Dead Works | The Whole Counsel

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snider, and with me is Chuck Baggett, and we're looking again at this book entitled,

Salvation in Full Color, 20 Sermons by Great Awakening Preachers. It's edited by Richard Owen Roberts, and it's a series of sermons on the doctrine of salvation laid out in a very specific theological order, and the order is almost as important as the content of the sermons, and we feel that we want to devote a number of weeks to this, months, because it is the kind of a thing that's a rare privilege to have some of the greatest preachers in the history of our nation, and some of their best -known sermons on the doctrine of salvation laid out for us in one book.

Jon, some people have had trouble finding the book, and if you do find it in some places, it's really priced well above its probably market value, but Richard Owen Roberts has some of these available, and you can find them on his website, which is

ROR, for Richard Owen Roberts, RORbooks .com. I think there are 1795 there, so if you've been looking for a book,

TJ has located them. Yeah. Well, let's jump into this week's author.

The preacher is Theodoros Frelinghuysen. He was born in 1691 in Germany, and came to the

American colonies as a young man, and what's really unique about Frelinghuysen is, though we often think of George Whitefield as the centerpiece of the

Great Awakening, even in America, and in many ways he was, or we might think of Jonathan Edwards as kind of the spark for the

Great Awakening, it's actually this man, Frelinghuysen, that is the morning star of that great movement.

He was born in Germany, as I mentioned, and was converted, and when he went to take his first job out of college, he was going to be the head of a small academy.

On the way to the academy to accept his position, he stayed the night with a godly elder in a church, and the man told him about a small church in the

Raritan Valley in the American colonies. It's a Dutch Reformed Church, and they were looking for a pastor.

So Frelinghuysen talked with his dad, he prayed about it at the church, prayed about it there in Germany, and they felt that, amazingly, that he would be the right man for the job.

So he went and began preaching, and immediately his preaching was blessed by the Lord, and there were conversions, but there was also conflict.

The church had always been okay with providing the Lord's Supper for unregenerate church members in the

Dutch tradition, and Frelinghuysen disagreed with that and said that the Lord's Supper is for those who have been born again only.

After initial conflict, the church agreed with him, and he continued to preach quite boldly.

I want to read a statement that Roberts makes about his fearless preaching. He says this, a fearless preacher,

Frelinghuysen said, I little care what is said behind my back by ignorant, carnal men who desire to substitute their own perverted order for God's truth.

They are greatly deceived if they imagine that they will thus put me to silence, for I would sooner die a thousand deaths than not to preach the truth.

And Roberts kind of gives some editorial comments there, and he says that he notices that many men would, unlike Frelinghuysen, would have come to a new country and spent a lot of time maybe getting to know the culture, befriending the people in the new area before he really delivered, you know, the harder truths of the gospel, and he said, but not

Frelinghuysen. He immediately went right to plowing the ground, and when people were, their feathers were ruffled, he continued to preach, and God used him to bring so many into the kingdom.

This sermon is entitled Dead Works. When you hear that, you might think of a passage that is in the book of Hebrews about repenting of dead works, but that's not really what this passage or sermon is about.

It is taken from 1 Peter 4 18, where we're told, if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?

And the sermon has more to do with, it's really a death knell to easy believism, or to any kind of passivity in salvation, than it is about that kind of idea of dead works that we see in Hebrews.

When I read the sermon, I thought back to part of Mr. Roberts' introduction to the book where he asked those questions about who is right.

He asked that several times, several different examples. I'll just mention one, the first one. Who is right? The preacher who insists that nothing is easier than becoming a

Christian. All you have to do is accept Jesus Christ into your heart. You can do that right now, or Jesus Christ himself who made the way of salvation so difficult that even his disciples asked, who then can be saved?

And if you read those for the first time and you're not familiar with that kind of thinking, Mr. Roberts' statements there could really be jarring, but this sermon is kind of the answer to why he says those kinds of statements.

He shows us that while salvation is of the grace of God and we're not meriting salvation, it's not easy and it's not cheap.

So he sets out to show that and how the righteous are scarcely saved.

He does this with two overarching points, and I think we'll probably spend most of our time as he does on the first one, which is that the state of the righteous is that they are saved, but scarcely.

The second point, the wretched state of the ungodly, that's what the righteous are than what state is the ungodly in.

Under that first point about them being scarcely saved, he divides it into three further sub points.

They are righteous, the persons who are righteous, what do they look like, what's declared of them that they are saved, and then the manner in which they are saved, which is scarcely.

And then he points out, I think, 14 different kind of obstacles or situations, elements of this that show why it is so difficult for a person to become a

Christian, or how it is impossible from our human side to become a Christian. It is the work of God.

