Anthony Rogers: Justification By Faith

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Reform Rookie podcast. My name is Anthony Vigneault, and I'm your Reform Rookie host, bringing you all things

Reform this evening. The goal of this podcast is to take the deep, rich truths of the Reform tradition and help you see the beauty in them and the joy you'll experience in understanding them better.

Understanding these truths will help us better know the God of the scriptures and help us better to appreciate His plan of salvation.

I'm really excited tonight because my guest is Anthony Rogers. He's an accomplished theologian and a debater who defends the

Christian faith against Muslims, Unitarians, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox opponents.

He has an extensive and excellent YouTube channel with over 250 videos where you can see his teachings and debates.

And today, with him, I'm looking forward to going over justification by faith alone.

And that's based on the debate he just did against an Eastern Orthodox opponent by the name of Serafin.

So, with that, welcome, Tony. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Oh, my pleasure.

Was there anything I missed? Do you want to tell people where they can find you online? I'm all over the place,

I guess. I have stuff, material, written material on the answeringislam .org

website. I wrote for Answering Islam for many years. I also wrote many things with David Wood on the blog answeringmuslims .com.

I did videos with David on his Acts 17 Apologetics YouTube channel for many years when

I was in seminary. That channel is now defunct. For those that watched David, you know that he got fed up with YouTube and decided to take down all his videos and give the channel over to Hatun Tash of DCCI Ministries.

So those videos, though, are still floating around out there. There's a lot of stuff. I can't keep track of where it's all at now.

People downloaded videos and put them up, and they've taken articles I've written and they've put them up in places. I've written stuff for various periodicals,

Reformed magazines, Reformed theological journals, like the Puritan Reformed Theological Journal and things like that.

So I've got a bunch of stuff out there, but the main place people can find me now is on my YouTube page.

Great. Excellent. So was Islam something that you were interested in as a

Christian? Was that something that drew you to it? Did you want to defend Christianity against Islam?

Were you in a situation where you had to do that? Yeah. So I was converted. The quick story on my conversion, which coincides with my confrontation with Muslims and becoming interested in evangelism to Muslims, the quick version is

I was converted at 18 in 1993 in prison. I ran on the streets of Southern California, eventually got in legal trouble, went to prison for stealing a car, was there for two and a half years.

It's there that I heard the gospel. I was overjoyed coming to know Christ and learning that my sins were forgiven.

And I had this immediate desire to tell everybody about Christ, but I quickly learned not everyone shared my enthusiasm.

They weren't as excited to hear as I was to tell the grace of Christ. And so people began to push back against what

I was saying. And so it was a pretty hostile context, both verbally as well as physically, potentially.

And so I had to learn how to defend it. And I wanted to defend it because I didn't want anybody to leave a conversation

I was in with some kind of an excuse. I didn't want to feel like I had failed to properly present the truths of the gospel in opposition to what other people were holding to.

And so I started to learn about Islam, both Orthodox Islam and various heretical offshoots of Islam.

Of course, the whole religion of Islam is heretical from a Christian standpoint, but even from a Muslim standpoint, there are heretical offshoots like the nation of Islam and the five percenters and the nations of gods and earth and so forth.

So I started learning about these groups and not only those groups, but definitely

Islam because of the context I was in. There were a lot of people that looked to Islam as their way of pacifying their own conscience without actually experiencing a real inward renovation of the heart.

Sure, sure. So as you're defending Islam, did you come to a knowledge of the doctrines of grace or was that beforehand?

How did that work out? So it all for me kind of just coincided. It's hard to separate out all these things because it was all in this period of time.

So I was what happened. First, I went to jail. That's where you're still going to court.

You're not yet convicted and put in the population, the general population of those convicted.

So I was in jail and providentially a devil worshiper was my cellmate.

But ironically or unexpectedly, rather, this guy was actually a pretty cordial fellow.

However, he had all sorts of antipathy for the truth of Scripture, the

God of the Bible, the Christ of the Bible and all that. And so he had this ax to grind. I wasn't expressing any interest in Christianity, but he had this ax to grind and wanted to tell me why he hated the

God of the Bible and why I should too and so forth. And along the way, I was saying things like,

I don't think you're telling me the straight scoop. I think you're just making things up.

This doesn't sound plausible. And so he actually told me how to get a Bible because he wanted to show me where all these things were that he was talking about.

So I filled out what's called a kite. That's where you request something. And I got a Bible and he couldn't show me any of the stuff that he was talking about.

And the few things that maybe looked a little bit like what he was talking about actually appeared in a different light,

I noticed. And he kind of gave up his quest to convince me of his particular positions.

But I'm there with a lot of time on my hands. So I thought, well, why don't I just read this thing? And I started to read it more for entertainment than anything else.

But while I was reading it, I read over and over again of how

God has all of heaven and earth at his disposal, how he is able to do as he pleases and does do as he pleases.

And that includes judging sinners. So for example, banishing our first parents from the garden, consequent upon their one act of disobedience, merely reaching forth and taking of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,

God exiled them from his presence. Then I read of how God destroyed

Sodom and Gomorrah by sending fire down out of heaven. I read of stories like this.

Nadab and Abihu, fire shooting out of his presence because they brought unauthorized fire before him.

And I realized the God of scripture is holy and has all of heaven and earth at his disposal.

I am at his mercy. He could destroy me any moment he desired to, but for whatever reason chose not to.

And I was really bothered by this because I knew I deserved judgment.

There was no question in my mind that I was a sinner before him. And so as I'm reading scripture,

I'm also reading those parts of scripture that speak quite explicitly to the fact that God chooses whom he will draw out of that fallen lump of humanity.

He chooses those upon whom he will set his love. And I read the

Bible through several times in this context at a very quick pace.

Like I say, I had all kinds of time at my disposal. So I'm reading through it and I would get to passages like John 6,

Ephesians 1, Romans 9. And not only those texts that are the locus classicus of certain doctrines related to the reformed faith, but certainly those texts.

And I knew when I was coming up to them that I was about to get into these sections that made me a bit uncomfortable.

Now understand at the time I was not yet converted, but I was in some sense convicted.

I realized that I was a sinner, but I didn't understand the gospel yet. And so as I'm reading these passages,

I wanted to get through them as quickly as I could. Because I didn't want to stop and really think about them.

But what really got me was in John 6 when Jesus delivers his great church shrinkage seminar.

This is where he starts out with the multitudes, the 5 ,000 plus people.

