Path of Evangelism VIII: The Fruit of Faith | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratia, and I'm here again with Dr.

John Snyder, the author and host of the Behold Your God study series and pastor of Christ Church New Albany.

John, it's good to be in the work. Thanks, good to be back. Yeah, well we're on episode 8 of our evangelism series, and we're done with our look at faith.

For episodes 6 and 7, we spent a couple weeks really looking at what are we talking about here?

We're calling people to faith in evangelism. What is it that we're asking them or calling them to?

And we're now returning to Samuel Walker of Truro's approach to evangelism, and we've come to the theme of repentance.

So really understanding repentance. What is repentance? Yeah, Walker talks about repentance as being, strangely he says, we now want to turn to the fruit of all of this, the fruit of faith.

And he talks about repentance, and that perhaps isn't something that we normally think of. Repentance as a fruit of faith.

Yeah, and he's going to, we'll talk about that today, but he's going to talk about the fact that there are certain facts, the facts of the gospel, that so take hold of a man under the influence of the

Holy Spirit that he wants to repent. But you know, as we were talking before we started filming, there is some debate on what we could call, you know, the temporal priority between faith and repentance.

Which one comes first? And which one comes after? And is there a necessary order?

Yeah, it seems that these, I mean, they're often referred to as the twin gifts of faith and repentance.

And so analogies like they're two sides of the same coin. But yeah, you can get bogged down in what you said, the temporal priority.

Which one comes first? So is that a legitimate argument to have? Well, I think it's, you know,

I don't think it's a bad thing to talk about. But I think the real benefit of that is not to come up with the answer, but rather to understand the relationship between the two a little more clearly.

Right. I think we'd be very safe, biblically, saying this, that these are simultaneous.

They're simultaneous because they are given at the same moment in the work of regeneration, in the new birth, the new nature placed within.

The eyes opened, the heart renewed, the will freed. And in that, the seeds of repentance and faith are there.

So simultaneously, they are there and simultaneously, they are being exercised.

But what we want to avoid is thinking that we can have one without the other. Yeah, can you imagine?

That would be terrible. I mean, what if we could have a faith without repentance? Right. Then what do we have? We're adding all the great stuff of the gospel to a life that's already crammed full.

So Jesus plus what I had. Yeah. And then repentance without faith, well, that would just be more morality.

That would just be, oh, I really need to stop doing this, and I need to start, I don't know what. I don't know what you would turn away from sin, but what would you turn to?

Right. Yeah, I think we could call that a Christless Christianity. You know, you think of the parable of the house that was full of demons, and it was swept clean, but nobody moved in, you know, and that would be a repentance without faith.

I've cleaned up my life. I've gotten rid of the bad stuff, but nobody moves in. There's no filling with the good stuff, and so they must go together.

When we think of it in our own experience, we know they go together because of the doctrine of regeneration, that these are both gifts, and one's not given today, and then a year later, another's given.

And you can almost connect that with kind of the lordship salvation debate, like, well, does he have to be

Lord to be Savior? What do you mean you could go ahead and accept his benefits now, and then 10 years from now, you could get serious about following him?

Well, that's certainly, we don't see that in Scripture. So does he give faith today, and 10 years later, he gives repentance?

No, they're given together, but they also work in harmony. It's what a man believes about the gospel that moves him to turn away from everything else, and it's turning from everything else that makes room in the soul for all that God has provided in the gospel.

Yeah, it's this whole idea of turning from and turning to, emptying the hands, as we've said over again, you know, emptying the hands of sin and self -righteousness, so that we can turn and embrace

Christ with both hands, and you know, not let go. He gives a definition in his approach that he wrote for other pastors.

Here's how he defines repentance, and I think it might seem a little unusual to us, you know. If you were to ask the average church person to define repentance, you would probably get a thing like, you got to stop and stop that and stop that.

Here's what he says, repentance is the heart choosing God in Christ as his master and portion, two things there he mentions, and refusing the services of sin and the delights and confidences of the world, and this, he says, is also called conversion.

So let's, you know, if we pull that apart, there's a response in repentance that's

Godward, and there's a response that's sinward. I'm choosing God, my master, but also my portion, my good, my treasure, my substance

I'm going to live on, my food, my life, but also to have that, the man realizes

I must turn my back on the emptiness of sin and its empty delights, and then he mentions that word conversion.