And then a couple of applications. As we read this, I think we should also keep in mind, you know, kind of a question in the back of our mind, of whether or not we've adopted a truncated gospel, one that is maybe short and pithy, but not really complete.

Yeah, and I think that that really becomes apparent when we look at what he describes as a righteous person.

Right. When we think of righteousness, especially as evangelicals, we tend to immediately go to justification, the righteousness that is provided,

Paul says in Philippians 3, the righteousness that comes from another, that's not accomplished through your law -keeping, but through someone else's law -keeping, your mediator, and freely given and freely received through faith.

But that's not all the Scripture says about a righteous man, and I think that Frelinghuysen really kind of reminds us that we need to make sure we keep a full picture of what a righteous person is, not just justification, though that certainly is the foundation.

He mentions a couple of other things, two other things in particular. One is that a righteous person is one who, by the grace of God, by that undeserved favor that, you know, that energy that has altered us, we live under the rule of a new king, and if we do not, then we do not live a righteous life.

And then second, he says, there is the demonstration of this new life to your own conscience and to the world.

By the way, you live differently, so while you might justify your claim to be a

Christian, you justify your statement that, I am a believer, by these good works, by a different lifestyle, you don't justify yourself before the

Lord, Christ is your justification. But we do demonstrate the validity of our profession by a changed life, and so all of those really ought to be kept together.

Yeah, so justifying it to our own conscience. If we say that we're a Christian, but there are no accompanying good works, if there's no evidence of that in a conflict against sin, then our conscience should cry out if we are a believer, right?

So it's important to keep a good conscience, and one way we do that is by living consistent with what we say we believe, or by giving these proofs of a changed nature that God himself has accomplished.

We're working out our salvation with fear and trembling, though it is God who is at work in us. Yeah, and I think it's always good to remember.

It's a very simple kind of rule that I keep in my mind. The relationship between a justified person,

God has made me righteous by placing me or uniting me, placing me in, uniting me to Christ, who is my righteousness, because he kept the law.

That's wonderfully true. But how does that relate to sanctification? That is me, with all that I am, responding to God, to God's beauty, to God's rule, to God's precepts, to God's promises, you know, so that we instead of just kind of plod along on this race.

So I think that a couple of things are helpful. One is, never let these two be isolated.

So a man who's been made right with God will want to live right with God, which is what you just mentioned.

So justification and sanctification can never be separated. If we separate them, then we don't have

Christianity anymore. But they cannot be gotten in a different order.

Justification cannot flow from sanctification, and really, that's the Roman Catholic system, that as God helps me,

I become a better and better and better person, you know, through the sacraments of the

Catholic Church and their means of grace, and one day I will reach a place where perhaps

I'm so much better, I'm right with God. So justification comes as the reward of a life of good works.

And also, they're not intermixed. They are wonderfully connected, never separated, but they don't mix into each other.

So it's not that the work of Christ on the cross plus some of John Snyder's good intentions together will satisfy the law of God.

It's Christ alone for my righteous standing before a holy God, and then flowing out of that, always connected to that, an alteration of life.

Another way of saying, I think, the same thing might be in terms of positional holiness and progressive holiness.

Positionally, if we are in Christ, we've been made holy. We can be called saints, holy ones, and it is a truth.

At the same time, we're told to pursue holiness, without which no one will see the Lord, and that it's not telling us to pursue positional holiness.

If we're in Christ, that's true, but we are to pursue this progressive holiness in which we are seeking to live righteous lives.

Yeah, yeah. And really, while theologians can get themselves kind of tongue -tied on this situation,

I mean, really, isn't it natural to every believer now, with a new nature, a new creation within, and with eyes open to see the beauty of the

Savior? In a sense, it's as if God wakes us up and gives us to His Son, and then says to us, do what you would really want to do.

And what I want to do, deep down, I want to love and live for the

King. So I want to know what that would look like, and so I go to His Word. Yeah, and when you don't, then there's grief.

Yeah, you could say that obedience is natural now, and in the same way that disobedience is unnatural, things jar within when

I choose John over Christ. Just like before we were Christians, disobedience was natural.

Living for self was natural, and obeying someone else was jarring. He mentions here the verse that Chuck mentioned early on out of 1st

Peter chapter 4, where Peter says, and if it is with difficulty or scarcely that the righteous is saved, what will become of the godless man and the sinner?

So the King James Version, scarcely, New American Standard, difficulty, with difficulty.

