Grace in the Blade | Behold Your God Podcast

Before we get started, we wanted to let you know we had a mechanical error in recording this week's podcast that resulted in poor audio. We apologize for the inconvenience. Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast.

I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratiae, and I'm here again today with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and the author and presenter of the Behold Your God.

Study series by Media Gratiae.

This week we're beginning to look at three letters from John Newton. John Newton you know from previous podcasts. This is not the first series of letters that we've talked about from Newton, because Newton was known to be, in his day, a letter writer with a lot of depth and wisdom that was really outstanding.

And so we're going to take three letters that Newton describes as looking at the progressive work of grace in the several stages of a believer's experience.

Right, and we got these from volume one of his works, and this is my own personal really beautiful old copy that I got for Christmas one time that I think I'll have buried with me in my casket. But it's wonderful that Newton takes that passage from Mark 4 where Christ talks about parable things, and he's going to use those things to help us.

So you have Mark 4 there?

Yes, so a little known maybe passage that Christ refers to one of his kingdom parables. This is from Mark 4, 26 to 28. And he was saying, The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil.

And he goes to bed at night, and he gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows.

How?

He himself does not know. The soil produces crops by itself, first the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn.

In the ear.

Right, so Newton approaches this passage pointing out a couple of things in his letters. One is that the work of God is mysterious. The gospel comes into the life under the powerful application of the Holy Spirit, and there are changes that are occurring, like in this parable, that it makes the farmer step back in a sense in amazement and say, I don't know how.

But also, there are stages here in Newton's understanding of this. Stages of Christian maturation, of sanctification. The blade, the ear, and the full corn.

So this might be seen as a symbolic portrayal of John's three categories in Christian sanctification that he mentions in 1 John 2, 13, fathers, young men, and children. He says, I'm writing to you fathers because you know him who has been from the beginning.

I'm writing to you young men because you have overcome the evil one, and I've written to you children because you know the father.

Yeah, yeah. So let's jump right into this. The first, he's going to mention a number of key elements, and we're going to try to.

Hit all of these for you guys.

But there's a lot in this letter, so we're going to have to really be self-disciplined.

Here.

The first thing he talks about is this whole issue of conviction. But in talking about conviction, he's going to talk first about the bad news, and that is that every one of us is born a stranger to our own God.

Not only a stranger, we're actually described in the scriptures as an enemy of God. That is, we are opposed to his governing us. And so Newton makes this point, that means sin is like a great leveler, regardless of what outward distinction we see in each other.

One man is very religious, one man is irreligious, intellectual, uneducated, rich, poor, it doesn't.

Matter.

All humanity bears the mark of a moral rebellion against God that goes so deeply that we call it a moral inability. It is unwilling to the point of being incapable of embracing the gospel and repenting and believing and responding to God in a way that pleases the Lord.

Every one of us, we cannot because we will not. And it really means that all of us have to face this hard fact that is revealed by Christ in John 6, verse 44, no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.

Right.

Now let's talk a little bit about the drawing, because Newton in this letter spends quite a lot of time talking about the drawing and the convicting. And he says some things here that perhaps we don't often think about that I believe are particularly helpful for us as we either do evangelism or as we lovingly come alongside other people who have just professed faith, whether it's as a parent, a friend, or a spiritual leader in a church.

One of the things that Newton really hammers home is that regeneration is connected to conviction. Now we're talking about the kind of conviction that leads a man to repent and believe, and he's going to distinguish that from other convictions.

We'll get to that in a minute. But Newton belonged to a church, the Anglican church, which particularly at that time was divided between evangelical and non-evangelical. Newton was an evangelical. Flowing out of the Great Awakening, there was a real re-emphasis of the experiential aspects and of the responsiveness of the soul, following Puritan emphases from the previous century.

But the Anglican church of his day that was not evangelical, which was the majority, tended to teach that because of the baptism, the kid was already right with God, so to speak. Already regenerated in a sense.

And all that was required, being a good Englishman in an English family, in an English church, was you just bring your kids up in kind of a good religious atmosphere, and in this atmosphere they just kind of grow into their Christianity.

Whereas Newton believed, and he says in this letter, that regeneration is instantaneous. Now the effects flow throughout the rest of the life, but there is a moment, and we may not always be able to pinpoint it, but there is a moment where the Spirit of God brings.

Life.

What Newton says there is that conviction is not something that leads to this life. It is actually an effect or a fruit of the work of God in the soul in regeneration. Therefore, he puts conviction as a part of the early blade stage of the Christian's existence, not prior to it, which is kind of what we tend to think if we're not being.

Careful.