And by the end of it, the multitudes have left because they're offended. Jesus said, they don't have any life in them unless they eat his flesh and drink his blood.

By which he meant coming to him in faith. He explains what he means by eating his flesh and drinking his blood in the context.

It means coming to him, believing in him, trusting in him and trusting themselves to him. And this was offensive to them because it suggested that in themselves, they were dead.

And apart from Christ, they had no life. And so they were offended and they walked away.

And then Peter brings up that this is offensive. And then Jesus said, you can't even come to me for life unless the father who sent me draws you.

So it's as if Jesus is upping the ante. And he also, or furthermore, said to Peter, do you want to leave also?

And Peter's response, I just remember it was like, to me, it was like the gates of heaven being opened as others have expressed their own conversion in various places in Scripture.

Luther pointed to Romans 1 16 through 18 or 1 16 through 17. Others point to different places, but Peter responded,

Lord, where shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. And so for me,

I didn't have this false alternative that I think many people have who have been introduced to a different way of reinterpreting the

Scriptures. You have those who will try and reduce or water down or otherwise falsify what

Christ is saying and make it sound more like you have something more to do with the process than is actually allowed in Scripture.

And so what I understood is that here's this Christ, this sovereign Christ who calls whom he wills, saves whom he wills, and brings whom he wills to himself.

And I thought these are my alternatives. Either I believe in Christ and his sovereignty, or I reject him and his sovereignty.

It wasn't like I could believe in Jesus and not believe in his sovereignty. I could believe in Jesus and not think that I came to him because I was graciously drawn or effectually called or something along those lines.

So when I understood the gospel, I understood it as this package deal.

I understood it as you're accepting Christ and what he taught, not Christ and only the things that you find comfortable or palatable and so forth.

Amen. Yeah, we have to come to Jesus on his terms, not ours. You know, he's the offended party. We're the ones who need to humble ourselves.

So yeah, that's amazing that you just read the Scriptures and through the

Scriptures themselves, you recognize that there's an elect group of people that the

Father gives to the Son in eternity past, and he draws them to Jesus. I see that as a betrothal language.

You know, he's giving a bride to his son, and his son, in love for his bride, is willing to die on their behalf, and the

Holy Spirit draws them and walks them down the aisle in preparation for the wedding supper of the Lamb. It's beautiful.

Yeah, and you mentioned how I came to these ideas just by reading the Bible. That's why

I hear a lot of people, when they want to attack Reformed theology, they'll make much of the fact that it's sometimes called

Calvinism, and sometimes they'll try and besmirch the character of Calvin. Any number of things along those lines, people will drum up.

But for me, they're always ineffective because I just look back to the fact that I was convinced of these things long before I knew there was a person named

Calvin. I didn't, you know, like I said, I didn't have anybody telling me anything about Arminius or Calvin.

I'm just reading the Bible, and it was clear to me, Jesus in John 6, Paul in Ephesians 1, and in Romans 9 through 11, they're clearly teaching divine sovereignty, unconditional election, irresistible grace, and so forth.

And so, I didn't think that there was this other alternative. And I like the way you describe what's going on in John 6 with the whole betrothal idea, because as well, the truth of particular redemption is involved in this, because when you think about it, the idea that God loves

His church, if that's not referring to a special love, then I don't know how we're supposed to be comforted by the statements of Scripture that God loves us, because we know that there are certain people that are in hell, certain people that are alive now that will be in hell, and certain people who will be alive who will go to hell.

And if God loves them in the same sense that He loves everybody else,

I'm not sure why I should derive comfort from statements of Scripture like that. But Scripture specifically says that Christ loves

His bride. Any man who loves another woman with the same kind of love that he loves his own wife is not really a good husband, is he?

And I don't think any wife is going to be ultimately comforted knowing that her husband has this indiscriminate love for every woman out there, and not a special love for her.

But Scripture speaks of God having a special love for His people, and of Christ dying for His bride, giving

Himself for her purification. Excellent. You know, the other thing that comes to mind when people say, well,

God loves everyone the same, and I say to them, okay, if God loves everyone the same, then it's not

God's love for you that saves you, it's your love for God that saves you. Because He's done the same thing for both parties.

So the deciding factor would be your love for Him. That's really what saves you, is because you love Him. But the

Scriptures are obviously replete against that. You know, it's only because of God's illuminating

Spirit bringing you to life, and changing the desires of your heart that you would even consider coming to Christ.

It's a death march. It's a dying to self. Yes. And it's similar to marriage, right?

Marriage is the sanctification ministry. It's dying to yourself and giving yourself over to the other person for their benefit.

So with that, what I wanted to discuss with you, or have you go through, is the reformed doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Now, this was obviously a big thing in the Reformation. This was the material cause of the

Reformation. The formal cause was Sola Scriptura. So if you could just break down what justification by faith alone means, and then we'll start pulling it apart and going through some

Scriptures to walk people through it. Yeah, so the basic idea is that man, by virtue of the fall, became guilty and corrupt.

We became guilty, meaning liable to punishment. As a result of sinning against God, breaking

His law, His judicial wrath is justly disposed against us.

And because of that, then, we need to be delivered from our guilt and also our corruption.

But in justification, God is dealing with our guilt. In sanctification and glorification,

He's dealing with our corruption. But justification deals with that legal issue of guilt or culpability, which makes us liable to divine punishment and wrath.

And so what Scripture teaches with respect to this is that Christ became incarnate.

He took upon Himself our nature. He became the second or last Adam and represented us in His perfect life as well as in His atoning death.

By His death, He endured the judgment due to us that now provides the grounds for God to remove our sin or remit our sin or absolve us of guilt and thus deliver us from liability to punishment.

And because of Christ's perfect life, which He lived in perfect obedience to the law of God, God now is able to view us not only as guiltless, but as righteous, as having satisfied the demands of God's perfect righteousness.

And so that, according to Scripture, is imputed to us. God doesn't impute our sin.

He imputed it to Christ. He died for it. And God, on the other hand, imputes

Christ's righteousness to us and reckons us as though we were righteous, as though we had kept

His whole law. And by virtue of that, we have a claim, a right, or a title to eternal life.

And so that's justification in a nutshell. And we say it's received through faith alone, through the

God -given gift of faith, the Spirit -wrought gift of faith, we receive or lay hold of Christ and His righteousness and the forgiveness that is in Him.

And so we distinguish this from sanctification, which is the ongoing work of the Spirit, who morally renovates us, spiritually regenerates and renews us and conforms us to the image of Christ.