So he says, now, we don't want to misunderstand this. We are not saying, Peter's not saying, that there is a possibility that the true believer will lose what

Christ has purchased, what the Father has promised, even from eternity. And so when we think of our security in Christ, we want to make sure that we understand why we're secure.

Some people will say it this way, I know that I'm secure and that I won't lose my salvation because a

Christian can't fall from grace. Well, in a sense, we can fall horribly, but no fall that occurs in our life will separate us from the love of God, and we just want to back up and kind of get a foundation that's bigger than, you know, our good intentions.

Like, well, I would never leave Christ. Wouldn't you? What if God left you to yourself? So we think of things like election, that even before God created, before time began,

God loved me and set his heart upon me and gave me as a gift to the

Son. Or we can think of other things, the purchasing, the calling, the indwelling of the

Spirit, the new nature, and what Paul calls the sealing of the Spirit.

It's as if we are a package that has been taped up and sealed by the Spirit, the Almighty Spirit of God, not to be tampered with by anybody until it's brought safely to the

Mediator, to Christ, at the end of time. So, you know, many wonderful reasons that we have for knowing that we're secure.

So Peter's not saying, when he says we're scarce, the righteous are scarcely saved, that it's uncertain.

Meaning, it is such an enormously difficult task, it takes

God to do it. Yeah. And Friedinghausen does point out that, by pointing to some other passages, what is meant by the idea of scarcity or scarcely saved, the

Greek word that's behind that is also used in Acts 14, 18 of Paul and Barnabas.

They're at Lystra, they heal a lame man, and the people there in Lystra start trying to worship them, and calling them

Zeus and Hermes, and they're insisting, you know, don't worship us.

And Acts 14, 18 says, even saying these things with difficulty, or they were scarcely restrained, with difficulty they restrained the crowds from offering sacrifice to them.

Or another occasion in Acts 27, 16, Paul is on a ship and the weather has turned, and they're in danger of shipwreck.

And the Bible says, running under the shelter of a small island called Clauda, we were scarcely able to get the ship's boat under control.

So both of those, they were able to get it, but it was difficult. They were able to keep the crowds from offering sacrifice, but it was difficult.

So scarcely does not imply that it's not, that a person's not saved, but the difficulty of that person coming to Christ.

There are many difficulties that accompany salvation. A lot of the older writers used to make a big deal about Christ's statement that the kingdom of God suffers violence, and the violent take it.

There is a holy violence. There is a holy desperation. There is a wholeheartedness.

Kind of, we could think of a white, hot zeal that lays hold of a man when he realizes,

I have no hope but this Jesus, and I will have him, and I will follow him to the end of time.

And so it does remind us of Christ's warnings. We'll just give you one example.

Luke 13 24, Jesus says, strive to enter through the narrow door.

For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. So that goes hand in glove with what

Peter says, that it is with great difficulty that men are saved. He gives that long list.

Chuck, why don't you run us through and just read us the, you know, the statements that he gives, and then we can maybe pick out a few that we could talk about.

There are 14 of these. They are evidences of the difficulty of being saved, or why it is difficult for us.

And the first, it's difficult because it requires that you be completely reborn spiritually.

You must be made alive in Christ. Second, a person must understand that believing is the only way of receiving this.

Third, the sinner must be brought to repentance. Fourth, a person must be made holy if they're going to see the

Lord. Fifth, a man must be brought to the place where he is willing to deny himself and follow

Christ. Sixth, a man must also be brought to a state of heavenly mindedness.

Seventh, he must love God above all, and he must love his neighbor as himself. Eighth, all of these must occur, and yet we are spiritually unfit to accomplish any of these on our own.

Ninth, not only are we unfit, but we're fickle and inconsistent. Tenth, sometimes

God withdraws his noticeable presence for a season. Eleventh, the Christian must endure many temptations and conflicts with Satan.

Twelfth, the Christian must be saved in the midst of an atmosphere that is not conducive to Christianity.

Thirteenth, a Christian must be saved while still possessing the old nature. We still have a deceitful and seductive heart.

Fourteenth, in this life, the Christian will suffer as other people suffer, but there are some ways that the

Christian suffers peculiarly, peculiar to the Christian. So those are 14 things that demonstrate why it really does take the wisdom of God and the power of God to save any of us.

That is, it is with great difficulty that a people like us could be rescued. All of these, we were talking about before the show, all of these refer to us.

All of these refer to humanity's condition and situation and enemies, but none of them refer to God, because we are not saying,

Scripture is not saying, that it is difficult for God. The God that called all things into existence effortlessly could save all effortlessly, but these are things that demonstrate that when we say someone is a

Christian, it is an amazing statement. It is a statement that requires the activity of deity, and not just a well -meaning church or family pastor or individual.