I feel really bad, I feel worse, finally I decide to get serious about Jesus, and then God saves me, and then it starts. No, no, God awakens a man, God opens his eyes, God changes out the stony heart for a fleshly heart, God frees the will, and the man is suddenly made aware of the depth of his sin and turns in repentance and faith.

So it isn't something in his view that leads to eventually God's mercy coming to a person, but it's actually an effect of the mercy of God starting in a life and in the soul. He does differentiate and distinguish.

He says that there are a lot of different kinds of convictions out there, and that it takes a wise counselor to be able to see what kind of conviction is this, and sometimes you may not be able to tell at all in the very beginning.

Yeah, certainly we want to avoid the idea that we're like a God who can look right into the heart, but having said that, the Bible gives a lot of evidence of what the real work looks like, and ignorance of that doesn't help us.

So he says things like this, the natural, if we can use the word supernatural natural, the natural conviction that comes just from hearing about hell and sin and a holy God and your desperate need and the freeness of the gospel and the goodness of Christ.

So you hear all these things, and Newton says, look, these affect people. But if it's not a supernatural work, it's what we would just call a general conviction, one of the ways you'll be able to spot it is that it's temporary.

It doesn't really produce anything.

Yeah, it doesn't lead to faith and repentance.

Right.

Now, he says, don't mistake this. It doesn't mean that the pains of that general conviction aren't sharp. They may be very sharp. And in our words, we would say this, a person might be pretty brokenhearted.

They may weep over their sin, but that doesn't mean it is part of that supernatural work of God if it doesn't lead to repentance and faith. You know, and another thing that he mentions is that sin might be feared.

A person starts to take a look at the sin in their life and they think, well, I don't want to do that anymore. I mean, look where that's going to lead. But Newton says sin is not really understood under general conviction.

You just you're just afraid to do it, but you don't understand the nature of it because your eyes haven't been opened to understand the nature of God, not seeing the majesty of God and the holiness of God and the truths of the gospel as they really are in the Bible.

You don't have any frame of reference to measure sin. So you've got this kind of inadequate view of God and an inadequate view of sin that doesn't lead to repentance and faith. But the supernatural conviction is when the eyes are open to the perfections of God and you see your sin in light of that and suddenly it begins to carry its true weight.

Yeah, Newton says in the letter that conviction, which is actually a part of the blade stage,.

If we want to call it that, is a work of God. He says it like this.

No outward means, no mercies, judgment or ordinances can communicate such a discovery of God or produce such a conviction of sin without the concurrence of this divine light and power to the soul. Then on the other hand, general conviction, a conviction that isn't from God, can be accomplished when threats or promises of Jesus affect the conscience and the feelings and the passions of a person.

But, Newton says, if these are not founded in a spiritual apprehension of the perfections of God, according to the revelation that he's made of himself in his word, they will sooner or later come to nothing.

And of course the person eventually returns to his old ways or alternatively becomes a moral self-righteous Pharisee.

Right, and Newton ends this first description of the blade stage by saying that we shouldn't be surprised when there are professions of faith that don't really prove themselves true. Because of the fact that within the Bible, within the scriptural descriptions, there's a lot that moves our emotions.

And many people, being satisfied with a mere temporary emotional stirring and thinking that that is embracing the gospel, make a profession of faith and then fall away. And Newton describes it this way.

He says these apostasies, so these shallow professions that then fall away, are more to be lamented than to be wondered at.

It shouldn't throw you.

It shouldn't make you say, what, the gospel doesn't work? No, the gospel works. The Bible warned us about this. But the truths of the gospel, even without the supernatural work of God, are so shocking that it affects people.

But if that's all it is, they will fall away. And you should break your heart over that. But don't let it shake your faith in God.

Yeah, and also don't let it shake your faith in the solidness of a true work of God.

Right.

You know, what, can you just get unregenerated?

Right.

Well, no, we have to look to the true nature of what regeneration is. And that's the point of this.

It's to try to help us think carefully about these things.

Yeah, and if, I mean, we can see in our day that a lack of care in this area has really blurred the lines for our world, for the culture around us on what is regeneration. I mean, if you go by the average description or the average outworking of an average baptism or church membership, you know, you look at that and you think, well, regeneration doesn't seem to accomplish so much, does it?

Right.

The final thing about that is, you know, if you were to ask someone who you are concerned about their soul, typically across the Mid-South, but perhaps in other parts of the world as well, well, tell me, you know, how do you know that you're a believer?

Well, I know that there was a time in my life when I was really bothered and I really kind of, you know, I did business with God, you know, got saved. And then, you know, well, what has that led to in your life?

Has that led to church membership? Has that led to active, you know, involvement with the body of Christ? I'm going on with Christ, going on with His word, walking with Him. Well, no, but, you know, the preacher told me that I know that something happened because I was there, I had that experience.