Do we actually become more righteous in sanctification? So, first of all, objectively before God, it's always important to keep these distinctions.

We are objectively and completely righteous before Him. In sanctification, it's interesting, we often use the word sanctification to refer to the process that follows upon our act of believing.

But Scripture more often than not uses the term sanctification to refer to what

God does at the beginning of the Christian life. When a person believes in Christ, he's justified, but God also sets that person aside and consecrates that person to Himself.

And so that's why Scripture will refer to people even before they look very like they've made much progress.

It'll refer to them as saints or holy ones. It's the same basic term, various forms of it that's used to refer to sanctified, sanctifying, sanctification.

That term is the same one from which we get saints. And so technically, the term sanctified refers to that initial setting apart of a person at the beginning of the

Christian life. But we also use it to refer to the process that follows from that, which

Scripture ordinarily speaks of in terms of mortification, where our inborn activity or proclivity towards sin is being killed off, because we still have the remaining vestiges of our sinful nature, and those inclinations have to be killed off.

And so this is usually referred to as mortification or putting off sin, or where Jesus talks about cutting off something.

He's talking about these desires towards sin. And then on the positive side, it speaks of being conformed to the image of Christ.

And so if that's what one means by becoming more righteous, then I would say yes. In sanctification, one is mortifying sinful desires and putting off the deeds of the flesh, and is growing in their conformity to Christ.

But somebody might mean something else. This is why I hesitate. Somebody might mean something else by the idea of becoming more righteous.

And so I guess it would depend what they mean by more righteous. Right. I'm trying to understand the

Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox position, which would say that justification by faith alone is a legal fiction.

You're pronouncing me righteous, but I'm not really righteous. So how does that work?

Yeah, well, it's only fictitious if the righteousness of Christ is fictitious. Scripture speaks of Christ as the righteous one, and it's clear that it refers to the righteousness of His doing and dying.

It refers not to the essential righteousness that has always been inherently and natively

His as the eternal Son or Word, but refers to the righteousness of Christ as the

God -man, the incarnate Son, actively discharging the duties of God's law.

That's what Scripture says Christ came to do and did do, and that is what Scripture speaks of being imputed to us.

And that righteousness is real. It's really imputed to us. It's really received through faith, and it really is the grounds upon which

God can, not fictitiously, but properly regard us as righteous.

If you have a bank account and I put money into it, because Scripture not only uses the language of legal terminology, but very close to this financial terminology, communicates the same idea, it speaks of things being credited.

Another word for imputation is credit or reckon. If I put money into your bank account, even though you haven't earned it, it's still reflected in your bank account that you have this money, and it doesn't make any sense for somebody to say, oh, well, that's a banking fiction, right?

It's a banking fiction to say you have this money because really it's His money. No, it's

His money reckoned or credited to you, and so it's really yours. It's really in your account. You can really spend it.

You can really rely on it. And so it's only a fiction if Scripture doesn't tell us that it's

Christ's righteousness that God takes into account in reckoning us righteous. So one of the things that Seraphim, the

Eastern Orthodox guy, was talking about was, is it ontological righteousness? In other words, is it an actual righteousness in us, or is it just, like you said, forensic?

Yeah, that conflates those two things that I was talking about. I mentioned that in the fall, we became guilty and corrupt.

So our legal status before God was that of guilty sinners who deserve His judgment, and our inward condition is one of corruption.

We are inclined towards sin. We are sinful by nature. And those two things are both being dealt with in the broader range of what

Scripture is talking about when it mentions salvation, but justification deals with that legal, objective problem that we have before the bar of God's justice.

And so it's not as if we're saying that God doesn't inwardly transform us.

We're just saying that's not justification. That's not the basis of our confidence before God. That's not the basis of our forgiveness or the absolution of guilt or things like that.

It's not the basis upon which God promises us eternal life. This is something that's dealt with in sanctification, where God not only forgives our sins and imputes righteousness, but also pours forth

His Spirit into our hearts and conforms us into the image of Christ. That indeed is a process, and it's something in which we're growing and so forth.

But it's not the grounds of forgiveness. It's not even really accurate to say, as we sometimes might say when addressing the errors of Rome in the

East, it's not even that they're conflating these two things. They're basically denying this one and putting this one in its place and saying, this covers the whole gamut of our problem.

And so it just erases. It'd be like saying the persons of the

Trinity are not really distinct persons and just getting rid of one or two of the persons.

So each person is fully God. And so you might still have the illusion of still having

God in that scenario, but according to Scripture, you don't have any person of the Trinity if you deny any one of the

Trinity, any member of the Trinity. And so I'm saying that they really just get rid of justification, and they want sanctification to cover everything, and it's just not how

Scripture presents it. Right. Wouldn't justification on a Roman Catholic view happen at the end after your sanctification?

So that's when you're deemed innocent because you now have your own righteousness, even if it was a gift given to you by Jesus because of your efforts, which is really not grace.

The problem is how they, when they talk about justification, they think that justification refers to a process that begins with God infusing righteousness into you, and they believe that the official

Trent answer, that the answer of the Council of Trent, the tridentine answer to this issue is that when

God infuses righteousness, the person literally becomes without sin. It's not just forgiven of sin, but sin is expelled from the soul.

And so you're brought into this state of grace. It doesn't refer to the disposition of God toward you,

His good favor toward you. It refers to a state that you're entering into and now are enabled by this infusion to live holy lives.

When you sin, you've now reintroduced sin into your being, and that needs to be expelled again through their sacramental system, and you need to be in effect, it's like a bucket or a bathtub.

You might think of it, imagine water being poured into it. That's grace, but there's a leak in the tub.

And so you need to put more water into it all the time. Well, that's the Roman system. God has poured grace into you.

It's viewed as a substance rather than in His good favor. And when you sin, the bathtub is leaking out and you need more being poured in.

Now, if you commit a mortal sin, now something more drastic has to happen. You need to be re -justified.

You need to be given the bathtub and the water all over again, I guess, in that scenario. I'm sorry, somebody doesn't know

I'm recording over here. I'm assuming you can edit this part out. Are you able to edit things out?

I can, yeah, sure. I really didn't hear anything from your side anyway. Oh, okay.

Yeah, no worries. Was it a person? Yeah, yeah, somebody came into the office here.

Oh, yeah, no worries. I forgot to tell them I was recording. So salvation justification is viewed in that way like a bathtub, and it gets these leaks and needs to be refilled.

