinfulness and the height of His holiness. These things are revealed to us only as we continue to spend time with Him and ask the Spirit to open our eyes to them. There are no shortcuts. No wonder then that it is so easy for all of us to do a million other things other than to spend time in the Word of God and prayer! The devil knows that and he does not want us going there.

  Let's look at a couple of Paul's prayers for the Ephesians. Notice that these people were already saved (1:1b), and yet we see Paul is praying that they might know the great riches of their salvation more and more. You can't help but see the riches of the language he uses to describe it all.

  Ephesians 1:15  For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, 16  I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, 17  that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, 18  having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19  and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might 20  that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21  far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22  And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, 23  which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
  

  Ephesians 3:14  For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15  from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 16  that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17  so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18  may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19  and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

  20  Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, 21  to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

  O, that we might ponder anew that a just God who must punish sin has freely provided the means for us to be justified in His sight and declared not guilty!

  O, that we might ponder anew that a pure God has made a way for vile sinners to be reconciled to Him, and not only reconciled but to become His own children!

  O, that we might ponder anew that a holy God who does not delight in wickedness has delighted to show mercy to sinners through His only begotten Son!

  O, that we might ponder anew that a righteous God laid our sins on His Son and punished them there and passed over our sins!

  O, that we might ponder anew that a mighty God loved us and sent His Son to die for us while we were helpless sinners!

  As Alexander Means wrote:

  What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
  What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
  What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
  To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
  To bear the dreadful curse for my soul.

  That is the glory of the Gospel!

  (If that wondrous love does not make you weep and rejoice in wonder and awe and praise and thanksgiving to God, then I implore you to keep reflecting on God's love for you in Jesus Christ and ask His Holy Spirit to break your heart over it and for Him, so His love might truly constrain you!)

  Wrath poured out on Christ.

  Wrath that was undeserved and unearned!

  Love poured out on us.

  Love that was undeserved and unearned!

  We are all undeserving of God's love.

  We could not and cannot earn God's love.

  All we could do was to receive it by faith, and even that faith was not our own!

  Ephesians 2:1  And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2  in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3  among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4  But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5  even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6  and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7  so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8  For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9  not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

  This is the glory of the Gospel!

  What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!

  A righteous God chose to pour out His wrath and punishment on His sinless Son, the spotless Lamb of God, so all who believe on Him might be saved!

  A loving God chose to pour out His love, mercy and grace on sinners, sheep that had gone astray, so all who believe on the Lamb might be saved!

  What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!!

  Indeed His love is wondrous! He is wondrous!

  So many Christians do not really understand the extent of what God in Christ did for them. (O, no, not that we can totally understand it with our finite minds, nonetheless, we have been given the Spirit so we might learn of Him and His great salvation more and more!)

  So many churchgoers can spout off verses or creeds or sing songs, or even teach or preach, but the joy of His salvation has not been written on their hearts...(or perhaps they've never been saved in the first place).

  I say that because I did that very same thing...for years. I was saved for years and years and yet I did not treasure Christ and His salvation because I did not see the precious treasure that His gift of salvation was to me.

  I want each of one of you to have joy and peace in believing and not have to muddle through life without knowing the greatness and wonder of His love for you. I want each of you to know the breadth and length and height and depth of God's love for you in Christ. I want you to have boldness and confidence and full assurance of faith.

  I want these things for you because I know how miserable I was apart from having them, and I know how blessed I am that God has given them to me...and yet I know I only know a small portion of what there is to know of Him and His love for me. (No, I'm not saying there isn't a continuing struggle...We must always be pressing on to know Him more and with that includes entering into His sufferings...)

  I also know that I have been blessed to be a blessing, so I might let others know of the blessings God makes available to all who are in Christ. I want each of you to share in that same blessing I have received: to know in increasing measure the joy God has for you in believing.

  And remember this: the blessing of joy and peace in believing and full assurance of faith is available to each and every one of His children. The devil hides these things from us. He is a liar and the father of lies. He appears as an angel of light. He hid the doctrine of justification by faith for years and years until the Spirit came down and opened the eyes of Martin Luther and the other reformers. And the devil's been busily working to continue to hide it ever since then. Remember that he comes to steal, kill and destroy, but Christ has come so we might have life and life abundantly. But God does not want us to live in fear and doubt, but He wants us to know Him and His perfect love that casts out all fear.