And then I know I can't lose it, you know, so I can't lose my salvation. And so, you know, it's just, it's really pandemic where we live, that this is the kind of thing that we're someone to be more careful to look at the genuine signs of repentance and conviction to see, is this a work of God?

Or is this a work of stirred emotions? People can be spared.

Yeah, it really is. I mean, we have felt the impact as, you know, even as we try to reach out to people around us, in our region, particularly, we felt the impact of a toxic misapplication of the doctrine of grace.

It is a free gift and we cry out for it and He hears us.

But He changes us.

And if we just stop there, then we, you know, really, we just put a rubber stamp on people that perhaps God doesn't know it as His children at all.

Well, the next thing in the blade is a new appreciation of the scriptures. He says that it is scripture that God uses to reveal Himself. And the scripture of light will lead the soul to more scripture.

And the great doctrines of the Bible will soon begin to be perceived and assented to. So that's important. Two things there. We begin to see these things, these great realities, the great doctrines of the Bible.

We see them, we perceive them, and we assent to them, because these are the words of the God that we are now coming to.

Yeah, and that is a wonderful evidence that you can look for in a 10-year-old who professes Christ or a 60-year-old who professes Christ. We often get questions like this. Well, I mean, what am I supposed to look for in a child?

Well, I would look for the same things that you look for an adult. It's the same God. It's the same work of salvation. There is a difference.

Sure.

We look for things on the level that a child's level, you know. So obviously, we don't look for a 10-year-old to have the brain and the maturity of a 60-year-old. But a 10-year-old will have an appetite for the Word of God that wasn't there before.

And even a child can begin to apprehend. I remember when our youngest child was converted. And so this was about age 15. So, I mean, plenty old to, you know, to be thinking critically. But he came to me, and I was still, you know, watching, waiting, trying to encourage him, trying to direct him.

He had told his mother and myself that, you know, he had really embraced Christ. And we were hopeful, but watching. And he came to me, and he said that one night, he said, Dad, Romans 5. I said, yeah, what about Romans 5?

Romans 5 could be a hard chapter for some people. And he said, Romans 5, greatest chapter in the Bible, Dad. I'm like, oh, is it?

He said, yeah.

Do you see what it's talking about, Dad? Like the representation of Christ, the second Adam. And I'm thinking, you're the kid that used to tell me just like months ago, I can't understand my Bible at all.

You know, God's not fair. And, you know, and then I began to see there is not only an appetite for the Scripture, this kid's reading his Bible. Second, there is a supernatural perception and grabbing hold.

And that didn't come from his mom and me counting it into, you know. So that was a very encouraging mark.

Well, Newton talks a little bit about this. Some, this blade stage that early signs of life may be weak. And this newly regenerated person might doubt his or her standing. So let me read this section from the letter.

Newton writes, he believes the word of God, sees and feels things to be as they are described, hates and avoids sin because he knows that it's displeasing to God and contrary to goodness. He receives the record which God has given of his son, has his heart affected and drawn to Jesus by views of his glory and of his love to poor sinners.

He ventures upon his name and promises as his only encouragement to come to a throne of grace. He waits diligently in the use of all means appointed for the communion and growth of grace. He loves the Lord's people, accounts them the excellent of the earth and delights in their conversation.

He is longing, waiting and praying for a share in those blessings, which he believes that they enjoy and can be satisfied with nothing less. He is convinced of the power of Jesus to save him, but through remaining ignorance and legality, the remembrance of sin committed and the sense of present corruption.

He often questions God's willingness and not knowing the aboundings of grace and the security of the promises he fears, lest the compassionate Savior should spurn him from his feet.

Yeah, that's a wonderful balanced reminder. Newton, I mean, you know, when we talk about once saved, always saved and assurance of salvation, Newton's not ignoring these wonderful things. He gives you a very biblical list of the impact of God's work, even on the baby believer, all those changes you just read.

We see those in baby believers. And yet, the young believer at this stage, not having a clarity of how the great covenant of mercy, of grace, fits together and how every need that that young believer has, has already been provided in Christ.

Well, he's easily shifted by his ups and downs and he begins to doubt. And that leads us to the third aspect, where Newton's talking about grace in the blade or grace in the young believer. And that is the issue of assurance.

And he says that in the early days of the believer's life, there are times where the believer does doubt. Am I really a believer? Am I what I claim to be? And Newton says that God will often respond in these early days with what he calls cordials, with these sweet expressions of comforting, strengthening love.

He gives a couple of examples.

He says, perhaps the Christian's heart is enlarged in prayer, or under hearing, or some good promise is brought home to his mind and applied with power and sweetness.

So that's the old way of saying this.