And so it's not until the end of that process that you can say that you came out on the other side,

I guess, with a full bathtub of water. That's kind of the Roman system. And of course, part of what's going into that water is being supplied not only by you, but also by the saints,

Mary, Joseph, the apostles, angels, other saints that have gone on.

Is that what they call the treasury of merit? Yeah, the treasury of merit.

So a Roman Catholic can't know that he's actually pulling it off until the end.

That's why there can't be any assurance in that system, because it is contingent on all of this.

It's contingent on them continually refilling the bathtub. Right, so ultimately it depends on the human being and their performance.

Right. Right, which is scary. That's not good news.

That's not good news. So the question I would have to ask is with this treasury of merit, was the merit of Jesus not enough to cover the sins of everyone who have faith in Him and are working for their own righteousness?

Yeah, I mean, that's the obvious question. If Christ's righteousness, if His merit is part of the equation, what need is there of this other righteousness that Rome talks about, that of Mary and the saints?

They would talk about it as a common treasury, Christ and that of the saints, but it's almost like somebody talking about adding to infinity.

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Roman Catholics will give divergent answers because Rome has no clear answer to that.

They just know that they don't want to say that it's Christ alone, as the Reformed have always said.

Right, right. It's always Christ plus Mary, grace plus, works plus, that kind of stuff.

So they're going to go to obviously James 2 and say, well, it's not by faith alone. How do you combat that with regards to justification?

Yeah, so first of all, a legitimate hermeneutical approach seeks to look at the testimony of all of Scripture and not try to make all of Scripture agree with your or somebody else's interpretation of a solo text.

Rome wants to select out of James' epistle. James wrote one epistle, five chapters, and there's one verse in James in particular that contradicts the notion of justification sola fide.

Whereas on the other side, we have the testimony of Paul's letters,

Romans, Galatians, where he's actually dealing with this in a sustained way. In Romans, Paul's giving us his didactic teaching on the topic, and it's the closest thing we have in the

New Testament to a systematic theology. And there, he's very clear that it's by faith alone. And in Galatians, Paul's defending the gospel against Judaizers who are attacking it.

So we have a sustained, systematic defense of the doctrine in Romans, or presentation of the doctrine in Romans, and a sustained defense of it in Galatians.

So those are the primary places we ought to be looking to determine what the teaching of Scripture is on this.

When we go to the epistle of James, then we already know—it's sort of like when you look at texts about the deity of Christ, there are texts that somebody might bring up that we might puzzle over, how does this square with the overall teaching of Scripture?

But the one thing we know is that Scripture has an overall teaching, and so if we don't understand how this text relates to that, then it's our understanding of that text rather than the witness of all of Scripture that has to be adjusted.

But James 2 is actually very easy. It's unfortunate, but most of our

English translations just don't pay attention to the grammar here. Some do, but in James 2 .24,

it doesn't literally say faith alone. If that were the case, the word alone would have to be an adjective modifying the word faith.

The way it's normally translated, it says something like, you see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.

So in that English sentence, the word alone is being treated as an adjective that modifies the word faith.

But in Greek, it's not an adjective. It's an adverb, and it's pointing back to something earlier in the sentence.

And so the way it should be understood is James saying, you see that a man is justified by works and not only justified by faith.

So he has two ideas or two justifications in view. If you read the context of James, he's talking about Abraham, whom we already know is justified by faith rather than by works before God.

Paul taught us that. And James quotes the same passage that Paul does from Genesis 15. But James's point in James 2 is those who say they have faith are merely mouthing this claim.

And it's without true substance if there's not action that demonstrates or vindicates it.

And so James has primarily in view the necessity of works to demonstrate or justify us before men.

In fact, this might help to sort of bring it into focus. In Romans 4,

Paul makes it clear that there's actually two different ways we can think of a person being justified. In Romans 4,

Paul says, if Abraham was justified by works, then he has something to boast about, but not before God.

So note the distinction. Before God, this is not true. This is an impossibility. And then

Paul says, for what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.

And so this is where Paul also says, to the man who does not work, but trusts

God who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness. So Paul's making it very clear that he's talking about justification before God.

James, without contradicting Paul, is emphasizing the fact that those who have faith, if they don't also have works, then their claim to faith is bogus, right?

That they're making a claim to have faith, but it's without any demonstrable, palpable demonstration, right?

There's no way to verify this. And so if you go back in James 2, and I'm sort of working backwards here in a sense, but if you go back in the context of James 2, you'll notice that James says two things in James 2.

He says in verse 22, just pulling it up real quick, in James 2, 22, it says, you see that faith was working with his works, and as a result of the works, faith was perfected.

And the scripture was fulfilled, which says, and Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, and he was called the friend of God.

Now in Greek, another technical point about Greek here, when you have two chi's, two conjunctions, meaning and, the first one is and, and the second one means and also, right?

So in Greek, what this literally says is, the scripture and the scripture was fulfilled, which says

Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, and also he was called the friend of God.

So you have two things in view here in James. Abraham being justified in Genesis 15 through faith before God, but then also to something later that caused men to refer to Abraham as the friend of God.

Now, what is it that would have led people to identify Abraham as God's friend? Well, obviously, among other things, but I think chiefly,

Abraham's act of obedience when he offered up Isaac on the altar, which is what James is actually talking about in the context, it was that act that people looked to and realized that Abraham had real faith, that act proved

Abraham's faith. And so people after the time of Abraham counted Abraham as God's friend, right?

Jesus says, you're my friend if you do what I command. So Abraham's obedience became the supreme demonstration of his faith and the proof that he was a friend of God.

And so what I'm getting at, sort of summing this up is, James has both of these things in view,

Abraham being justified before God by faith and demonstrating his faith before men through his acts of obedience to God.

And so the scripture was fulfilled that says he believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. And also he was called the friend of God.

This is why 224 then goes on to say, you see that a man is justified by works and not only justified by faith.

So he acknowledges that one is justified by faith, meaning before God, Genesis 15, 6.

And as Paul said, but also speaks of this justification or vindication before men through works.

Right. And would you say Paul in Romans 5 nails it when he says, therefore, since having been justified by faith, we have peace with God.

Yeah. So what's interesting is throughout the Old Testament, it talks about the future, the great assize, the final day, and of our need to be right with God with respect to that.

And it talks about all sorts of other blessings that will be ours in the eschaton, right?

We'll have the life of the spirit, deliverance from even the presence of sin and so forth.

What's interesting is in the gospel, Christ comes and he actually accomplishes redemption for us such that we are now put into possession of those future realities.

