Faith Is...

Luke 18:9–14 and the Question of Saving Faith

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg.

The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, the 18th chapter. Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and they treated others with contempt. Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector.

The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus, God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get.

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but beat his breast, saying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.

For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted. This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus. Amen. Faith. That's our topic today. Faith. What is faith?

What is that all about? And if we kind of give you an analogy, faith is something that has to do with trust. If you don't trust something or someone, well, you're not going to extend yourself or risk things.

For instance, think all the way back to after the 9 -11 attacks. You guys remember those? I remember those. I can't get that out of my mind. I've been thinking about it lately. I don't know if it's just because we're getting close to September again.

You know what I'm saying? But all that being said, immediately after the attacks, there were no flights available. Nobody could fly anywhere. And I kind of was excited about that because my boss at the time, who I'm absolutely convinced was the guy that they based Michael Scott's character on from the office.

My boss happened to be in San Francisco at the time. And, well, at the time of the attack, him being in San Francisco, no flights available, he wasn't going to be in the office for a few days. And it took him a few days to figure out how to rent a car and then drive all the way back to Southern California.

I was bummed when he showed up. But all of that being said, you'll note that no flights were available and everybody had lost faith in the safety of getting on an airplane. And so the government and the airlines and the airports had to put together some kind of a comprehensive plan to make it so that we would feel safe flying again.

And so more than a week, more than a week, no flights available, they finally had put together an interim plan on what they were going to do to ensure people's safety. And I remember in Southern California watching the news.

And the news was all about the first flights that were taking off. They actually went to airports, showed the security scene that was there. There were armed military with M -16 automatic weapons in airport terminals, man.

Talk about freaky. But all of that being said, they were interviewing people who were getting on planes. Do you think it's safe to fly yet? Do you think it's safe to fly yet? I'm not sure, but I have to get back home.

And things like this were the answer. And so when the planes took off, everybody held their collective breaths. Nails were being bitten. And I remember hearing on the news, the first plane that landed at Los Angeles International, LAX, that the people on board cheered when they landed safely.

They would have given a standing O to the pilots except for they had to keep their seatbelts on and their tray tables in the upright and locked position. I know how the spiel goes, right? So when we talk about faith, faith is one of those things where we have trust.

Trust can be broken. Or as Christians, we're going to note that we are always tempted to put trust or have trust in the wrong thing. This is why heresy is so deadly. And so as we work our way through our three texts today, we're going to work our way through all three, we're going to consider what's going on here as it relates to the topic of faith.

And so in order to help us out, Genesis 4 is where we're going to begin. And I would note, when you ask your average garden-variety, church-going, evangelical Christian, what is the reason why Cain's sacrifice was not accepted by God?

Answer, because Cain offered a salad. Wrong. Okay, I can hear the game show host buzzer go, eh, dun-dun-dun-dun, whoa. Right, no, thanks for playing. Here's some lovely parting gifts, but you're wrong.

Okay, this is not how this works. If you work your way through the book of Leviticus, you'll note that grain offerings are completely acceptable to God. You can bring a grain offering to God. You can offer him bread.

You can offer him wine. You can offer him animals. It doesn't matter. So what's the problem here? And we need to understand what's going on, and so we're going to take a look at Hebrews 11 first. In Hebrews 11, the great hall-of-faith passage, Hebrews 11, one begins with these words.

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the certainty of things not seen. Ooh, that's a good definition of faith, the assurance of things hoped for. What are you hoping for from God, by the way? If you're hoping for a Maserati or me an Aston Martin, yeah, yeah, yeah, you got the wrong hope here, man, because truly an Aston Martin is not something that I can see in my driveway at the moment.

Thank God. Can you imagine paying the taxes on that thing every year and the upkeep and the maintenance? All of that being said, we're talking about what? Reconciliation with God, the hope that we have of eternity with Christ in the new earth.

And you're going to note that faith is the assurance of things that are hoped for. It is the certainty of things not seen. And in our day and age, there's a lot of people running around the Christian landscape talking about the virtues of doubt and that they are talking down the concept of certainty.

Oh, if you have certainty as a Christian, you're arrogant. How dare you have certainty? It is better to embrace doubt, to embrace mystery, to embrace nebulousness and fuzzy things. And, you know, that's not what faith is.

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for. It is the certainty of things not seen. Then the author of Hebrews goes on to say, for by faith, the people of old, people of the old covenant, they receive their commendation.