The believer's struggling with questions. He goes to pray and it's like God just throws the door open between heaven and earth. And there's such a sweet sense of communion with God. Or hearing a sermon, it's like I've never, it's like I've never heard that preacher preach before.

And it's like, he's just talking to me. Or I read the scriptures and it's like the book is illuminated and every phrase is exactly what I needed. And so Newton says, now God will give these to us, but being a young believer, they are tempted to misapply them, to misunderstand them.

In two ways, he says,.

They misunderstand the nature of these. They are temporary. They are occasional. They are meant to help during a rough spot.

That's the nature.

But the young believer thinks this is permanent. This is what happens when I do what I'm supposed to do. I just live on this plane of uninterrupted happiness. And then he says, they also misunderstand the design that these are not meant to be a resting place where you just plop down and say,.

Well, you know what? It's pretty nice right here.

These are meant to encourage you to press on in sanctification. So in other words, a young believer is tempted to live on their feelings and experiences. And so at this stage, not being as clear as they should be, or as they one day will be, about the great realities of Christ, they tend to go up and down with their own experiences.

Yeah.

Newton writes in this letter, he wants to feel something that may give him a warrant to trust in the free promises of Christ. He wants to feel something that gives him a warrant to trust in the free promises of Christ.

His views of the Redeemer's gracefulness are very narrow. He doesn't see the harmony and glory of the divine attributes in the salvation of a sinner. He sighs for mercy, but he fears that justice is against him.

However, what has God up to through this? By these changing dispensations, the Lord is training him up and bringing him forward.

Yeah, that's a wonderful, wonderful summary. Now we're running out of time. So let's just hit, he mentions a couple of strengths. He says, there is that sensibility and keenness of appetite during this stage with which the young believer attends the means of grace.

And he says, it's almost like they count the hours between the sermons, count the hours between the church services, count the hours between the chance that I can get back to my Bible and read. And that's so characteristic of a young believer.

There's also a zeal for souls. And Newton admits, now this zeal for souls sometimes is mixed with a lot of immaturity. So you're a bit too forward, a bit too bold. Maybe, you know, you say a little too much.

Maybe a little ungracious toward older believers.

Yeah, certainly.

And so he says, and yet this is a commendable yearning to see God honored in the redemption of sinners. Newton kind of closes down the whole letter by summarizing what we're looking for at the end of this stage.

I mean, it's not a clear cut stage, but as we would say, this person's moving from that blade to that more mature middle stage.

And here's what he says.

The older, the more mature Christian has more solid, judicious, connected views of the Lord Jesus Christ and the glories of his person and redeeming love. Hence, his hope is more established. His dependence is more simple and his peace and strength more abiding and uniform than in the case of the young.

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.

People who purchased this have been getting in touch with us. And I've heard from pastor after pastor about every other week, we'll hear from someone who says, well, guys, we got four new families in our church and they've come from the church across town, which they didn't realize was a prosperity gospel church.

Indeed.

And here at the Shepherds Conference, I've heard hundreds, literally, that's not an exaggeration, hundreds of comments from people here who have been impacted by this film. And I hear those same stories that I've heard pastors tell me that people have watched the film and come into their churches.

And that's the thing is that God delivers his own out of deception.

That's right.

You can't be indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God and stay in that level of deception indefinitely. If you truly belong to Christ, then the Holy Spirit will lead you out of that. If the Holy Spirit is strong enough to save us, he's strong enough to deliver us out of deception too.

So God in his good providence is using that film and the truth therein to open people's eyes and come out and get in good churches. And that's vitally important.

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.

For more information about American Gospel, Christ Alone, visit themeansofgrace .org. So that's Newton's advice to those who are in the blade stage, who are in the beginning of what our Lord himself describes here in this kingdom parable of the beginning of a work of grace.

And with all of it, it's fraught with difficulties. There are some sweet things. There are some places where immaturity and a lack of the grasp of, I love what he says earlier, without a connected view of Christ, with all of the things to see how Christ is determined to save sinners for his own glory.

With all that, does that mean that the blade stage is not beautiful?

Well, no.

He says that a tree is most valuable when it's full of ripe fruit, yes. But there is a peculiar beauty when the trees unblossom. These young years of the Christian, they're like springtime. They're in full bloom.

And as God prunes and gardens, then this tree, this believer, they will bear fruit in older age. Their faith and understanding are weaker, but their hearts are warm. And maybe those of us who may be not in the blade stage, we can certainly remember with fondness and we can pray, we should, our hearts should be warmer than those who don't have as connected a view of who Christ is and what he's done.

So I hope this is encouraging to you wherever you are in your walk with the Lord Jesus. And as we continue to look at these two other stages, we hope that those will be helpful to you as well. Thanks for listening.

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