Jesus Saves! But How? PART 14 Saving Faith

Andrew Grey cotinues the teaching series on Salvation with Part 14: Saving Faith.

This is from the adult Sunday school session on Sunday 26th April 2026.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Open up Ephesians chapter two, please. And in the uh Black Church Bibles, Mike Winter. Page nine seven six. Thank you. Page nine seven six. Let me read Ephesians two, one to ten. Let's listen to God's word. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive, together with Christ, by grace you have been saved, and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. So let me pray. Father in heaven, we bless you this morning for this great salvation which you have given us in the Lord Jesus Christ. Please be our teacher this morning, encourage our hearts, teach our minds that we might better walk with Christ, trusting and obeying Him. And we pray in His name. Amen. It's a few weeks since we've been in this Sunday school series. We've been thinking about Jesus saves, but how. And we've split this course into two bits. We've thought about salvation accomplished, the person and the work of the Lord Jesus, what he did in his life, death, resurrection, ascension, outpouring of his spirit, and then how that great salvation, that treasure benefits us. And we've seen that if we are outside of Christ, it benefits us not at all, but then joined to Christ, in union with him, well, how does it benefit us? And we've we've been working through the benefits which Christ by his spirit bestows on Christian people. We've thought about those who he has chosen. He then calls to himself, he effectually calls them, he powerfully brings them to Christ. He makes us new, he regenerates us, and then he enables us to respond with repentance and faith. And that's the point at which our minds, our hearts, our wills are deeply engaged and where our responsibility is most engaged as we repent and believe. Where we started off in the very, very first session, we actually thought about our need of salvation. And that passage in Ephesians 2, it reminds us why we need the work of Christ and why we need the Holy Spirit to do that work and bring it to us. Because we saw that we are, if you just look at Ephesians 2, 1 to 3, we are dead, enslaved, and condemned. We're dead in our trespasses and sins. We have no spiritual life in ourselves, we cannot save ourselves or make ourselves Christians. We are enslaved to Satan. That is that the spirit that's at work in the sons of disobedience, albeit it's a happy slavery, we like it, and we're also condemned with children of wrath under the wrath of God, until such time as a mighty work of God is done in us and for us. Now, so the point we're at, we're thinking about repentance and faith, our response to the Lord. Before Easter we thought about repentance, and today we're thinking about faith. Now, just a few comments about repentance and faith. Those two things cannot be separated. We're talking about them separately. You can distinguish them, you can't separate them. They are like uh two sides of the same coin. Where one is, the other will also always be. So saving faith is also a repenting faith. Repentance unto life is also a believing repentance. It's why, for example, when the Lord Jesus began his public ministry, he said, Mark 1, the time has come, the kingdom of God is near. So what do you do? Repent and believe the good news. Those two things go together. Also, regeneration always produces repentance and faith. So when God makes a person new, gives them a new heart, takes away their stony heart, gives them a fleshy heart which loves him and loves his word, you will always find the fruits of repentance and faith growing on that new regenerate tree. Unless you are born again, unless the Holy Spirit does that work in a person, it's impossible to repent and believe. Lastly, repentance and faith they are essential. That is, it is necessary to repent and believe. Without doing so, you cannot know Christ and cannot be saved. So those are just, if you like, some preliminaries, super important to have in mind. Let's think now specifically about saving faith. First, how does faith save? Now, really importantly, not because it earns us merit. So faith is not the meritorious cause of salvation any more than repentance is something that merits anything from God. We don't deserve anything, nothing kind of accrues to our account, if you like, because we believe in the Lord. So how does faith save us? Well, think of it like an instrument. It is the instrumental cause of salvation. Imagine for a moment that God's grace is like a present, a gift which is held out to us. Faith is the hand with which we take hold of it. And in many ways, the Bible will show us and teach us that those hands must be empty hands. You don't come to God with payment for this gift. You come empty-handed. And you take hold of it. There's no cash, there's no merit, there's nothing. But we do gladly and willingly grab that wonderful gift and take it and open it and enjoy it. Of course, we do need to remember technically, faith does not save us. It's God who saves. And all the power to save resides in our Saviour. Helpful quote here from John Murray. As one has aptly and truly stated the case, it is not faith that saves, but faith in Jesus Christ. Strictly speaking, it's not even faith in Christ that saves, but Christ that saves through faith. It's all about Him. It's all about Him. And we are simply receiving Him and all of the blessings and gifts which He has for us. Turn over, second side of the handout. Where does faith come from? I put a paragraph from the Westminster Confession there, chapter 14.1, it's the modern language version. The grace of faith by which the elect are enabled to believe to the saving of their souls is the work of the Spirit of Christ in their hearts and is ordinarily produced through the ministry of the word. This faith is increased and strengthened by the same means, and also by the administration of the sacraments and prayer. We are enabled to believe. Faith in Christ is not something that you can self-generate or kind of work up in yourself. It is something we are enabled to do. Ephesians 2, verse 8. It is the gift of God. Save by grace through faith, this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. So this salvation package, which includes our receiving of it, it is all the gift of God. It's done by the work of the Holy Spirit. He gives us hearts that desire to and