And by faith, we understand that the universe was created by the word of God so that what is seen was not made out of the things that are visible. And by faith, Abel, here's our operative text, by faith, Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts.

You see it? Abel had faith. Cain, nuh-uh. And verse 6 then goes on to say, and without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists, and he rewards those who seek him.

Without faith, it's not difficult, it's not challenging, it's not hard, it's impossible to please God. That's the reason why Cain did not please God, because Cain had no faith. Now work this out then.

Note that our Old Testament text makes it very clear that there was some religious activity going on there, and we'll talk about that in a second. So let's work our way through our Old Testament passage, or at least a portion of it.

Adam knew his wife. She conceived and she bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord. I always point this out when this text comes up or when I preach on it. If you read this in Hebrew, it does not say, I've gotten a man with the help of the Lord.

It legitimately just translates as, I have gotten a man, the Lord. And there is a whole exegetical tradition within Christianity for millennia now that have seen this text as, well, what? As, well, belief that Eve mistakenly thought that Cain was the Messiah, that Cain was the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent.

Could you imagine what a head trip that would have been, right? And the arrogance that that would have fostered inside of this fellow. So again, Eve bore, she bore his son Abel. Now, Abel was the keeper of sheep, Cain a worker of the ground, and in the course of time, Cain brought to Yahweh an offering of the fruit of the ground.

Abel also brought of the first fruit of his flock and of their fat portions, and we'll note here, there's religious activity going on. Cain doesn't have faith, but he's going through all the motions. It's kind of like the Roman concept of ex opera operato.

How do the sacraments work? Ex opera operato. Well, what does ex opera operato mean? By the working of the work. You see, just do the thing, bend the knee, make the sign of the cross, light the candle, say the prayer, come to the Eucharist, do the thing.

It doesn't matter if you believe or not, the thing does the thing because the working of the work does the work, right? This is heresy. In fact, Cain is held up as one of the three archetypes of false teachers within the Christian church.

The three, again, are Cain, Balaam, and Korah. Korah is the guy who rejects the biblical offices that God has established in the church. Cain is the guy who has religious activity, no faith. He goes through the motions, expecting that just by showing up and doing the thing, putting some money in the plate, saying a prayer, repeating after me when they're supposed to repeat after me, and doing the thing, that somehow that will make him acceptable to God.

And then Balaam, of course, is the prophet for profit. He'll give him the right amount of money, and he'll conjure up the right blessing or curse that you need, regardless of what the need is. And all that being said, those are your three archetypes.

So Cain does not have faith, and it says this, the Lord, Yahweh, he had regard, and watch the order, he had regard for Abel and his offering, which means by faith, as Hebrews lays out, by faith, God had regard for Abel.

Abel had faith. He was commended as pleasing God and declared righteous by the fact that God accepted his sacrifice. Cain, on the other hand, God had no regard for Cain, nor his offering, because Cain doesn't have faith.

So Cain, being humiliated by the entire ordeal, bears a grudge against his brother, murders him, puts him in the ground. God comes looking for him and says, where is your brother? And he says, I don't know, am I my brother's keeper?

And listen to the contempt that he has for God in that response. I don't know, am I my brother's keeper? If I had ever spoken that way to my mother, my head would still be spinning today. So what does God do with such an insolent and murderous man as Cain, who is clearly not up to snuff, and whom he is not well pleased at all?

Well, this is where it gets interesting. God has mercy on Cain. Now granted, Cain now has to experience temporal consequences due to his lack of faith, due to his murdering of his brother. The ground will no longer yield its strength to him, and when he plants crops, every single one of them would fail.

I wonder if I still am under this curse myself. But I digress. But all of that being said, he recognizes now that he's in deep trouble, and God has turned him into a wanderer on the earth, and he's concerned that if anybody should find him, that they would end up murdering him as a means of basically vindicating God and vindicating Abel, right?

And so God hears his concern and does something quite interesting. He marks Cain mercifully. Despite his sin, Cain is marked, and the mark then is the thing that will protect him from experiencing murder himself.

He doesn't deserve this. God has had mercy on him, and one of the things I love over and again when I see Lutheran sermons on this text, everybody who preaches on it sees a connection to baptism. It's kind of an interesting thing because in our baptisms, we were marked with the name of God.