So sometimes scripture will speak of these things as future. And so sometimes Christians will talk about how they have the hope of eternal life, right?

We have this grounds for our hope that we will live with Christ forever. But scripture tells us because we are in Christ, we already possess eternal life.

So sometimes scripture will speak as though these things are future, but because they are ours in Christ, we possess them already right now.

We already participate in the life of the age to come. We already have eternal life. We already have peace with God.

We are already justified before God. So when we show up on the final day of judgment, we already know the verdict in our case.

We know how God is going to pronounce things. So you get some people that want to try and talk about a final justification that don't realize that this final justification has been brought into the present for the believer.

We are already vindicated. Jesus said in John 3, those who believe in him shall not come into judgment, but have already passed out of death into life.

So the judgment for us in principle has passed, though there is going to be a future day in which the public announcement...

We've made the claim now, and people can't see that we are the children of God, but Paul says that we're going to be openly manifested or revealed to be the sons of God on that day.

And so all scripture is talking about when it mentions this as a future thing is that one day this is going to be openly and publicly declared.

Amen. Amen. And they don't have peace with God because their relationship with God can be taken away by venial sins and worse mortal sins, right?

A mortal sin will cut them off from the grace of God. Now they have to be re -justified, correct? Yeah. And of course, not only does scripture not speak of a re -justification, that language doesn't appear anywhere, neither the word or the concept, but it definitely leaves them with this...

or should, I should say, because some people will try and find various ways to pacify their own conscience, right?

The person who is alert to their own sins and to their sinfulness, who is actually engaging in the work of introspection, as they should, if they're trusting in themselves and in their own works, they ought to be scrutinizing their own thoughts, their own heart attitudes, their own actions.

They ought to be scrutinizing them to make sure that they're not committing any sin, and so that they can keep track of the sins they do commit and make appropriate confession of them and penance for them.

And the problem that that would create is, just imagine, most people are not like Luther.

People like to dump on Luther for having this sensitive conscience and so forth. But really, if you are trusting in yourself in this way, as Rome teaches you to do, and the

East teaches you to do, well, you ought to be scrutinizing everything, because you've got to make sure that you are confessing it and doing penance for it, and appropriately flagellating yourself for engaging in ascetic rigorism, or rigorousness, or whatever the right term is there.

But, I mean, so when Luther would go to the confessional and confess his sins, he'd leave and he'd remember a sin he forgot.

And sometimes the priest would get fed up with Luther because they thought he was bothering them with trifles or was being too pedantic.

But Luther realized that only the slightest sin is necessary to damn one. And besides that in the

Roman system, purgatory, you're going to suffer in purgatory to some degree for every sin.

So you want to get rid of all that to the degree you can. So I would think a person who's conscientious about sin and so forth would be terrified every moment, thinking, maybe there's a sin

I didn't confess. Maybe there's a sin I didn't even— David talked about certain hidden faults. He said in the

Psalms, forgive me of hidden faults. That tells us that there are hidden faults. There are things we are not even consciously aware of.

Wouldn't that be terrifying? You've got these faults that you're not even confessing because you don't even know that you've got these faults.

I would think that a Roman Catholic and an Eastern Orthodox person would have trouble sleeping at night if this was what they were trusting in.

Yeah, truly. I mean, if the system is based on our faithfulness to God and not

His sacrifice on our behalf, I could see how assurance is going to be fleeting.

I mean, you may feel confident one day and the next day not. So this doctrine of justification by faith alone touches so many other doctrines, and one that I just brought up is the doctrine of assurance.

Can you go through how that is going to hinder somebody who wants assurance?

Especially when I talk to Roman Catholics, I always talk to them about John chapter 20. These things are written so that you may know that you have eternal life.

If all we had was the gospel of John, that would be enough to trust in Jesus and know that we have eternal life.

So how does this doctrine play into assurance? Yeah, so Calvin used to say that Christ is the mirror of salvation or the mirror of election.

Sometimes people pretend that the Reformed faith undermines assurance because you can't possibly know if you're elect.

How could you know what God has decreed, whom God has chosen? Well, this is just quite frankly wrong in terms of how it's portraying

Reformed theology. We don't pretend that we have some kind of access to the divine decree directly or that we need to have a direct access to the divine decree in order to have a grounds for assurance.

The grounds of our assurance is Christ. We believe that election is unto salvation.

It is unto faith in Christ. So a person can know that he's saved by virtue of having faith in Jesus.

That's how we know we're saved. He's the mirror of our election. If you trust in Christ, then it's because you were given by the

Father to the Son. And the Son, in turn, has given himself for you.

And if he gave himself for you, then you know that you cannot possibly perish in God's wrath.

That's the whole line of reasoning in Paul in Romans 8. Paul says, who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?

It's God who justifies. Who is it that condemns? It's Christ Jesus who died. More than that was raised again to life, right?

And if so, if God gave his own son for us, if he didn't spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, Paul says, how can he not with him freely give us all things?

That's the basis of our confidence. If God gave Christ for us and he gave us to Christ, then we cannot possibly fail to arrive safely at his heavenly kingdom.

Paul in Philippians 1 said that we are confident of this thing, this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.

And then later in chapter 2, he tells us on the basis of that, work out your salvation, not for it, work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it's

God who's at work in you, both to will and to do according to his good pleasure. So the ground of our confidence is that Christ is our savior.

We were given to him. He gave himself for us. And now that we are in him, God by his spirit is actively at work in us, guaranteeing our perseverance in faith until the end.

And since the ground of our forgiveness and our being regarded as righteous before God is

Christ's perfect law -keeping and vicarious sacrifice, it's not at all based on our own efforts.

Though we do say even our own effort is something that's guaranteed in salvation, that Christ not only died to deliver us from wrath, but also to spur us on to good works and perseverance to the end.

Right. We were saved for good works, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the illustration that I usually use, and tell me if you think it's pertinent, if a heart is alive and beating, it will have a pulse.

So the heart causes the pulse. The pulse is not the cause of the heartbeat, right?

So I look at the heart and the heartbeat as faith, and the pulse would be works.

So your works are not what fuels your faith. Your faith is what fuels your works. And it's the way you tell how a person is alive.

You check their pulse, and it's the same thing with a Christian. You check their fruit.

You see what they're doing. Are they growing? Are they progressing? That make sense? Yeah. So true faith always produces obedience.

That's why Jesus could say in John 3, he who believes in the Son has life. He who does not obey the

Son will not see life. Because the idea here is that if you have faith, then there will be obedience.