Yeah, yeah, conversion, when we think about conversion today, probably it's most used to think about, well,

I grew up Jewish, but I've now converted to, you know, Roman Catholicism, or I grew up as a

Muslim, and now I've converted to Christianity, but the older writers, when they think of the Ordo Salutis and the whole issue of soteriology, conversion is a category within, on its own, and it's, it would be safe to say,

I think, that it's kind of a summing up of, or at least it encapsulates faith and repentance, that a person who has been converted is employing or engaging in faith and repentance.

Yeah, the word convert, the root for that word is to be turned, to turn or to be turned, and so, as you said, it involves the whole response of the, of the believer, of the, of the believing, repenting man.

When we think about conversion, we need to distinguish it from a couple of things, if we're going to be very precise, and sometimes when we talk, we're not being that precise, and so, but if we're going to be precise, conversion is not synonymous with regeneration.

Regeneration, God awakening, God quickening, God newly creating, new birth within, dealing with the core of our being, renewing our nature through the

Holy Spirit, that is something we're not active in, just like we weren't active in our birth.

We are completely passive, we are receptive, but not active, but when we talk about conversion, we're active, we're, we must be active, or there's no conversion.

We're also not, though, saying that conversion is sanctification, because sanctification is the flowing out of what

God has started in regeneration. It's like there's that, you know, it's like our heart was a desert,

God plunges his fist into the floor of the desert, and there's this, our artesian well that begins to flow, and now, it starts to spread across the desert.

Everywhere it touches, new life sprouts up, but there's a lot of ground that needs to be, it needs to spread to, and so, the

Christian life, while it begins in regeneration, we never, it's never ended, you know, that it's the loving, wonderful process of working outward what

God has placed within. So, conversion is the awakened sinner, made alive to these great realities by God's Spirit, turning in faith and repentance to God in Christ.

So, one other thing, I think, that we need to point out here to avoid confusion, we are talking about conversion, the will is involved, there's a choice, and we're gonna be talking about choosing, and, and, you know, we make a choice to follow

Christ, and etc., and we've talked about temporal priority, which one comes first, it may be more helpful to think in terms of causal priority, just the answer is, the question is, what comes first?

So, how do we distinguish this, the will being engaged in conversion from kind of the classic

Arminian, you know, look, you just need to choose Jesus, you just need to, right now, you've got what you need within you to, to choose to follow

Jesus, and I think that is, we have to explain that that is related to regeneration, so help us see that.

Let's say that the only thing we can see is man's requirement to choose, which is clearly in Scripture, here's the gospel, what's your response?

You owe God the trust that embraces His word above every word that your feelings and the world says.

So, choice is there, and I think that a type of a hyper -Calvinism that would say, we actually don't have a choice, has misunderstood the

Scripture, but if we divorce choice or, or conversion, our response from regeneration, then we've got decisionism, where if I just make the right decision, and I do it with a sincere enough heart,

I can save myself, and that's not going to happen, because nobody wants God, nobody chooses a king above himself, until God begins to do something on the inside of us, but if we get regeneration right, that the work of the

Spirit is what regeneration is, what causes a man to believe, what causes a man to repent, what opens his eyes, and makes

Christ's love irresistible, then we can hammer away at choice, in my opinion, as hard as we want, we can say, choose life, choose

Christ, choose, and we're not afraid that we, we've gone back into decisionism, because we understand the work of God in the soul, is enabling a man to choose in a way that he will never go back against that choice.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's very helpful, just to understand that, that we're going to talk in a little while about, you know, the ability to, to see

God, and once we see Him for who He is, I've said before on this show, that if the whole world could see the reality of who

God is, and we could see Him with regenerate eyes, and regenerate heart, so to speak, then you couldn't stop, there would be a worldwide stampede to run to the source of all good,

God, and it's, but it's, it's, it's the regeneration that, that, that happens to us, that allows us to then, you know, our hearts are free, our wills are free, and we're free to finally choose what we want, because what we want is

God now, and so, you know, that it's important for us to think, to get those things in the right order.

Well, we're gonna take a break in just a second, but when we come back, we're gonna talk about one of Walker's other directions to the evangelist, and he says that the person who's being instructed must be made diligently and continually to attend to and regard what the mystery of redeeming love presents to him in the gospel, in order that it may have a converting and sanctifying influence upon his heart.