We were baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and despite the fact that we do not deserve life, we do not deserve to be preserved, God preserves us and marks us with his very name so that we do not have to experience, well, eternal death.

It's kind of a fascinating connection. So you'll note when we talk about the topic of faith, Cain had none. But then there's malformed faith, faith in the wrong thing, and unfortunately, well, we've all either been guilty of this in one degree or another or we've gone to church with somebody who is just like what we see next.

Faith in the Wrong Thing

We turn now to our gospel text and the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. And here's how the text begins. Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves. Well, that's a poorly formed faith.

The person who trusts in himself trusts in a fool. They trusted in themselves that they were righteous. Not only did they trust in themselves, they trusted that they were perfectly good, that they were totally righteous, that they had done the stuff necessary to get on God's good side.

They were trusting in their own righteousness, in their own works, in their good deeds. And, of course, the self-righteous always have this problem. They treat others with contempt. Yeah, you're familiar with Dana Carvey's church lady, right?

We've all gone to church with her. Could it be Satan, right? This is what we're talking about here, right? This judgmental person who says, well, I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't chew. I cannot believe that people could call themselves Christians and do those things.

I have gotten my act together, and me and Jesus, we're tight, right? This is how they talk. And if you want to be tight with Jesus, you've got to start following my example. Oy, right? This is a malformed faith and trust in completely the wrong thing.

This person has faith for sure, but not saving faith, not faith in Christ. So as the story goes, two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. I love the fact that to the audience that was there when Jesus first told this parable, that the way they would have heard this, the setup, ah, Pharisee, good guy.

Tax collector, bad guy. And you can almost hear them hissing when Jesus said, there was a Pharisee. Ha, way to go, Pharisee. A tax collector, boo, hiss, ha, right? You could just hear that. Everybody knows how this is supposed to go.

And so Jesus describes what's taking place. A Pharisee standing by himself prayed. I always like to point this out. I'll keep doing it because the repetition helps us. What time of day is this? This is a very specific hour of the day.

And the hour is three in the afternoon. If you look in your Mosaic Covenant, you note that on a daily basis, there are two sacrifices. There's the sacrifice in the morning, and there's the sacrifice in the afternoon.

First sacrifice is at 9 a .m. Second sacrifice is at 3 p .m. And this is the 3 p .m. hour of the sacrifice as well as the hour of prayer. And people would gather in the temple, in the inner court there, for the purpose of, well, witnessing the sacrifice and also praying.

As the psalmist says, let my prayers rise before you as incense, the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice. So this is what's going on. And you'll note there's blood involved. And it's got to be a somber kind of thing that has to be watched here.

So out comes the sacrificial lamb, and you can hear it bleeding. Bah, bah, bah. And the priest pulls out his knife, and the bleeding stops. And the bleeding begins, right? Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.

This is the context. And in the middle of that, while the evening sacrifice is being offered, the Pharisee prays this outrageous prayer. And every time I read this prayer, I always hear it in my head, in the voice of Joel Osteen.

It's the craziest thing. And so let me see if I can get the voices out of my head here. God, I thank you that I'm not like other men, extortioners, the unjust, adulterers, or even like the tax collector.

I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get. You can just see him say, I am the head and I'm not the tail. I am rich. I am wealthy. I am wise. I am righteous. I am woo-hoo. Praise me. Right?

What on earth is that? Yeah? Is that any different than Joel Osteen's affirmation theology, where you stand in front of a mirror and declare how amazing you are? There is no difference, none whatsoever.

And here's the thing. To the audience listening at this time, they would have said, yep, that's the right way to pray, man. Those Pharisees, they have every right to be praying that way. Fasts twice a week, tithes everything that he'd get.

There's a tax collector. Boo, hiss, go away. Standing far off. You're not far enough away, right? You shouldn't even be in the temple. Standing far off. He wouldn't even lift up his eyes to heaven. Something has gotten into this fellow.

Maybe the law of God, the Holy Spirit, has convicted him of his sin, of his greed, of the different ways in which he's slowly murdered his own, well, countrymen by siding with the Romans and extorting from them every single denarius that he could squeeze out of them so that they lived in squalor while he lived in luxury.

And the word of God has gotten into him and convicted him of his wickedness. So without even being able to look up to heaven, he prays, God, be merciful to me, a sinner. And the Greek verb here for be merciful is a word that really is invoking the sacrifice that is being killed at this time.