So if a person doesn't have obedience, then it's a sure sign they don't have faith, right? So that's why

Jesus can say, if you believe in the Son, you'll have eternal... He who believes in the

Son has life. He who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God continues to abide on him.

And so it's a sort of if -then relationship. If faith, then obedience. Therefore, if not obedience, then not faith.

And so it's not that obedience saves. It's that the faith that saves produces obedience.

And to be more technical, it's not faith that saves. It's Christ that saves through faith, as Warfield once said.

Amen. Yeah. So as Protestants and true Christians, we want to witness to Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, but sometimes we forget the other side of the ditch, which is within evangelical

Christianity, they hold to easy -believism. And it's this professed, well, I believe in Jesus.

I don't have to do anything going forward. How would you use the Scriptures to combat that?

Yeah. So I'd say that the way Scripture presents salvation, remember

I said before, salvation can be used in a narrow sense to refer to justification, but it's also broader in its scope.

And sometimes Scripture has something more narrow in view, or sometimes something more in view.

Salvation, broadly speaking, is that whole range of things God is doing to reclaim humanity and bring us into full communion with him.

And so it includes justification, but isn't limited to it. It also includes sanctification and final glorification, which includes the resurrection of our bodies, as well as our spirits being perfectly conformed to the image of Christ.

And Scripture teaches us that all of these blessings or benefits, all these saving blessings are in Christ, and therefore they're ours in Christ.

And so there's no such thing as— the way that a lot of these people are thinking of things is sort of like, you hear some of them say they accepted

Christ as their savior, but not as their Lord, right? Or that's something they need to do further than having accepted him as savior.

And the problem is that you can't cut up Christ, right? He's not like a pie.

You are either entrusting yourself to Christ or not.

It's a package deal. And so when you believe in Christ, you're believing in him who justifies and him who sanctifies.

He's our sanctifier as well as our justifier. And so for the one who believes in Jesus, they are now by virtue of that a partaker of his benefits, inclusive of justification and the spirit by whom we're sanctified.

So in 1 Corinthians 1 verse 30, for example, Paul says that Christ has been made for us wisdom from God, which is to say, according to Paul, our righteousness and also sanctification and redemption.

So Paul says that through faith, we are in Christ, and through union with Christ, we are righteous and we receive sanctification as well.

And him is the whole kit and caboodle. So unless you can cut Christ up, then you can't say that he's your justifier, but not also your sanctifier, or he's your savior, but not also your

Lord, right? It's a package deal. Right, right. Again, you have to come to him on his terms.

So God is the one who justifies the ungodly. So again, it's not that we wait till the end of our sanctification period to see how we did so that he would justify us, because at that point, we would be godly, right?

So he's the one who, in the gospel, we're given the verdict before the trial, right?

And that's why it's good news. And the people who hold to Jesus as savior, but not

Lord, have not come to him the way he's expected them to come to him.

Yeah, and interesting in places like Matthew 7, for example, when

Jesus says that certain people will be excluded on that final day, he does mention works, but there it's evident that the works are revelatory rather than the necessary grounds of the judgment.

In other words, so Jesus says in Matthew 7, he'll say to certain people on that day, depart from me,

I never knew you, right? You workers of iniquity. There it's not, well, you came to me and expressed faith and were saved, but then later stopped being saved because you didn't produce good fruit.

It's that he never knew them. And the evidence of that is they didn't produce good fruit, because if they were good trees, they would have produced good fruit.

That's the parable that precedes that statement of Jesus, that a good tree produces good fruit. And so it's not that fruit doesn't make a tree good.

It has to be a good tree before it can produce good fruit. And so that's why

I say when Jesus mentions this, he's not mentioning good works as the grounds of their acceptance, but as the evidence that they actually belong to him.

And he's saying if they didn't produce it, then he never knew them. So we would say that a person has to produce good fruit, because again, true faith produces good fruit.

And the person who lacks it is showing thereby that he also lacks the faith that gives rise to the fruit.

So would you say like in the parable of the sower, they believed for a time, and then the cares and concerns of the world choked out the seed?

I mean, was it true belief? Can you believe in Jesus without being regenerated?

Well, I think a person can have a kind of historical faith or something like that. There were people that were witnesses, eyewitnesses to things that in certain ways knew these things better than we did.

At least they knew them through the eye gate, right? They were visible witnesses of these things, and they heard these things.

And so there would have been people that would have seen things. They could have seen Jesus on the cross. You could have even had people that were present after he rose again.

I mean, Judas was present for most of these things. He could have told you that Jesus performed miracles and would have had a kind of faith.

But it's not saving faith, obviously, because even in the case of Judas, who's witnessing all these things, and so is outwardly identified with the disciples, and so was a professing believer for a time,

Jesus doesn't treat Judas as though he was somebody who had genuine saving faith and then later lost it, because long before Judas committed apostasy,

Jesus referred to Judas as a devil, right? Remember in John 6, this is long before Judas' apostasy and the open public manifestation of his unbelief to the other apostles.

Jesus said to the 12, you know, do you want to leave too? And then Jesus said, have I not chosen you, the 12, and yet one of you is a devil, right?

So Jesus identified Judas as a devil long before his open apostasy. And then in John 17,

Jesus said that Judas was the son of perdition, meaning the one doomed to destruction. So I'd say that there is a kind of faith, a historical faith, meaning a person can believe that certain things are historically true, but they don't necessarily have the trust in Christ that is the component of saving faith, right?

And John's gospel, when you look at it, it's clear that he uses belief in different ways. It's an interesting study to go through how he uses it.

But remember, for example, in John 3, it speaks of certain people believing in Jesus, and then it says, but Jesus was not entrusting himself to them because he knew what was in them.

So it's suggesting that this belief is not that saving faith that John is calling for.

And you have something very similar later in John 8, where it says that Jesus said to those who had believed in him.

And then the whole ensuing discourse is one of a protracted debate between Jesus and these people who are said to have believed in him.

It's not saving faith. It's quite evident in that, because Jesus still speaks of them as being in slavery.

He speaks of them as belonging to the devil and not belonging to him. And then he says, those whom the son sets free are free indeed.

And they've not yet arrived at that point. So it's not the case that the gospels are always using belief in the same way.

Sometimes it is a, because we speak of faith, saving faith, having three elements, right?

Knowledge of the facts pertaining to Christ and the gospel. Assent to them is true.

So we're saying, yeah, these things are true. And then trust, we have to actually trust in Christ.

We have to entrust ourself to him. And so, you know, Satan has knowledge of the facts.