are able to reach out to the Lord with faith and repentance. That is not something that sinful people can do. We are so deeply lost. When he makes us new, he enables it. It's a gift, it's a work of the Spirit. The Spirit has a toolbox, if you like. That is, he has tools through which he likes to do his work. He can work without means and above means, but he has means, tools which he likes to work through, and he actually has promised ordinarily to work through. And that is the preaching of the words, sacraments, that is baptism and the Lord's Supper, and prayer. For example, faith comes by hearing. Romans 10. Super important that. Faith comes by hearing. When we have wobbles in our confidence in Christ, and every Christian does, I do. Faith comes by hearing. That's a true principle at the start of the Christian life, or even before someone's a Christian, the best thing for them is to be hearing the word read and preached. But as you go on, it doesn't change. Being under the sound of the word preached, it is the thing that the Spirit will most use to grow our confidence in Christ. Allied to that, the sacraments, which are a bit like the word visible, baptism and the Lord's Supper. The Lord uses them in the power of the Holy Spirit to do our souls good. And prayer. It's not an automatic thing that the word of God grows Christians. It's not that you can just open your Bible and read or come to church and hear a sermon and automatically have your faith grow and your union with Christ strengthened. It depends on the work of the Spirit. It does actually matter that we pray, both for the preaching and the receiving of the Word of God, that it would actually do something. Wonderfully, the Spirit loves to hear such prayers. The sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, just really briefly, they're described as being a seal. That is something that confirms to us the truthfulness of God's promise. It's a bit like a faith strengthener. And for our encouragement, perhaps in our praying, remember that man in Mark 9, 24. I believe. Help my unbelief. It's a good prayer. It's a good encouragement for Christian people. That's where faith comes from. But we haven't actually said thus far clearly what faith is. Let's think about that. Our next heading, what is faith? Down the centuries, the Reformed tradition has distinguished three bits, three aspects to saving faith, each of which builds on the preceding bits: knowledge, assent, and trust. Knowledge. Sometimes people try and distinguish or separate faith and knowledge. So faith is something where you just kind of leave your brain at the door, or it is wishful thinking, or it's irrational. And the Bible would actually say, no, that's not the case. There is a knowledge, there are things for our minds to know that are essential and indispensable to saving faith. Just as in an ordinary human relationship, we do not trust someone we know nothing about, so we must know who Christ is and what Christ has done, at the very bare minimum. Now, sometimes the measure of truth which is apprehended by the believing person, it's very small, and that's okay. And just sort of slight sidebar, which we've mentioned before, the Bible does describe the phenomenon of infant faith and infant salvation. It's something that God does, and that there is a mystery there. But in the ordinary run of things, faith cannot begin in a vacuum of knowledge. So Romans 10, 17, faith is of hearing and hearing of the word of Christ. So we begin with knowing things from and of the word of Christ. Second, moving on from that, assent. Faith is, faith requires assent. Not just knowing the truth respecting Christ, but also believing it to be true. And not just truth about Christ, but also what Christ can do for sinners, and what he can do to meet my misery and my sin. But of course, that alone is not enough. There's this rather chilling warning in James 2, verse 19. You believe that there is one God, good. Even the demons believe that and shudder. So Satan and his demons have knowledge and they have assent. That is, thus far, they are orthodox believers concerning the doctrine of God. Satan and the demons know that there is but one God. They actually believe that. They know it's true. They probably know that's true more than most people on this planet. They assent to it. Obviously, that is not true and saving faith. They know it, they assent to the truthfulness of it, and they hate it. To knowledge and assent must be added, trust. Thirdly, trust. It's a paragraph from Westminster Confession 14.2. This is really helpful. By this faith, a Christian believes to be true whatever is revealed in the word, because of the authority of God Himself speaking in it. He also responds differently to what each particular passage contains: obeying the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God for this life and that which is to come. But the principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life by virtue of the covenant of grace. So there, if you like, is the essential of saving faith. There is a trusting of God's word, the Bible. And so the Apostle Paul said about the Thessalonians, 1 Thessalonians 2, 13, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God. So the Christian comes to the Bible and receives it as the word of God, and therefore responds to the voice of God. And he speaks differently within the pages of Scripture. So when he commands things, we obey. When he gives warnings, and he does, he warns his children, we fear, we tremble, and that's a right response. And when he promises things, we embrace those promises. We take hold of them and we receive them. From another angle, trust at its most basic and fundamental is a resting on Christ alone. I know that salvation is in Christ. Did you notice in our reading, Ephesians 2, 1 to 10? Where mercy and grace is to be found, it is in Christ, in Christ Jesus. It's with Christ Jesus. He has everything that I need, and he and all of those blessings, they are made over to me. They are given to me in the covenant. So he joins himself to me. It's a bit like a marriage-like union, which my sins and demerits go to Christ, and all of his goodness and blessing is given to me. And so we rest on him. That's actually one of the meanings, particularly, of the old test, one of the Old Testament words for faith. It has the sense of leaning on. And here we are leaning on Christ for all that we need. That's true on day one of the Christian life, but it's actually true of every