Is Salvation Dependent upon Your Obedience? | How Pietism Affects Assurance

A lot of what we're trying to highlight is this emphasis on your improvement, and you need to be examining yourself.

And if you're not continually improving, you should be afraid, and you should be concerned because your legitimacy is now

called into question.

This kind of onward and upward, we're just continually getting better thing, I think that is everywhere in American

Christianity.

Sometimes it takes a very obvious, like here's seven steps to better finances or seven steps to a better marriage presentation,

or in more serious minded contexts where the Bible is taken very seriously, and oftentimes they're conservative and

Calvinistic, you get this emphasis on personal growth to where you become maybe not

prosperous materially, but you become so spiritually strong that you're kind of impervious to the challenges and trials of

life, and you are spiritually able to just take on whatever you encounter.

There's almost not place for weakness anymore.

If someone were to ask you, John, what is pietism?

I've kind of heard this word, and I've seen the little book over there on the table, but what's pietism?

And I will say before I answer this question, I think you need to understand how vitally important your question is

because it has changed the trajectory of my life and my ministry forever.

I grew up in pietism, and being liberated from it has been a great joy.

Pietism though, it's a confusion in my opinion, and it's this.

It's taking that which is biblical, which is the obedience of the believer, and putting it in

the wrong category with the wrong emphasis.

And the category it often gets put into is acceptance and blessings of God.

In other words, how well I perform and obey is whether God accepts me as a

believer and whether he will continue to protect me and bless me.

For instance, often one's assurance will be called into question depending upon their

performance.

Again, their obedience, right?

Am I doing enough on my behalf to prove the evidence of my life as a true believer?

And so all sermons and reading and really the interior of their Christian life becomes the most important thing

about the Christian.

Are they performing well enough?

The emphasis of our preaching and our teaching and our conversations in life in the local churches is one of

looking inward and self -examination, pointing the Christian in on himself to examine everything that's going on in our

hearts and minds, rather than always being pointed outside of ourselves first to Jesus.

We kind of implicitly, if not explicitly, point the Christian toward his obedience to know that he will be saved.

Christ should always be the focus.

Christ should always be the foreground, and that the Christian life is only understood in light of him and as a backdrop to

what he alone has done.

And in Pietism, that kind of gets inverted.

The Christian life is in the foreground.

Christ is in the background.

In Pietism, typically, our identity is derived from what we do or what we don't do.

Whereas for us as confessional Protestants, we would invert that and say that our duty, what we

do, is derived from who we are.

If you don't believe the work of the Spirit is the one who comes in and regenerates the sinner, and then the

believer then is transformed by the works of the Spirit through the means of grace,

if you don't believe that, then you're going to put emphasis not on the power of the Spirit and the means of grace,

you're gonna put emphasis on the individual acts of the person, which when you look at revivalism and the

history of it, this is what Pietism is birthed out of.

If you're not emphasizing the work of Jesus on our behalf, you're going to emphasize your own works.

And so I think this is important because when I say a matter of emphasis, you emphasize the wrong thing, people start working on the wrong stuff.

How do you know if you're in a Pietistic context, if you're listening and you're newer?

In Pietism, typically the gospel is like the entry point to the Christian life, it's back there, it's like that, well, I

trusted Jesus and the gospel was back there and now I've kind of entered into the Christian life and I'm about living the Christian life

now and the gospel was then, this is now.

Secondly, is even like how the gospel is preached, is the gospel preached to the

saints or not, right?

So -.

Yeah, no, just the sinners.

Yeah, because typically I think the understanding in a Pietistic context is that unbelievers need the gospel,

Christians need something else, which is being told how to live effectively, rather than

understanding that the saints need the gospel all the time and that the power for their living only comes from Christ.

In a Pietistic context, the tone tends to be kind of threatening and exacting, it's this kind of like obey or else dot,

dot, dot, it's that kind of feel.