He would have sent to all the facts as true. And so he has belief in that sense, but he doesn't have, he doesn't trust in Christ for salvation.

Right, that's the dividing line. You know, entrusting yourself to Jesus and trusting that when he died on that cross, you died on that cross.

When he was buried, you were buried. When he was raised, you were raised. You know, that's different than knowing facts about Jesus or just saying, yeah,

I believe, you know, I believe in Jesus without actually trusting the fact that your sins have been paid for on the cross.

So I know in the past you did work on some of the early church fathers and justification by faith alone.

Was there any councils before the reformation that talked about this doctrine?

Well, there aren't really councils that are focused on the question of justification.

There were councils that say certain things that are relevant in various ways.

One council, and this is primarily relevant with respect to our view of grace or other views of grace, but the

Council of Orange had some very strong things to say about the grace of God in salvation.

And it's not that it doesn't have any defects from a reform perspective, but what's really striking is just how far the

Roman church and the Eastern church have fallen from that council because that council goes well beyond what they currently profess.

It has a very strong view of grace and the necessity of grace and the sufficiency or efficiency of grace.

And the depravity of man. Oh, yeah. If people read that, they'll think they're reading—

I would say there's some defects in it, but if people read it, I think a lot of people would think they're just reading Reformed theology here.

They wouldn't think that this is anything like the Roman view or the Eastern view. In fact, so the council was sort of a— it was

Augustinian in certain ways, but it didn't go the full distance of Augustine or Augustine.

And if you listen to some contemporary Roman Catholics and certainly

Eastern Orthodox people, they seem to hate Augustine. It's very strange.

It's this whole new wave of people. They're talking about Augustine as though he is just this rank heretic or something, which

I find really strange because— for a number of reasons. But one, as far as the

Roman church goes, Augustine is not merely a saint in the Roman Catholic tradition.

He is a doctor of the church. And I don't remember the exact number, but it's in the 30s, right?

If you're talking about saints, there's not as many as we would say because we think everybody who dies in Christ is a saint.

They have a limited number of people who are actually canonized saints, people that they think are appropriately prayed to and venerated and all that.

But there's an even smaller group of people that are known as doctors of the church. And Augustine is one of that small band of people, between 30 and 40.

36 comes to mind, but I'm not sure that's the exact number. And so he's a doctor of the church.

And here you've got people trashing Augustine these days that claim to be Roman Catholics. Now, I think it's consistent because their theology has fallen away very much from Augustine.

But usually people want to try and mask their departure better and pretend like, we really are agreeing with Augustine here.

But they're not even up to the level of the Council of Orange, which itself was a little bit lower in terms of its strong stance on grace.

But I think people should go read it. And if they read it, like I say, they're going to be like, this just sounds like I'm reading

Calvin. And I know that Anthony character said that it's not a fully reformed thing, but I'm having trouble even detecting those elements of it that are not reformed.

Right. Well, it's funny that you said that, because when I first came across that, that council and I read through it,

I was shocked. I'm like, this is absolutely amazing. So much so that I have a website, reformrookie .com,

and I have a section with the creeds and I highlighted that one. I want to make sure that people read that because it's going to affect, it's going to affect

Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox doctrine. When you understand the deadness of man in sin, well, then you're going to understand what the

Bible means by grace. You know, it's not an enabling grace. It's a grace that actually saves.

It's a grace that brings you from death to life, which is vital.

If you think that grace just enables you, even well -meaning Christians, you know, like Arminians, they hold to prevenient grace.

It's not a grace that saves. It's a grace that, again, puts the ball back into your hands and it all depends on what you do with it.

Yeah. Yeah, it's unfortunate because I actually like, I like the terminology prevenient grace.

The word there is being used in an old sense. People probably aren't familiar with it, but to prevene means to come before.

And so we certainly teach that grace precedes all our efforts or whatever.

What Arminians, Wesleyan Arminians who hold a prevenient grace mean is that there is, this is actually to their credit, at least.

These older Wesleyan Arminians would affirm that man is totally depraved, but they'd say that God has given this grace to all men that overcomes that depravity so that everybody has the potential to believe, but may not.

They may not use that grace and so forth. So they're acknowledging at least total depravity, though it's neutralized by prevenient grace.

So it's virtually a non -existent category, but they're acknowledging at least the necessity for grace.

But a lot of contemporary Arminians don't even go that far. But the problem with their doctrine of prevenient grace is that they think of it as universal and provisional.

So this grace is given to everyone, and it's potentially thwarted.

It's ineffective. We would say that grace prevenes, it comes before, but it's particular and effectual.

So in other words, God gives this grace to certain people, and those people by virtue of God bestowing

His grace on them do come to believe. It actually accomplishes the intention of God.

So when you read the Council of Trent, not the Council of Trent, well, although I will say even the

Council of Trent is better than what a lot of contemporary Roman Catholics teach about grace. It's still not, again, it's not up to the level of Orange.

It's not up to the level of the Reformed faith, but it's better than what a lot of contemporary Roman Catholics were saying.

So what scriptures would you use to point people to effectual grace? It's a grace that actually accomplishes what it's set out to do, versus just an enablement or an opportunity for somebody to now believe.

Yeah, well, a great one that ties in with our topic is Romans 8. And most scholars, certainly

Pauline scholars, will acknowledge that whereas the term calling in scripture can sometimes refer to the external call of the gospel, which is broader than the elect, right?

The call goes out to as many as hear it, but there's an external call then in that sense, whereas that sort of thing can be found in scripture.

In Paul, he always uses calling in the sense of the internal call, a call that is effectual.

And so you find that way of speaking outside of Paul too, but I'm just saying that outside of Paul, you get both concepts of external and internal call.

In Paul, you only get this term being used for the internal call. And so when you look at, say,

Romans 8, 28, it says, we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love

God, to those who are the called according to his purpose. So Paul says everything works together for good for these, those who love

God. And then he further identifies them as those who are the called. So those who are called love

God, according to Paul. No, it's not those who are called might respond and might love

God. It's that's who they are. They are those who love God. They love God because that's what they were called to.

But notice he goes on to say in verse 29, for those whom he foreknew, and these are all active verbs.

It's not talking about anything we do here. It's talking about God and says, for those whom he foreknew, these he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son so that he would be the firstborn among many brethren.

And these whom he predestined, he also called. And these whom he called, he also justified.

And these whom he justified, he also glorified. So this is what's known as the golden chain of redemption.