  Let us persevere in the race set before us, to seek to understand and experience more and more God's love for us in Jesus Christ so we might enjoy Him and exalt and exult in Him, rather than being burdened down by our sin, guilt and shame. (Yes, we do not take our sin lightly, we must grieve our sin for our sin grieves God. We must confess and repent of our sin, but then we trust in God's power to forgive, to cleanse and to purify us completely.) Christ came so we might have abundant life and that our joy might be full – at all times, even in the sad and dark times of our lives. The rejoicing Christian is a spring of water in a dry world. The rejoicing Christian is a bright light in a dark world. That is the glory of the Gospel. For believers to be able to say, "Blessed be the name of the Lord" no matter what! No matter what! To rejoice in the Lord always – along with the apostle Paul in whatever prison places God may have ordained for us, we are free to rejoice in Christ through the work of His Spirit in us!

  There is a battle going on for souls. Yes, there is a battle for souls who are still in the kingdom of darkness and under the dominion of the evil one; a battle so that lost souls might come into the Kingdom of God. But there is also a battle for souls which are already in the Kingdom of God. For those of you who are saved, the devil is furious that you are no longer bound in the kingdom of darkness, but he still works to keep you in the darkness to some extent, by causing you to doubt God's love for you and to continue to have you go round and round in circles in your own thoughts about your sin and mistakes and failures or about how others have hurt you. I've known that. It's a sad and gloomy existence. That is why I pray along with Paul for each of you:

  May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope (Romans 15:13).

  Our belief in Jesus Christ ought to be marked by joy and peace and hope. Not because of what we feel. Not because of what we see. We walk by faith and not by sight. We can have joy and peace and abound in hope because of the salvation that has been given to us. Notice this is not an "I hope so" kind of hope, but rather a vibrant and full and abounding hope imparted to us through the Holy Spirit.

  God wants each one of you to be filled with joy and peace in believing. And I know it seems to be a hard thing, but nothing is too hard for God. It seems impossible to many of you right now, but with God nothing is impossible. I thought it was impossible for me. I thought it was too hard. I thought this joy and peace were available to others, but certainly not for me. But then the Spirit began to help me to take hold of those promises as reality and I began to ask. Yes, I struggled. I fought and clawed, and I must continue to do so. We must be diligent to enter into His rest. But as we seek Him, God will give us that joy and peace in believing in His way and in His time. I am praying He would give each of you a passion to continue to follow hard after Him and ask Him to give you a greater sense of the joy and peace and hope which is your birthright as His child.

  Many teachers and preachers and denominations have wrongly taught that we must add our own works on top of Christ's work. To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them (Isaiah 8:20, KJV). That is false teaching. Was Christ's work not enough for us? Was not the provision of God the Father made for our salvation not enough to save us once for all? Yes, we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, yes faith without works is dead, yes, we are ordained to walk in good works, but let us never forget that those good works are the fruit of our salvation and never the root.

  Let us not be like so many of the Jews who stumbled over the precious cornerstone by trying to work up and establish a righteousness of our own by our own good works, but let us accept by faith and rejoice with great joy in God's all-sufficient and everlasting provision of perfect righteousness for us through the Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 10).

  Now, finally, to Luther's story of receiving assurance...

  If you are battling and struggling with assurance and knowing the joy of your salvation, know that you are not alone. For a long time Martin Luther remained unassured. Yet he continued to seek out God's truth through the Scripture. Finally one glorious day, the Holy Spirit shone the light of the glory of the Gospel of Christ in his heart as he was reading Romans 1. The following is his account of his coming to receive assurance (from Luther's "Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther's Latin Works" (1545) by Martin Luther, translated by Bro. Andrew Thornton).

  From my case you can see how hard it is to struggle free from errors which become fixed by universal standard and changed by time-honored custom into nature. How true the proverb is: "It's hard to abandon customs" and "Custom is a second nature." How right Augustine was when he said, "Custom, if it is not resisted, becomes necessity." I had been reading and teaching the Sacred Scriptures diligently in private and in public now for seven years, so that I knew almost all of them by heart. Then too, I had imbibed the beginnings of the knowledge of Christ and of faith in him, i.e., that it is faith in Christ and not works that justifies and saves us...
  
  I had conceived a burning desire to understand what Paul meant in his Letter to the Romans, but thus far there had stood in my way, not the cold blood around my heart, but that one word which is in chapter one: "The justice of God is revealed in it." I hated that word, "justice of God," which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust.
  
  But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience. I couldn't be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, "Isn't it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?" This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.
  
