What is Faith?

The Sermon’s Title, Text, and Three Main Points

The sermon is actually entitled, The Gospel Method of Salvation, and his text is Romans 10 .4, For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth. He has three points with lots of sub-points.

The nature of true faith in Christ is the first point, and he spends probably half the sermon on that. Second is the necessity of faith in Christ for justification. Third, the glory and excellency of God's method of justification.

And then, as you mentioned, some short application. So that's just a brief overview of how he's going to approach the sermon. As he sets out to talk about this and demonstrate these truths about faith, he first gives us a definition of faith, though.

Faith as a Saving Grace in the Westminster Shorter Catechism

And to do that, he goes to the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Confession and answers that faith is a saving grace whereby we receive and rest upon Christ alone for salvation as he is freely offered to us in the gospel.

So that's, I think, a helpful definition for us.

The Mind’s Assent and the Will’s Free Consent

Yeah, and basically that kind of lays out the outline for a sermon. He sticks very close to that. When he talks about the nature of faith, he says that it includes two great matters. The ascent of the mind, that is, that we agree wholeheartedly, you know, without reservation, that God is true and that what he has said about us and about our sin and about the way of redemption through Jesus Christ alone, his life, his death, that these things are trustworthy.

So the ascent. We might say the brain, you know, the intellect. Okay, I believe with my mind. He says there's also the free conduct of the will where we gladly lean all on him. We gladly turn away from other hopes, refusing to add anything to Jesus Christ.

We turn from all of our righteousness, you know, all of our resolutions, and we lean all of our hope on Christ. Now, this sermon has so many subpoints. We've decided that we'll just kind of hit some of the points that we feel are most needed for today.

Easy-Believism and the Problem of Mere Mental Assent

So I think this is one of them. When we look at the scene with evangelicalism today, we find, you know, some extremes. One would be easy-believism, where mental ascent would be all that there is. So someone says to you, Chuck, if you want to go to heaven, you just need to know these facts and say, do you agree?

And you would say, well, sure, I accept those as true, or I agree with those. So kind of a nod of the head is all that's required. Whether the life is transformed after that is maybe not even expected or looked for.

So that would be an extreme example, and we don't want to paint people who use the sinner's prayer, you know, as all with that brush. But that would be an extreme example. The other example would be, though, hyper-Calvinism, which, amazingly, there are versions of hyper-Calvinism that would teach that because God made choices in the past, his choice to elect is all that's required.

Hyper-Calvinism and the Necessity of Faith and Repentance

So no faith or repentance are actually needed for justification to be received, and we feel that that is equally unbiblical.

Perhaps even arguing that those two things are works, and you can't add to your salvation. So how would you bring those along?

Yeah, and I remember asking a person that said that, and the idea was that, well, once you see Christ in heaven, because you're elect, you end up in heaven, and when you see Christ in heaven, then you'll believe then.

But that doesn't really match the Scripture, does it? I mean, it matches a logic. If God has made choices in the eternity past, and God being God, that all of his choices will come to fruition, then really the abuse of that is that all the means that God has chosen to bring us to that end are ignored or thought of as unnecessary.

With that logic, you could say that the life and death of Christ are unnecessary. Well, God made an electing choice, and his determinative decree is all that's required. Well, then why did Christ come?

Why must the gospel be preached? Why must men believe and repent? And I think the simple answer to that is, well, the king, who is sovereign, has declared that this is the way that this will be accomplished.