single day of the Christian life. There's not really a difference between how you begin and how you go on. I think that's a big blunder. Actually, lots of the letters in the New Testament are trying to correct that in slightly different ways. The way you begin is the way that you go on. We always are to trust in the Lord and carry on trusting him. Galatians 2.20 is a great picture of this. Paul says, the apostle, the life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. That'd be a good verse to say every morning as you get out of bed, wouldn't it? Stick that on your mirror. Another helpful quote here from John Murray. Faith is knowledge passing into conviction, and it's conviction passing into confidence. Faith cannot stop short of self-commitment to Christ, a transference of reliance upon ourselves and all human resources to reliance upon Christ alone for salvation. It is a receiving and resting upon him. It is here that the most characteristic act of faith appears. It is engagement of person to person, the engagement of the sinner as lost to the person of the Saviour, able and willing to save. Faith is trust in a person. The specific character of faith is that it looks away from itself and finds its whole interest and object in Christ. He is the absorbing preoccupation of faith. Couple of questions. But what about firstly, what about assurance? Now, by which I mean this. We're saved by faith in Christ. That's the hand that receives the Lord Jesus. Christians have a greater or lesser experience of that. So imagine kind of an out-of-body experience in which you can look at your relationship with Christ. And sometimes we feel like I'm holding on to Christ really tightly. Sometimes I feel like I'm barely holding on by my fingertips, or maybe I'm not holding on at all. And we can talk about the assurance of salvation, an inward conviction that Christ is true and he's true for me, and also its absence. Now, have a look at that paragraph from the Confession 14.3. This faith varies in degrees. It may be weak or strong. It may often and in many ways be assailed and weakened, but it gains the victory. It matures in many to the attainment of a full assurance through Christ, who is both the author and the perfecter of our faith. That some Christian people are weak in faith, and all Christian people are weak in faith sometimes. And the Bible testifies to that and explains that in many different ways and many different passages. We experience the assaults of sin, you know, our own sinful nature, the flesh. Suffering, it can drive a person towards Christ, it can also do harmful things to our walk with the Lord. We have Satan, an evil one, who wants to diminish our faith in Christ. Think of, for example, how he sought to destroy Peter. Read about that in Luke 22. And how Jesus prayed for him. Think about the shield of faith. Why do we need a shield of faith, Ephesians 6? Because of what the evil one wants to do. So there are it should be no surprise if our faith wobbles and if our assurance, our confidence that we are Christ's people goes up and down. The Lord wants us to grow in assurance, to grow in confidence. That is a godly thing. And in the end, it will be perfected. The great thing to hold on to, though, is we are not saved by our assurance, we're not saved by feeling confident, we're saved by Christ. So when I fear my faith will fail, Christ will hold in fast. Now just a little trailer. We're going to have two sermons actually on the two bank holiday Sundays, bank holiday weekends in May, on doubt and assurance. So that's but what about assurance? But lastly, what about faith and works? Now, just another trailer. I'm not going to say much here. Gavin's actually preaching about this today in James chapter 2. So we've been thinking about saving faith. We do also think have to think about how saving faith relates to a Christian's works. Let me read just a few little bits from the Westminster Confession that help us. Faith. Receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness is the only instrument of justification. Yet it is not the only grace in the person justified, but is always accompanied by all other saving graces. Justifying faith is not dead, but works by love. So when a person is made new and they're given the grace of faith, that will work itself out visibly in spirit-empowered good works. Those works do not save us, but they are in the power of the Holy Spirit good. The Lord receives them, he loves them, however, imperfect they always are. We are not saved by good works, but we are never saved without good works. Because the Lord is making new creatures who resemble Jesus. That's really what the next quote there from chapter 16.2 says. These good works, done in obedience to God's commandments, that's what defines a good work, obviously, they are the fruits and evidences of a true and living faith. So Christ is the tree, and people who are grafted into him will exhibit Christ-like fruits. That would be John 15, 8, for example, or James chapter 2. Lastly, chapter 16.3, their ability to do good works is not at all from themselves, but entirely from the Spirit of Christ. And in order that they may be enabled to do these things, besides the graces believers have already received, there must also be an actual influence of the same Holy Spirit working in them both to will and to do God's good pleasure. So the same, do you see what it's saying? The same Holy Spirit who brings us to Christ and gives us all graces, all of the treasures that Christ has, who enables us to repent and believe. That same Holy Spirit also enables us to do good for Christ. He works in us to will and to do what God wants us to do. Quoting from Philippians 2. Let's pause there. We've got a few minutes. Let me encourage you to talk to the neighbour for a few moments. Things that have encouraged you, any questions you have, and then we'll share some of those questions and encouragements in just a moment. So how do we exercise, I guess, the means of grace, those tools that the Spirit uses, maybe when we're in adversity or temptation in the moment. Would anyone like to speak to that? So it's not by our own strength, it is a supernatural work of God. We have, if you're a Christian, you've been made a new creature. I guess one out one practical out of the box of that, genuinely praying in the moment is probably the best thing you can do in soliciting others to pray. Because the Holy Spirit loves to answer those prayers. Anyone else wants to chip in?