  I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: "The justice of God is revealed in it, as it is written: 'The just person lives by faith.'" I began to understand that in this verse the justice of God is that by which the just person lives by a gift of God, that
  is by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the justice of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive justice, i.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: "The just person lives by faith." All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise
  itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. I ran through the Scriptures from memory and found that other terms had analogous meanings, e.g., the work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which he makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.
  
  I exalted this sweetest word of mine, "the justice of God," with as much love as before I had hated it with hate. This phrase of Paul was for me the very gate of paradise. Afterward I read Augustine's "On the Spirit and the Letter," in which I found what I had not dared hope for. I discovered that he too interpreted "the justice of God" in a similar way, namely, as that with which God clothes us when he justifies us. Although Augustine had said it imperfectly and did not explain in detail how God imputes justice to us, still it pleased me that he taught the justice of God by which we are justified.

  Are you struggling with assurance of your salvation?
  
  Do you continue to have doubts?
  
  Do you continue to be plagued by the guilt and shame of your sin, even though you have confessed it?
  
  Have you badgered the Scripture like Luther?
  
  Have you meditated on the Scripture night and day like Luther?

  If you are struggling to understand and fully accept God's free grace offered you in Jesus Christ apart from your works, then please open your Bible and ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten you. May the Spirit strengthen you to badger and meditate for as long as it takes, so that along with Luther, your soul might truly understand and embrace that "The just person lives by faith," so you might be free to rejoice and exult in God's free gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ and enjoy Him as He intends!
  

  ---

  If what you're reading here and elsewhere on my blog may seem familiar, I will say much of what the Holy Spirit has written on my heart has come through the ministries of two men, the late Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Dr. John Piper. (You can access sermons of Dr. Lloyd-Jones here and Dr. Piper here.) Praise God for those saints He sends and empowers to teach us, and praise God for that He can do exceedingly above all we can ask or imagine! A couple years ago I never would have imagined I could enjoy and rejoice in God as I do today (please see my post Remembering the pit & bog so I might rejoice in Him & you might also! (Psalm 40:1-3)). I don't want you to waste your life languishing but to come to know Christ as your chief Joy!

  You may find these helpful:

  my posts tagged "past sins and guilt" and my series of posts "Dealing with Past Sins & Guilt" especially:

  Kingdom-Obsessed People don't keep looking back at past sins (dealing with guilt): "Forgiven Sinner, What Do You See?"
  Dealing with past sins & guilt: Micah 7-False guilt vs.Godly guilt--Godly guilt causes us to rise rather than remain fallen
  "Either we accept the atonement of Christ or we repeat it."

  my other letters on assurance and joy including:

  • the laborer's lamentation and affirmation
  • Letter 1 on assurance and fighting for joy
  • Letter 3 on assurance and fighting for joy (Jesus' desire vs. Satan's desire)
  • Letter 7 on assurance and fighting for joy (remember His love for us while we were sinners)
  • Letter 8 on assurance and fighting for joy (sin, assurance and the joy of our salvation)
  • Letter 18 on assurance and fighting for joy (my testimony of joy)
  • true repentance leads to joy (Letter 37 on assurance & fighting for joy)
  • Keep me away from the paths of the destroyer that I might behold Your face. (Psalm 17)
  • letter 42 on assurance & fighting for joy: "Blessed Assurance" - You are a child of God!
  • dear devil/dear flock of God (day in, day out): Letter 63 on assurance & joy
  • The Lord of bliss offers us bliss today (letter 79 on assurance & joy)
  • "give me also springs of water" - Will you be an Achsah? (letter 66 on assurance & fighting for joy)
  • "Deck Thyself, My Soul, with Gladness" (Letter 75 on assurance & fighting for joy)
  • Be a sanctuary to me, O Lord (Isaiah 8:14)

  Christ's work for us:

  • Martin Luther on assurance
  • who are we to say . . . (Christ's atonement and assurance)
  • Jack Bauer & the Atonement
  • Luther's Commentary on Galatians
  • Labor Day: Do you know the blessedness of not working? (Romans 4:1-8) (about penance)
    
  • Reformation Day: Martin Luther on "How One is Justified before God, and of Good Works"
  • Bible Reading: Jeremiah 23--THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS
  • Bible Reading: Ezekiel 7–"But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more"
  • "Salvation unto Us Has Come by God's free grace & favor"

  
  The Word of God and you:

  • Get gnawing, put your nose down in the Book to feed the white-hot flame of God's gift
  • my ministry & your attitude toward the Word of God
  • Considering Jesus: (1) Making time to consider Jesus
  • Considering Jesus: (2) Why do we do quiet time anyhow?

  Scripture quotations unless otherwise indicated are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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