It's an interesting word altogether, very interesting verb. It means, God, may you be expiated towards me. Expiation involves sacrifice. So what's he doing? He's pointing to the sacrifice on the altar.

And Roseborough's paraphrase would be, God, let that sacrifice be for my sin. That's the point, right? So Jesus then does the old switcheroo. The good guy now becomes the bad guy. The bad guy becomes the good guy.

That's the scandal of the gospel. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, talking about the tax collector, justified, declared not guilty by God rather than the other. And here comes the punch.

Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled. The one who humbles himself will be exalted. A proper Christian faith does not look to itself. It does not look to its good works, which Christ has prepared for us to do.

It does not look to its obedience, its piety, or anything else in the hopes that that is what's going to save the person. That is a faith that will damn you because it is not saving faith, the faith that trusts in Christ.

And here's the important bit. Christ is the one who is our sacrifice. It is not a coincidence that the morning sacrifice was at 9 a .m. and the evening sacrifice at 3 p .m. Because when Jesus took your sins and mine upon himself and suffered the wrath of God in our place, his nailing to the cross occurred at 9 in the morning.

His breathing of his last, where he cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And he cries out, It is finished. And he yields up his spirit. That occurred at 3 in the afternoon. It is not a coincidence.

God knows what he's doing. Jesus is the one who is the righteous one of God. He is the spotless lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The one who trusts in himself that he is righteous is blind and is self-deceived, and his faith is not on the proper thing.

The late Dr. Norman Nagel of the Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, who was a mentor of one of my pastors, he always used to describe faith as eyesight. Faith always has to look at something.

What is your faith looking to? Is it looking to your progress? Is it looking to your wallet? Is it looking to, well, just name the thing. If it's anything other than your crucified and risen Savior who has bled and died for all of your sins and gives you salvation completely as a gift, your faith is in the wrong thing.

You're going the wrong way. I always loved that movie, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. And there's John Candy and Steve Martin driving on the wrong side of the road in a car that had been set on fire the night before.

It actually hadn't been set on fire. They're going down the wrong road, and there are some people going, You're going the wrong way. You're going the wrong way. How do they even know where we're going?

It's a great scene. And so I'm here as that person on the other side of the road while you're merely driving to your doom. You're going the wrong way. Turn around. Do not trust in yourself. You cannot save you.

Your righteousness cannot save you. Only the righteousness of Christ can save you. Your condition is far worse than you can possibly imagine. You are not a good person. You and me alike, we are all ungodly.

To trust in ourselves is to forfeit eternity and to declare ourselves unworthy of the gift of eternal life. So in our Ephesians text, it puts a wonderful bow on all of this. Paul, in his great summary of the Christian faith, reminds us Christians where we all began.

And he says this in Ephesians 2 .1, You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air. The spirit is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind.

And we were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. It does not paint a good picture of humanity here. Humanity is not a bunch of people who are born morally neutral or basically good. We are all born and conceived dead in trespasses and sins.

And you'll note, this is not a knock on anybody in the cemetery over here, in our graveyard, but I can guarantee you that nobody in our cemetery right now is improving. Their situation is not getting any better.

In fact, I would say things are decaying out there. Dead is dead, and dead doesn't get better. Dead gets worse. We don't hold Evangelism Sunday for the dead. We don't sell self-help books to the dead.

The dead can't do stuff. They don't get better. And you cannot get better either. And so we've got to take this into consideration here. This text reveals something very important to us, the question of where does faith come from?

We've heard a lot of people talk in terms like this, and maybe you've used language like this, but it's wrong. Somebody will say, I have, I have put my faith in Jesus. No, you did not. It is impossible for the dead to put their faith in Jesus.

The dead are dead. It is a denial of the doctrine of original sin. It is a denial of this passage. It is a denial of the text where David says, in sin did my mother conceive me, because that's what is true of all of us.

Each and every one of us were born under the dominion of darkness. We were dead. We carried out the passions of our flesh, and we were under the dominion and rule of Satan himself, and we are not capable of extricating ourselves from this situation.

Your good works, your efforts, your prayers, your piety, your kneeling. It doesn't matter what you do. You cannot get yourself out of this. Dead is dead. And then the big turn here comes in verse 4 with the words, but God.