SPEAKER_03 26:20

I mean, I love this verse in 2 Timothy 4 17 where Paul says But the Lord stood with me and strengthened me. I think that's probably the single biggest thing I didn't hold on to probably because I know we thought I'm going to like with me. Um actually felt used to put it in a very real way. When you're feeling like they're not true, no, they are true, it tends to be problems of true. If it doesn't feel like it, and everything else is that for goal, it's gold.

SPEAKER_02 27:37

Making the most of Sunday does actually make a difference to the rest of the week. So the Puritans used to describe Sunday as the market day for the soul. So once upon a time, I don't know, you'd go to the market to buy all of the food you'd need for the week, and you go to church on the Lord's Day, and happily you don't have to buy anything, it's entirely free. But you you you are there to stop up. Uh, and I I guess that's I guess that reminds us that it's both a supernatural and an active process, the business of giving ourselves to worship and the Lord's people on the Lord's Day. You know, he's got things in his word and in gathered worship in in all of its dimensions that will both supernaturally strengthen me, but there will also be things that I can purchase, buy and stack up in my soul. Maybe it's from James chapter 2 this week, such that on Wednesday afternoon, um, somewhere near the front of my soul is something that I have I have received from the Lord. So yeah, I would I would encourage us just to just to make them constantly get into the habit of making the most of the Lord's day in that kind of way.

SPEAKER_00 28:48

I'm just gonna say I think one more thing to add to that in terms of we've got each other, God uses each other, so obviously we've got Jesus walking with us, we've got the spirit in us, but in those moments when we're struggling, ask a friend to come to them behind you, to talk to you, to put the Bible with you, to pray with you just to sit with you, like pushing that you've got in isolation. So each other.

SPEAKER_02 29:10

Thank you. Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

Um we were reflecting on under and the idea of breaking the public with mine and that. I think after we think I'm trusting, I'm likely for external. Um well imagine for people from another part of the world coming in here exploring uh or coming home with people lunch and going, what are you placing your trust in what it's like and then? Um and yeah, I don't know what the question is, but is there is there a challenge for us to well not just we trust in Jesus with our spiritual well-being, we actually need to be better at trusting him with the day to death.

SPEAKER_02 30:11

Yeah, trusting Jesus with this life, not just the life to come. And I guess that that probably goes in two directions, doesn't it? We we know, being honest, most of us, because of our circumstances in life, it is very easy day to day to trust in a whole bunch of other things. We are materially well provided for. Actually, those things come from the Lord. Um, but then also perhaps from another angle, the Lord does have promises about this life. I mean, we we don't want to sort of over-promise. I mean, we're we're we don't want to be health, wealth, and prosperity false teachers and liars, but the Lord does have promises for us in this life, and he wants us to receive those and embrace those. Never will I leave you or forsake you. Um, anyone who leaves father or mother, he will have well, he'll have dozens of homes, etc., to belong to fathers, mothers, fields, and so on. So there are wonderful promises in this life. I think we ought to draw stumps there. Let me let me pray briefly. Father, we have a wonderful Redeemer and mediator in our Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for the gift of faith and repentance, and we pray for ourselves and ask that you would grow those graces in us, uh in our whole church family, uh, in our children. Think of those words of the Apostle Paul. Pray that they would be true and known to be true by each of us, that the life we live in the body, we live by faith in the Son of God who loved us and who gave himself for us. Please would you use our gathering today to that end? Uh, in Jesus' name. Amen.