So, when we get back from our break, in just a few seconds, we'll break that quote out. It's, spoiler alert, it's, it's about the gospel, it's about the good news of the gospel.

So, we're here on the last day of the Shepherds Conference 2019 at Grace Community Church, and I've run into Justin Peters.

Justin is an evangelist, and you will also recognize him from the American Gospel Film.

Thank you so much. You're welcome. I really appreciated your, I mean, your testimony here, and your testimony to, not just to be anti -prosperity gospel, but to be, this is the gospel, and to see how beautiful it actually is in contrast.

Right. How did you come to be involved in this? Well, Brandon Kimber contacted me a few years ago and told me about the project that he was working on, and it, when he described it to me, it sounded like it was right up my alley, and something

I very much wanted to be a part of, and I'm very glad that I was.

I'm glad that he, he reached me. I think he did a great job with the film. Yeah. Put together really, really well, very compelling, and I think it does put in stark relief the contrast between the false prosperity gospel and the true gospel.

That's right. Well, and this film does a great job of that. It's not just a hit piece. Right. You know,

I think he takes about the first 40 minutes and just expounds, what is the gospel? What's the message of the gospel?

And then the rest of it, you know, you just almost let these other guys talk. Yeah. And the viewer says, wait a minute, they're not saying what the scripture's saying.

God in His good providence is, is using that film and the truth therein to open people's eyes.

Well, I know that I speak on behalf of so many of the people who'll see this to say, thank you. Thanks for spending time with Brandon, and Brandon, great job.

We love your film, and we're grateful to see the Lord continue to use it. Yeah, amen.

For more information about American Gospel, Christ Alone, visit themeansofgrace .org.

Welcome back to the Behold Your God podcast. We're back in our evangelism series, and we're thinking about the concept and the subject of repentance.

And we've been getting a little help from Samuel Walker of Truro. Walker comes now with another direction to the evangelist.

He says that the person being instructed must be made diligently and continually to attend to and regard what that mystery of redeeming love presents to him in the gospel, in order that it may have a converting and sanctifying influence upon his heart.

So, in other words, the good news, and the good news as we're going to see, is God. Yeah, I think that he's just following out what

Paul says in the book of Romans, that it is the kindness of the Lord that leads us to repentance. There are many good starting places for a man to cry out and say, what must

I do to be saved? The fear of hell is a great place to start. The awareness that no matter how hard I try,

I can't clean myself up. That my life is a shambles. That my marriage is a shambles. That my children need me to be a different kind of man than I am, and I can't be that man.

Those are all great places to start, but the only thing that leads a man to abandon everything that he felt he once needed to embrace the

God he has not yet seen with his eyes, through the method of redemption that's explained in Scripture, is that he must be convinced of those wonderful particulars in the gospel, that God has loved him like that.

And when he sees that, then he will be broken free from the grip of the other things.

And, you know, when we think about that as evangelists, we want to give a lot of time to explaining the particulars.

So, one thing we know is that we ourselves need to understand those particulars, not just God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

That's too vague. What has He done in the gospel? But we also want to be men who are presently experiencing the same influence of the gospel, that it is daily melting my heart.

It is daily making me want to get up and live another day for Christ. Yeah, and you know, if that's not us, if we're merely involved in religion and morality, then we'll be tempted to use the same kind of thing, the same kind of prison that we live in, the same kind of straitjacket that morality is.

We'll just be tempted to wrap other people up in that same straitjacket. And so, if we're not melted by and in the grips of gospel love, then we can't do evangelism.

Walker really drives home his point with a statement, and then he follows with two more important points. But Walker says, you know, explaining how he saw the motivational level in a man turning to God in conversion.

He says this, the real motive to delighting in God and choosing

His service and the true ground of a due sense of the sinfulness of sin, of self -abasement, hatred of sin, and actual rejecting it is an evangelical sight of God.

Yeah, so there he deals with the motivational level because as really as the evangelicals, we know we're talking about 18th century men, we're talking about the

Puritans before them, the Reformers before them, they understood that it was never enough to have external changes.

I can't just join a church, dress differently, and talk differently. So we want the heart to be captured for Christ.

And if the heart's captured for Christ, it'll never stay internal. It'll change the externals.

But you read in that quote a wonderful phrase that was very popular then, not so well known today, but so significant.