Yeah, and so while we are not passive in our salvation, at the same time, there's nothing we can do to get salvation or to merit salvation.

There are all these obstacles that are, for us, insurmountable, but not insurmountable to God. Yeah, and we'll talk at the end some of these wonderful applications that really do help us avoid the two problems that we might see in a church.

Easy -believism, which is a misunderstanding of what the Scripture teaches, but so is also hyper -Calvinism, a misunderstanding.

They both land you in this kind of passive condition, a spiritual rocking chair, and so we want to stay out of that, but let's look at some of these.

I think the second one that he mentions jumped out at me. A person must understand that believing is the only way of receiving the salvation, and he lists that as one of the reasons that it is scarcely or only with difficulty that anyone is saved, and that just seems kind of counterintuitive.

If you say to a person who asks you, what must I do? If you say, well, believe.

He thinks, only believe? I mean, I can do that anytime then, and immediately the human nature thinks, well, belief is the easiest thing in the world, but Frelinghuysen is right.

He gives a long explanation there that we won't go over, but he basically shows that when a man is in the grip of a fallen sinful nature and his mind is blinded by his pride, the very last thing he would ever do is go out of himself to look away from himself for hope and cast himself completely upon Jesus Christ.

That that is just so against our nature, it is impossible apart from the work of God.

One of the ones that jumped out at me was the eighth one. So there's all these obstacles that are insurmountable to us, and then on top of that, you have this condition that you're dead.

You have no ability to deal with any of these obstacles by yourself.

There's nothing in you. No ability, but also no desire. You have no real feeling to want to deny yourself or to want to follow

Christ and put aside possibly your own reputation, possessions, maybe even your own life, as he mentions in one of them.

Why would you want to do that? Well, you can't want to do that until God changes something in you.

Yeah, so coming from what Paul says in many places, but in particular Ephesians 2, that we're spiritually dead, does a corpse ever run a race?

Does a corpse ever earn a paycheck? Does a corpse ever fight a war?

Does a corpse follow? Does it understand? Does it respond to a voice? But when

Paul says we're spiritually dead, we do not want to venture into a wrong territory and say, well, I want to follow

Christ, but like Paul says, I'm spiritually dead, so I can't do anything about it. The spiritual death does not mean that we are spiritually inactive, sadly.

We're very active. We're just always active in the wrong direction. My heart is extremely responsive before I was a

Christian to every idol. My legs ran to every lie. You know, my eyes were all open toward things that promised that John could be the center of the world, but I was unresponsive to God.

So being spiritually dead does mean incapable. Incapable of doing what would be required to rescue myself.

But the inability is also woven together with an unwillingness. The stain of sin is so complete in me.

It's not just that I can't follow Christ, it's that I won't follow Christ until Christ gives me a new heart.

So it's not the kind of a position that's kind of this guiltless, pitiable condition. A man is lame and he can't walk.

It's a man that so prefers lameness that he would never walk. Another thing that he mentions here is the atmosphere that we're required to follow

Christ in. That we're required to believe in, to repent in, to persevere in, and that is the world.

And in two ways, the world is a poisonous atmosphere for the believer. One way is the world's false friendship.

It's counterfeit smiles where it comes to us and says, now that you're a Christian, great!

Now you can have Christ and the old life. And sadly there would be many churches perhaps that would unknowingly kind of assume that that's true or promote that view.

So the world comes along the Christian, you know, the old way of living comes alongside the

Christian and there's this false friendship. But there's also these dreadful terrors where if you're not tempted and seduced by the world, you're terrified by the world.

You're paralyzed with this kind of fear or despair or disillusionment. You think,

I thought that Christian life was going to be easy. I'm on the side of the king. But life has become very difficult at times and I wasn't prepared for that.

I didn't count the cost. And you know, if you're not biblically informed, you might think that Christ isn't all he said he would be.

But in fact, he did warn us about that. We could say it this way, Ephesians 6, with Paul's battle language,

Paul brings that at the end of that wonderful letter in which he has spent nearly three chapters giving the the church at Ephesus the most sublime descriptions of doctrine, and then a couple of chapters of duty, and then the battle scene.

And so one thing that we learn from that is that every doctrine that we have to believe is custom -designed for a battlefield, and every duty that we have to do is to be done while surrounded by and opposed by enemies.

There's just no exception. Friedlinghuysen concludes these 14 statements with the question, or rather the statement, it becomes us then not to esteem salvation so lightly and have such easy attainment.

