Is Nominal Christianity a Problem? | Faith Alone is "Radical"

I understand that you guys believe in Sola Fide, but what do you do with a nominal Christian? Jesus speaks to the lukewarm Christian and he spews them out of his mouth. God hates nominal Christians. People are nominal because they aren't taking progressive sanctification or they aren't taking obedience seriously.

You emphasize this too much and people are going to continue in nominalism, they're going to continue being lukewarm, they're going to continue being distant from the church or distant from the things of God.

Fear, Law, and the Problem of Nominal Christianity

I would say the exact opposite. People are so tired by the law and so beat down by it that it's just easier to not do whatever it is that you say they should do. I would say a lot of times I don't think Christians are nominal.

I just think they're not doing it your way and now you're upset. They don't live the Christian life like you think they should live. I am with those people. I'll walk away from that type of Christianity because that is not what I've been called.

To.

I've not been called to live by your standards or by your laws or by your denominational requirements. I have been drawn into the church. I'm not saying I'll leave the church, please don't get me wrong, but what people hear when we emphasize faith alone is that they're saying, well, you guys just want to live however you want.

That's what you're saying. Let me go to a second part that's adding on to this responding to culture. I too am responding to culture, but I'm responding to that culture. I don't believe that God governs his children by fear and guilt.

He governs them by love. Well, how do I know this? Because Jesus flat out says, abided my love. He does not say live in fear of judgment. He does not. Not to the believer. There's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

You've been given a spirit of adoption, not a spirit of slavery and fear.

We love. Why do we love? Because we're afraid if we don't, we'll be thumped on the head. No, we love because he first loved us. We love because it's a response to the nature that's been given to us by faith.

When strong language of warning is used in the New Testament, it's always in cases of hard-hearted, high-handed, unrepentant sin. It's not people who are struggling to, oh my gosh, I found myself caught in sin again.

It's not to those people. The language of the New Testament to those believers is gentle, compassionate, and tender. We're exhorted to be patient with each other and love each other in those contexts.

The strong language is for a different kind of scenario. My thoughts, John, on nominalism, just very quickly. It's very interesting to me that in our evangelical moment, we think that the way to combat nominalism, which is again Christianity in name only, it's false profession.

Now revivalism and all those kinds of things and decisionism and conversionism, we don't have time to define all those isms. Basically, it's this kind of movement and methods that are associated with revival in the American church that produce all kinds of emotional responses, and it's not good.

We could talk about it some other time. But we think in evangelicalism today that the way to combat nominal Christianity is to combat it with law. We come in and we tell people, okay, well, you think you're a Christian, let me give you all of this stuff to do, and then you stack yourself up and see how you're doing.

Well, biblically speaking, the way that you combat nominalism is not with law. It's with union with Christ and clarity on the gospel. That's what Paul does.

Union with Christ and the Gospel Answer to Nominalism

And what do you mean by that? When you say union with Christ, that might be a new phrase for people.

Yeah, thank you. So read Romans 6, would be the chapter in scripture to look at on this reality of being united to Jesus, and even John 15 as well, where Jesus, in his own words, will talk about abiding in him.

So those are great sections to look at there, but union with Christ means that by faith, I mean, so this is very relevant for our conversation today on Sola Fide. The reason that we are saved by faith alone is that by faith, by the means of faith, we are united to Jesus and we are referred to in the New Testament, Christians are, more than any other term, we are referred to as being in Christ.

So by faith, we are in Christ. We're united to him. And what that means is that our sin was placed upon him and he bore that and paid the penalty for it. But then everything that is his is now ours. His righteousness, his merit, you know, his death, we died vicariously.

His glorious inheritance will be ours. We will be co-heirs with him. And so all of his holiness and everything is now ours by faith. And so that's how Paul responds to this idea that, well, should we just live however we want?

Paul says, may it never be so. He doesn't then pound people with law. He says, you need to know who you are. You need to realize that you've been united to Jesus. In his life, death, and resurrection.

And now you're in him. You're not like you used to be, you know, and you're, there's something fundamentally different about you. And then he goes on to talk about the implications of that new identity.

And so that's how we combat nominal Christianity is by heralding Jesus and his sufficiency and his work and our union with him, right? And then, you know, we give people, we give people Christ and we watch their lives change.

We continue to point them away from themselves to Christ. And it's amazing in the context of the church. Now you can't just do this by yourself on the mountaintop somewhere. You're living life in the context of the church.

You're beholding Jesus every Sunday in the word. You're coming to receive Christ by faith in the table. You're singing of Christ. You're praying to the father in Jesus name. You're benefiting from the fellowship of the saints and all the rest.

And as we behold Christ, 2 Corinthians 3 .18, we are transformed from one degree of glory to another.

That's right.

It's a very, it's a, it's a supernatural thing and God does it. And you can't, you just cannot do this with human engineering and methods. It will not work.

No.