You talked about an evangelical sight of God. So, Matt, what's that? Yeah, I think we have to constantly be on the battle to reclaim that word, especially here in America.

We're not just talking about, you know, a white Republican view of God, evangelical. That's kind of what that word has come to mean.

But rather evangelical is rooted in the evangelical, the good news. So this is a gospel sight of God.

And the best way maybe we can understand it, it's so important to understand it, is to contrast it with what the old writers would call a legal sight of God.

So, you know, when we think of a legal sight, what that might look like is, you may be familiar with the the story of Pilgrim's Progress, and when they come to the mountain, they come to Mount Sinai, and it rumbles and thunders and fire shoots out of it.

So, you know, that's a view of God and His law coming to crush you and kill you.

If we have a legal sight of God, it's like coming to Sinai, and we can be afraid.

We can know that we should run and hide and try to make fig leaves for ourselves, you know, to cover over our shame.

But contrasting that with an evangelical sight of God, I think is really helpful for us to see.

We see the love of a redeeming God. We see a

Father who has planned from time eternal to redeem a people.

And it's He who has planned this rescue. There's no question then, when we come to Christ and we hear

His royal command, come to me. There's no question whether He'll come and will

He destroy us? No. He says that His burden is light and that He's come to give us rest.

And it's just amazing, but it has to do with how we see. If we still have that legal sight of God, then we'll only run and we'll sow fig leaves.

But if we do see this evangelical sight of God, then we see God in all of His gospel love and all of His gospel activity toward us.

And that really makes all the difference. Yeah, I do want us to be really clear. We're not saying that the

Old Testament, the Sinai picture of God, that's holiness and justice and righteousness. And the

New Testament is just love and compassion. When you look at Sinai, you see a perfectly straight, a perfectly righteous being exposing our sinfulness through just this, the

Ten Commandments. We see how different we are from Him. So there is a holy

God and the law is good, but we're not good. Right, and if there's any confusion about that, go back and listen to the episodes in this series where we talk about conviction and the use, the right use of the law.

We're just talking about at this point in guiding a person to Christ, post conviction, post regeneration, in conversion, what is it that motivates a person to live for God?

Well, it's this evangelical sight of God. Yeah, so we're seeing the same God, but when we meet

Him at the cross, we're seeing the absolute holiness and justice dealing with the

Son as our representative. And we think, why would He do that for me? And that's the kindness that conquers us.

And how Walker sums it up, he says, kind of like this, all right, I've just kind of boiled down a big section.

He says that the Spirit shows a man his sin so clearly that the man feels the weight and the shame of that sin.

He runs to Christ for mercy because he sees there by God's enabling, that in Christ we see

God as the merciful, gracious, and the most desirable God. We are aware at that moment of our need that this merciful

God has offered us all of this in the gospel. And Walker goes on to say this, it does engage the heart to turn and daily to return to Him.

So the love of God in the gospel then is so powerful. Yeah, yeah,

I think it's the big wrecking ball of the Bible, you know. God's going to send you to hell. Well, when I was a lost person,

I thought, well, I'll risk it. Maybe it's worth it, you know, like a fool, I thought that way.

But when now as a believer, when I see a sin and I see the cross and I think, John, how could you choose it again?

You know, and it's like this smashing thing that no matter what wall I put up, it destroys it.

To sin against love is so much harder than it is to sin against Sinai, to sin against just, you know, strict.

Well, I don't measure up to that anyway, so why shouldn't I? But no, to sin against the love of a

God who has who has given himself for us is just it's it's hard.

So this is the love that makes God lovely to the believer. Yeah, he follows that with those two cautions.

So here's the first one. He says, no other motive can convert the heart, but an evangelical sight of God.

Nothing else will move a man to embrace Christ on Christ's terms.

No adjustment, you know, an unconditional surrender, except this view of God, you know, and we've talked about there are other views that we've offered people, you know, sadly, we've offered them, you know, you want to go to hell?

No. Well, come do this right here and you'll get into heaven. Right. I remember at a conference at a crusade that I was working at as a counselor in college that the man would say, well, some of you girls, your boyfriends have dumped you this week, maybe some of you, your friends have been unkind to you at school.

You want a friend that'll never treat you that way? You just come right here and you pray the sinner's prayer and that'll, you'll have that kind of friend and there's a flood of girls and but but there was no sight of God in the gospel.