God here, the word God, theos, is in the nominative. It means it's the subject of the sentence, and there are three verbs that follow. And God is doing all the doing. Not you, not me, not nobody else.

God, being rich in mercy. I love the modifier rich. God isn't chintzy when it comes to mercy. Because of the great love that he had. Megas, love. Great love that he had for us. God doesn't love us just a little bit.

He loves us a lot. No, no, it's great. It's beyond what you can even imagine. Because of the great love with which he loved us, he, even when we were dead in our trespasses and sins, God is the one who made us alive together with Christ.

When did he do that? Hmm. I don't know. It sounds baptismal to me, if you think about it. Because what does Romans 6 say? When you were baptized, you were buried with Christ, and you were what? Raised with Christ.

And so I would note that this particular verb really only appears one out of the time in antiquity, and that's in the book of Colossians. God made us alive together with Christ. This is a baptismal reference.

And by grace you have been saved. And he raised us up with him. That's your next verb, raised us up. And seated us with him. God made us alive, raised us up, seated us with Christ. He's doing the doing.

He's the one who wills, not you, not me. He's the one who made us alive, not you, not me. He's the one who even gave us faith. And he did all of this so that in the coming ages, he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.

I love that, that part of the reason why he did this is so that he can show even more riches of his grace in the world to come. You think you've experienced God's grace now? Wait until you see what's coming.

God's intent is to really kind of pour it on thick in the grace and the mercy and the love department in the world to come. And if you've ever heard somebody say, well, the reason why Jesus died on the cross was because you were so worth it, that person's lying to you.

That's just nonsense, okay? Romans 3 makes it clear that all of us have sinned, all of us have become worthless. In fact, if you believe that the reason why Jesus died was because you were worth it, then you're still worshiping yourself rather than your great Savior who saved you.

So here's the question then, where does faith come from? The text explains it. Verse 8, a verse that many of you probably have memorized. For by grace you have been saved through faith. This is not your own doing.

It is the gift of God. And I would note, there is some regularity with which I get asked a very specific question regarding this passage. And it will usually come in as an email. It goes to the email to secretary at kungsvingerchurch .org.

My wife fields the email and says, so-and-so has a question about Ephesians 2, verse 8. They said that in the text it says, it is not the gift, it is not the result of works, it is the gift of God, and they want to know what it is.

Okay, what is it? That's a good question, and I have a pretty standard answer. So I call them up or talk to them on Zoom, and so we'll work through the text and say, all right, so here's what it says.

By grace you have been saved through faith. It's not your own doing. It's the gift of God. So which is it? Is it the grace? Is it the faith? Is it the salvation? Which is it? Yes. Yes, the whole thing, okay?

It's a package deal. It's like one of those really cool gift bags you get at Christmas or on your birthday where you reach in and you got a gift in there. It's like, ooh, this is cool, but then the person says, keep looking.

Take the paper out. Oh, take a look. The grace, the salvation, the faith itself is part of a gift. You were dead, so God made you alive, and he gave you the faith that you have in Christ. It's not the result of works so that no one can boast.

We then are God's workmanship as Christians, and we are created in Christ Jesus for good works. Notice our good works do not create us in Christ. We are first created in Christ Jesus, and what do Christians do?

They do good works because they're Christians. If you're doing your good works in the hope that someday, someday you might be able to finally become a Christian, you'll never get there. Your good works cannot save you.

And God has prepared all of this beforehand that we should walk in them. So as we consider the topic of faith, you'll note Cain had none, and you'll note the Pharisee had all kinds of faith, but it was in the totally wrong thing.

And so as we consider again this idea of faith, come back to your baptismal reality. Come back to the truth that God has gifted you. He's made you alive in Christ. He's seated you with Christ. He is the one who has raised us from the dead and given us the gift of faith, and true saving faith has its eyes focused only on one, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, who mercifully because of his great love for us, offered up his own life so that we can live.

He died in our place, suffered the wrath of God in our place so that we would never have to suffer the wrath of God. He is the righteous one. You are the unrighteous one. He has taken your unrighteousness and iniquity so that you can now be righteous before him and clothe you with his righteousness all as a gift.

So faith matters. So here's the question. Who do you believe? Who do you trust for your salvation? Christ, yourself, Shiva, Vishnu, your money or whatever? Who you believe in matters. There's salvation only in Christ.

In the name of Jesus, amen.

Support, Distribution, and Closing

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