William Perkins, the famous Puritan, once coined this expression for this teaching here in Romans eight, because it quite literally explicitly connects all these things,

God foreknowing or foreloving is the term means, predestining, calling, justifying, and glorifying.

You can't say that a person is called in this language of Paul and not also justified.

Those whom he called, he also justified, Paul says. So if called, then justified, that presupposes that they positively responded to the call.

And if justified, then Paul says also glorified. So those who are predestined are called.

Those who are called are justified. Those who are justified are glorified or will be glorified. So it's again, it's a chain.

If one, then the other. And so that's an example of effectual calling.

You can't, in Paul's terminology, there's no such thing as a person who's called who doesn't respond in faith.

And you have that idea elsewhere in Paul, in Romans, or excuse me, 1

Corinthians 1, Paul talks about it. In John 6,

I think you have an example of this idea. That's where Jesus says in two different ways that people come to him by virtue of the gracious, enabling, and efficient power of God.

He says, nobody can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him. And then along with that, he says, all whom the father has given to me will come to me.

And the one who comes to me, I will not cast out. So the ones who are given to him, so there's a group that are given to him.

And then he says, these will come. And those who come, he will give eternal life and they'll not perish.

So anybody who will not perish on that final day is somebody that came to Christ. Anybody who came to Christ is somebody who was given to him by the father, but you can't break these things up.

You can't say that somebody was given, but doesn't come. You can't say somebody comes, but wasn't given. You can't say that somebody will not perish on the final day who wasn't given and didn't come.

The one just is the other according to Jesus. Well, how would you refute somebody who would say, well, it's all those who come and learn from the father who come to me.

Yeah, so all those who learn of the father. So in John six, Jesus is saying, we usually,

I think sort of implicitly think primarily of the spirit when we think of something like coming to faith.

And I think there's a legitimacy there because scripture often speaks of the activity of the spirit.

But in John six, the emphasis is being placed on the father. And there, Jesus says that it's those whom the father gives.

It's those whom the father draws. It's those whom the father enables who will come to him.

And so the idea is the ones that are given to Jesus, the ones that are come to Jesus are those who are given to him by the father.

So we learn of the father. It's by the father's activity that we come to the son.

So I don't know what they might think otherwise when they talk about learning from the father, but the point that Jesus is making in John is that we are the sons precisely because we are the fathers and are given by the father to the son.

Right. Amen. I also, when I go through Romans eight, especially 28 through 30,

I think it's as if Paul's echoing Ezekiel 36 and the new covenant, because Ezekiel says, it's all the

I wills. God says, I will take you from the nations. I will gather you. I will sprinkle clean water on you.

I will cleanse you. I will give you a new heart. I will give you a new spirit. I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes.

Right. And it's all these I wills, I wills, I wills. It's God doing all the work. And then we get to Romans eight in this beautiful passage where these are all the verbs that are being done by God.

Nothing is being done by us that effectuates any kind of salvation. We're the ones being carried along.

It's just beautiful. Yeah. Amen. Amen. So, Tony, I know

I've had you on for quite a while. Any closing words with regards to justification that you, if there was somebody who was struggling or who thinks that somehow, some way, their works play a part in their salvation, what would you tell them?

Yeah, well, I'd say two things. Number one, the gospel is very clear that it's the doing and dying of Christ that is the basis of our confidence.

Scripture tells us that we can go to the Father with confidence precisely because Christ has opened the way for us.

If Christ, by his doing and dying, did not do that, which is sufficient, then there's no hope.

But if Christ did it, then there's all hope. You either recognize what's being said when we talk about Christ doing it, or you don't.

I mean, there's just no alternative. If you're looking to Christ, then you know that you have all confidence.

You have the foundation for confidence. But I also think that this, I think this doctrine ought to cause people to be very grateful and really ought to be a very sanctifying truth.

I've distinguished justification from sanctification, but I really believe that justification is one of the great sanctifying doctrines of Scripture because it lays the ax to all human pride and boasting.

One practical way of thinking about all of this is to think about the difference of having to try and earn somebody's love, doing things with the hope that they might love you.

If that's your approach, then there's always this sense of everything is sort of suspended.

You're always worried about the next thing you do, hoping to gain that person's favor.

It's very different if you already have someone's favor and are now doing things in light of that.

Imagine if you have a parent who you always think you have to please in order for them to love you, or by contrast, parents who love you and therefore you do things to honor them because you know they love you.

I think it produces piety. A right doctrine of justification produces piety because it lays the ax to human pride.

It should cause us to well up with gratitude and it should give us a great confidence to go to God.

It should be a boon to prayer. What hinders you from praying, knowing that this God has flung wide open the kingdom of heaven to you on account of his son?

So I think that the doctrine of justification is wonderfully practical and not only true in that other sense that we've mostly been focused on, that it's the basis of our objective declaration of righteousness.

Amen. Amen. Yeah, so that let him who boasts, boast in the Lord. It's all his work and what a gracious work it is.

When I look at my life and I look at the things that I've done, to know that the perfect love that God the father has for Jesus, the son is the same love he has for me.

It couldn't be any more. It's perfect love. And I go back to, you know,

Romans 5 .1. Therefore, since having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through Jesus and we stand in that grace and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.

So that when we recognize that our destiny is heaven because of God, boy, if that isn't a motivating factor to serve him and please him out of love for him,

I don't know what is. You know, I think Piper says it's not duty, it's delight. You know, we have this incredible father in heaven who rescued us for all eternity from our sins.

And, you know, what more? There's nothing he needs us, you know, needs us for.

But we need him for everything and we just look to please him. Amen.

Amen. If you could hold on a second, brother, I'm just going to close out the show and then just have some final comments with you. Thank you so much,

Tony. I really appreciate you taking the time and sewing into us like this. I'm praying that it does, you know, it does affect the hearts and minds of some people who may not understand justification by faith alone.

So with that, friends, thanks. Thanks again for joining us on the show. Please check out the website at www .reformrookie

.com where you'll find articles, videos, and this podcast. Be sure to also like our videos on YouTube and subscribe to the weekly podcast.

Also, check out Anthony Rogers on YouTube. If you type in his name in the search engine, you're going to find debates and teachings.

He doesn't teach for like an hour. He teaches for four hours at a clip and it's amazing stuff.

In fact, his talk with Tony Costa on justification by faith alone is excellent.

If you haven't listened to that, please take a look at that. So once again, remember, a life reformed is a life conformed to the

Jesus of the scriptures and to God be the glory. So semper reformanda, always be reforming.