It was just offering them other motivation. Yeah, for felt needs and it can never convert the heart.

Right. I remember one of the things that I was involved in actually before coming to Christ, but was involved in church for a season before and one thing that's wildly popular in our culture is this kind of belong before you believe model.

So this attractional model of church with, you know, to be fair, I think that there's some good motivation.

We want to love people. We want to see people converted. So what do we do? Well, we just bring them into this big family, our loving community here in this church.

We just love on them and if we do that, then they'll, they'll, they'll want to follow Jesus. They'll be converted, but it's not a loving community and it's not a friend that will never leave you and it's not a ticket out of hell that will convert the heart, but it is this evangelical sight of God through the cross.

Yeah. Second caution he gave us is, he said that in as much as conversion lies in the will, neither knowledge on the one hand nor sense, meaning feelings on the other, can be mistaken for it.

Now, we have to keep this in context. If you're explaining to person, a person, the love of God in the gospel and their heart is melted and their emotions are moved and their mind is being filled with all these new facts,

Walker's warning us, don't let him stop there. Call them to engage the will.

Choose this God. Turn from this. Turn to him because a religion of new words and some warm feelings alone that doesn't lead to change is not

Christianity. Yeah, that's right and that's an ongoing thing. I mean, the regenerate converted heart is daily engaging the will to follow

God and look, you know, we can come, these doctrines in the scripture that we believe are wonderful and your mind can be taken up by those things and it would be easy to go live in a world of doctrines and, oh,

I'm understanding more and more how all these doctrines fit together and your will to choose

God is less and less engaged and you could confuse your growth in the knowledge of the doctrines of grace or whatever, you know, theological pursuit that you're going for as, well, this is growth in grace.

Well, no, those two things shouldn't be separated but they could be so there's kind of the warning there.

So we could ask ourselves, what kind of changes would we expect to see in a converted person?

Yeah, and these come with time but I would expect that they would want to be a part of a gathering of believers.

They'd want to be a part of a church and no longer happy to stay isolated. That when they're confronted with the

Word of God, not perfectly but truly, they are responsive to what they once were just deaf to.

I would think that, you know, one of the things we look for here before baptism is if it's a younger person, especially if it's a spouse, go talk to their spouse.

We ask their family, well, have you seen some sweet changes that the gospel brings?

And if they say, no, I haven't seen any change except different talk. Well, then let's go back and make sure that we understand what a

Christian is. And sometimes it would be the very areas where the person might have been most notoriously ungodly that now they are so wonderfully changed.

Yeah, I think the first one that you mentioned needs to be emphasized again. I mean, you know, we're preparing to engage in this church project with Jeffrey Johnson and we're really looking at these issues and I'm remembering in my own life, 1

John 3 .14, when I really was evaluating, where am I?

This word, we know that we've passed out of death into life because we love the brothers.

And that love for the brothers, love for Christ in his people is going to be manifested in seeking out fellowship with the brothers.

And the scriptures as clear as can be, whoever doesn't love abides in death. So we should look for love for the brothers in our people who we hope are being converted.

But again, all of these changes are changes that occur because and only so far as they've had this evangelical sight of God.

Yeah, it's a sweet thing that what God commands us to look at for obedience and holiness, it's not another weight that we have to carry.

It's not a ladder we have to climb. It's we're looking at him stooping and it moves us.

It's a motor that moves me to want to obey. Yeah, so if you're listening and you don't have a clue what we're talking about, maybe it makes sense on one level, but your heart is devoid.

You've never seen this. Don't wait. Be honest with God. Tell him you don't know what we're talking about and cry out to him until you do.

He delights to reveal himself to a person who's humble enough to admit, I don't know you, but I want to.

Yeah. Well, thanks for listening and be sure to tune in and watch our

Supporter Appreciation Podcast. You can see that at Mediagratia .org or in English that's

TheMeansofGrace .org. We make these available for those who come alongside

Mediagratia as monthly supporters who help us do the work that we're engaged in from things like this podcast to exhibiting at conferences, which we're doing a lot of right now, to big projects all the way down to the smaller projects.

So we do that as a tangible way to say thank you to those of you who've come alongside as monthly supporters.

If with anything that we do, we never want finances to be a legitimate barrier between people who want the materials but can't afford them.

So if that's you, feel free to get in touch with us at info at Mediagratia .org and we'd love to get those into your hands.