The posture, default posture of the preacher and most of the Christians is, yeah, most everybody in the church is probably a fake.

That's right.

They're probably a faker and so we need to smoke those fakers out and make sure that only the strong survive and the serious types are the

real ones.

And last one that I really wanna draw attention to though, is the sacraments and how the sacraments are viewed.

In a Pietistic context, the sacraments are made more about our faithfulness and obedience to God than they are God's

faithfulness to us.

This is why the Lord's Supper in particular was one of those anxiety producing times for many

Christians in their church going experience.

Because it's a time of hyper introspection and hyper self -examination to whether or not I am

worthy to come to the table and worthy in their minds means, have I done well enough?

Rather than understanding that the sacraments are about God's faithfulness to us primarily and that they're given to us

because we're needy.

And because we're weak.

Worship in one sense is a dialogue between us and God.

God has spoken, we respond.

God has acted, we respond.

I think Pietism has messed us up in terms of how we even think about what we do on Sundays together in the gathered church.

They will pound the desk, sola fide, sola fide, faith alone, faith alone, faith alone for justification.

But then there's this constant boogeyman that they're chasing that is

running throughout the congregation, telling people they can live however they want.

And so they're trying to scare them out of the house.

Look at the way the Lord is transforming you by his spirit.

Look at the fruit that is being born in your life and be encouraged.

Have your assurance strengthened.

That's biblical.

But instead, what we often get told is, how do you know you're a believer?

Examine your life.

And that is, we have completely left the realm of being encouraged by my obedience to now

looking to my obedience as the ground of my standing.

And that's a problem.

Pietism turns the whole entire light structure off of Jesus and puts it on you.

And you're so blinded by you, you end up hurting people.

You judge them, you plow into them, you criticize them.

And or, Justin, you're so blinded, you go hide because you're so overwhelmed by how much of a failure you

are because the light's on you instead of Jesus.

Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.

Where are we looking?

Looking unto me, the author and finisher of my faith.

And maybe Jesus is the author, but I'm the finisher because I've got to do my part.

And when Jesus said it is finished, he kind of meant that.

His part was done, now it's your part.

When the writer of the Hebrews says, he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, he kind of meant that.

And all we're trying to do is come back in here, take the clutter off the thing and say, no, it is Christ

always and only.

He is our whole and only righteousness today and tomorrow and forever.

And it's always going to be Jesus.

And you are not going to look within to find the ground of anything before the Lord.

You're going to look without to Christ always.

And so there's an emphasis on his objective work that stands unaffected by how you

feel and how you're doing and how well you obey today and how well you'll obey tomorrow and how hard you'll fight sin tomorrow.

You will be righteous in Christ, reconciled to God in him, and you can bank on it.

And that is going to change your life over the long haul.

And it will be because you have fixed your gaze on the Savior, not because you have been looking at yourself and navel gazing at other people

all the time.

Like that's just not a way to live.

I always love asking people, how many good works is it going to be enough for you to come to a moment where you feel justified?

Like you're then putting -.

You can't define that.

No, you're putting your faith in your works, believe it or not.

The only thing that's going to comfort any of us at the end of it all, and we know this is true, is to look to another who has accomplished our salvation.

Thinking Colossians even just really briefly here, the whole language of put off, put on, that you get in a number of Paul's

epistles, that is completely, it's a union with Christ identity in Jesus argument.

You're not that anymore.

No.

You're this now in the Lord Jesus.

So yeah, you carry the corpse of the old man around with you, but put that thing off and live like who you are now.

That's his argument over and over and over again.

It's not calling their identity into question.

It's pointing them to their new identity in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And then that being the reason and the fuel in one sense for how they live.

Every time Paul motivates the believer to obey, every time he uses grace, every time, not fear.

It's always a motivation of love versus fear.

If you're not being motivated by love, you're in pietism flat out.

If you're being motivated by fear, that's pietism.

Yeah.