If we see these things to be true, if we see others who have at great cost persevered, and we see that there have been many difficulties in their

Christian life, that there has been a battle, then why would we think that there would be no battle for us?

Right. Yeah, so great application. Never again let the world, or even perhaps the cultural modern church, give you the measurements of salvation.

Salvation is an infinitely glorious and big thing. I've always been fascinated when

Paul writes to the Corinthians in the first chapter of the first letter. He does not say, the gospel is the mercy of God, or the gospel is the love of God, or the gospel is the grace of God, or even the gospel is the holiness of God.

He says the gospel, he says two things, it is the power of God. And then later he says, it's the wisdom of God.

And when we look at these 14 things, if a person were to slow down and kind of work carefully through what

Friedlinghuysen points out from Scripture, you do walk away with those two things. You walk away and you think, for any man or woman or child to be brought from death to life, from a stranger to a child of God, and to run that race well to the end, this is the wisdom of God on display.

This is the power of God. And it is the grace of God on display. None of these things make light of grace.

They highlight grace. You can't do it. You have no leg to stand on. If it's not the grace of God, then you're lost.

Yeah. And it's a good chance for us to kind of do a very practical check on our theology.

When a person in a church where we're at, when a person in your home says, I've believed in Christ, I've asked

Jesus into my heart, you want to be as encouraging as you can be. You certainly don't want to be that grumpy old person that always starts off with,

I doubt it, you know, prove it. But you do want to ask yourself, do you look, you know, graciously, do you look for the changes that only a living

God would be able to make in a person? Because that's the salvation that we want for our loved ones, for the people that come to the churches and, you know, and listen to us.

Yeah, we could say that maybe it's a good test for church membership as well.

I mean, if we have a regenerate church membership, then how do we determine as best we can looking at fruit what a regenerate person is?

What do they look like? Yeah. Well, fruits that only God can produce. Well, as we said at the beginning, we want this to dissuade us from two pitfalls.

So maybe we could think of a right understanding of the whole picture of a Christian life, not just justification, but what flows out of it and where it ends.

We could think of that as kind of a narrow mountain path that's beautiful, but if you're not careful, to the left and to the right, there's a very steep cliff.

On one side is easy believism, where a person says, all you have to do is repeat after me, or ask

Jesus into your heart, or just mentally accept, kind of nod your head to these

Bible facts, and you think, easy as can be. And then on the other side is hyper -Calvinism, that says it's so hard,

I dare not even try, because that would almost be kind of putting myself in God's place. No, I'm just gonna wait until God does it.

So clearly, the whole picture ought to move us to a desperation where we cry out to God and say, save me, save me for your name's sake, but God, only you could save me.

Look at, you know, I would take all 14 things to God and say, I just read a sermon that said this,

God, it's true. So I have no hope in me, but I have great hope in you, and I will not leave you alone until this kind of salvation is mine.

John Bunyan, in his book The Pilgrim's Progress, one of my all -time favorite scenes in that allegory comes at the early part of the book.

Christian is setting out on his journey, he's just been converted, pilgrims just become a Christian, the burden is off his back, and he spends the night with a man named

Interpreter. And Interpreter takes him through a number of rooms in his house, and then he takes him out of his house to another scene where he's basically giving him lessons that he needs for the

Christian life. You've got to understand this. And because Bunyan gives it in a picturesque way, these are scenes.

One of the scenes that he views is a great palace, and inside the palace the people are walking along the top, and they're clothed in golden garments, and they're happy and clean and joyful, and they represent a

Christian. And there in front of the palace is a group of armed men who prevent anyone from getting in there.

Out in front of them is a man sitting at a desk with basically an ink pen and a book, and anyone that wants, anyone can come up and sign the book and then try to get through the men.

If they can get through the men, they can get into the palace. And so everyone is afraid of the armed men, and Christian is kind of shocked that no one will even try.

And then he sees a man with courage come up, signs his name, straps on his armor, runs into the men, and they go at it, you know.

And then he backs up, and he goes again, and again and again. He gives and receives many blows, and finally through desperation he breaks through, and the next scene you see the men dressed in gold up top.

Now we're not talking about work salvation, that if I do well enough, Jesus lets me in.

What Bunyan, the interpreter says to Christian, do you understand this? He says, no, I understand this one.

When a man has been made to see, when a woman, when a young person has been made to see how great their need is, and how great a

Savior there is, it doesn't matter if there's a thousand hurdles, a thousand enemies in between me and Christ, I will rage against them until I have

Him. As always, the text of this sermon will be available in the show notes.

If you'd like to know more about Friedlinghuysen, there are two biographies available at heritagebooks .org.