I will have the privilege to gather this week for the first time this year with a group of men who are committed to growing in the grace and knowledge of God, learning what it means as saved sinners to live under the Lordship of Jesus. We will among other things we do together examine the first book that we are reading for this year, What is Saving Faith, by John Piper. It is one of the most important books that I have read in a long time. It is addressing an issue about which so many in our churches are clearly confused. This book has helped to solidify in my soul what I have believed for a long time the Bible teaches about saving faith.
If you were to know me, really know me; you might be a little (or maybe a lot) skeptical of trusting me and my observations about what Scripture teaches. I began my life as a Christian being what would have been called at the time a “legalistic fundamentalist” with an intense evangelistic fervor. I was an active and aggressive witness for Jesus. I simply wanted people to accept Him for who He is so that they could be assured of heaven. Any discipleship that I would do with a person, which in those days was not much; was to help them know how to behave as a Christian: don’t smoke, don’t drink, be in church as much as possible, tell other people about Jesus etc. I was fervent. I was faithful to what I was learning to be as a Christian but I was far, far from flawless. So were those that I saw “pray the prayer” or “walk the aisle.” Many of them, in fact, walked the aisle out the back door after a few months never to return. I began to wonder about the meaning and reality of salvation. My front burner question was, “what is saving faith?”
I had in just over two years after being saved begun ministry as a preacher in a church, first as a “fill in” and then as the real thing. Ordained at age 19, I went from “al” to “Rev. Wright.” I had such high and holy views of the church and her people. It did not take long for those high and holy views to collapse. I saw and heard things from leaders in the church that caused my soul to grieve and my heart to hurt. And the struggle over what salvation really means became more and more intense. What I was seeing and experiencing quite simply was a deadly crash between what I saw in the church and what I was learning from Scripture. I was beginning to question whether or not I had really misunderstood what Scripture taught about salvation because I was seeing so little of what I saw in Scripture among the people in the church.
So, I loosened up. My evangelistic approach did not change but by expectations did. I wanted to see people “saved” so that they could go to heaven but I actually expected little change in their lives because to this point I had seen so little in the lives of others. Can I be honest? Life as a pastor was so much easier this way. I was just one of the boys hanging out with other boys whose only difference from any other boys is that we had all made a profession of faith and went to church most Sundays. But all during this time, I was digging deeper and deeper into the Bible. And one day I began to see in the Bible what I had never seen before.
I began to see what saving faith really is. It is God by His Holy Spirit opening my mind to see the majesty and glory and beauty and wonder and magnificence (I could go on and on here) of who God is in Jesus and of what God has done in Jesus to save sinners. It is seeing all of that through the Scriptures by the power of the Holy Spirit in the awareness of just how sinful I really am. It is being captured by the greatness of who God is in Jesus that leads to a compulsion (faith) to know Him, to love Him, to worship Him, to be a part of His body the church, to grow in Him and to point others to Him (I could go on and on here). It is to come by God’s grace to the place that the vision of Jesus is so overwhelming that I desire Him—Him, not His benefits and blessings, but Him; and I desire Him more and more. This faith is real. This faith is rare in our day. Satan has snatched it away and given us a substitute that will send us to hell while we think we are going to heaven. This faith like a seed in soil grows in us and keeps on growing in us producing real fruit for the glory of God. This faith comes from God to us by His Spirit and when we see it and receive it, we want everybody to see it and receive it. This is the faith that saves us and shapes us. This is the faith that leads not only to deeper and deeper devotion but also to deeper and deeper delight. This is grace-infused, gratitude-invoking, love-inducing, Holy Spirit anointed, joy growing, holiness seeking, and happiness finding faith. Get the book. Read what He says. It is so Bible saturated that in the end, in so many ways to say “no” to what he writes is to say “no” to what God has written in His Word about Saving Faith.