The Truth of Justification

Welcome back to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder, and with me is Chuck Baggett, and we're looking again at the book, Salvation in Full Color, 20 Sermons by Great Awakening Preachers. And again, the theme of the book is the entirety of the work of our salvation.

So we're not merely looking at these wonderful aspects of the kindness of God to us as sinners and the completeness of the provision that we have in Christ, but we want to remember with each sermon that we're looking at, we are also looking at the different facets of the astonishing wisdom and love and power of the triune God.

So every aspect of these truths is important, not just because it touches our own salvation, but because it does touch upon the honor of God. And so we want to be careful with these truths, not because knowing them perfectly guarantees our rescue, but because these are the truths that are like, you know, these are the beams of the sun, the rays of the sun.

These are the expressions of God's greatness seen in our rescue. And so we that love the Lord, we want to love the truths of the Lord. Now, we're looking today at the doctrine of justification by faith.

And it is a theme, of course, that was at the heart of the Reformation, along with things like sola scriptura, that the Bible is the only authority and the final authority for all Christian life and belief.

And sola Christus, you know, it's only through Christ. But also sola fide, it's through faith alone in Christ that a person receives justification. And we were talking earlier before the podcast that really this is a great place to be reminded of a kind of a fundamental truth, and that is each generation of Christianity has to, in a sense, rediscover these great truths for themselves.

I mean, so our forefathers passed them down to us, of course, and we have great teachers, written, you know, documents, we have the Scripture, we have the Spirit of Christ. But every individual, in a sense, has to have, you know, a Protestant Reformation in their own heart.

I see that the Scripture is trustworthy. I see that Christ is the only way. And I understand justification by faith for myself. And so there is that, you know, that personal grabbing hold of that. And what we want to do today is kind of pull the doctrine out, dust it off, fall in love with it again, and, you know, and look at ways that we might live on this, or how we might understand this more carefully.

And our helper today is a man named Samuel Blair. Samuel Blair was a godly minister, blessed, very effective in the Second Great Awakening. He was not only a minister, but he was also a teacher of ministers.

Samuel Blair and the Training of Ministers

And so at this point in time, many of the evangelicals didn't want to go to Harvard and Yale because of a kind of a moral and spiritual decline. So sometimes pastors who had the academic ability would turn their homes into little seminaries.

The Log Cabin is one, you know. These were names that were kind of given as a nickname, as a slur. The tenants had it. Samuel Blair had one, and one of the, I guess, the most famous of Samuel Blair's pupils was Samuel Davies.

Blair was a very intellectual man. As Chuck and I worked through the sermon, we noticed that it is very different than like a George Whitefield sermon. Whitefield sermons are extremely simple, full of pictures that kind of stick with you.

Blair is much more like you're listening to a professor explain precisely. Also, Whitefield was much more gripping, you know, personal application, exhortation. Yeah, I think if you measured the application section of Whitefield sermons compared to the doctrine section, you'd almost be like half and half, you know.

Whereas Blair is like 90 doctrine explaining very carefully, and then just the last page is like application. So different ways, you know, different gifts that God gives men, but you can see why Whitefield was so popular with the masses, and Blair was a man that taught preachers for a long time.