Tonight I want to talk about the third element of saving faith. We've talked about the necessity of having a cognitive understanding or at least having a cognitive awareness of what is claimed in the Christian Faith. Hearing the preaching. Hearing the doctrine of sin. Hearing the doctrine of Christ. Hearing the doctrine of the crucifixion. Hearing the doctrine of the resurrection. Hearing the doctrine of his ascension. Hearing the doctrine of his coming again. All these things just become a part of the mental awareness that a person has of what is claimed. That has to be there. The second thing is coming to a point of seeing such evidence for it based upon some principles whether it is logical coherence or whether someone has actually convinced you that the Bible actually is a trustworthy book and even maybe divine revelation and you know that the Bible teaches these things and so you become committed to the idea that these things are true. And the third level then, when those come together to some degree, some degree of cognition, at least the major important point, some degree of understanding that these things actually are true, and then in those whom God converts, He takes all of that and He gives what we're calling a cordial persuasion of the truth of these things, a heart embracing this, seeing the loveliness of it, seeing the necessity of it, seeing the power of it, sensing the holiness of it, and desiring it as that which gives us certainty, the hope of eternal life, and is that which is transforming to our own lives. So it is that third element that we're talking about Tonight, again, the grace of faith whereby 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 wrought by the ministry of the Word by which also and by the administration of baptism in the Lord's Supper prayer and other means appointed of God it is increased and strengthened By this faith, a Christian believes to be true whatever is revealed in the Word for the authority of God Himself and also apprehends an excellency therein above all other writings and all things in the world as it bears forth the glory of God in His attributes, the excellency of Christ in His nature and offices, and the power and fullness of the Holy Spirit in His workings and operations. and so is enabled to cast his soul upon the truth consequently believed, and also acts differently upon that which each particular passage thereof contains, yielding obedience to 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 have immediate relation to Christ, accepting, receiving, and resting upon Him alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life by virtue of the covenant of grace. This faith, although it be in different stages and may be weak or strong, yet it is in the least degree of it different in the kind or nature of it, as is all other saving grace. from the faith and common grace of temporary believers. And therefore, though it may be many times assailed and weakened, yet it gets the victory, growing up in many to the attainment of a full assurance through Christ, who is both the author and finisher of our faith. So saving faith is a cordial persuasion and confession of these saving works of Christ. Saving faith terminates on Christ himself as he is revealed to us in the scriptures. The particular point that I'm focusing on out of the confession and I hope to illustrate from scripture is the grace of faith whereby 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 wrought by the ministry of the Word. Now we've been looking at the book of Colossians for demonstration of some of these ideas and again I want to look at Colossians chapter 1 and see something of the progress of Paul's argument in this. So Colossians chapter 1, let's begin with verse 3 again and get the entire narrative of Paul. We always thank God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ when we pray for you since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel which has come to you as indeed in the whole world is bearing fruit and growing as it also does among you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth just as you learned it from Epaphas, our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit. And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." So Paul in this passage begins with a full confidence that The faith that he has heard that they have is a saving faith because he puts with it the idea that this faith in Christ Jesus and the love you have for all the saints. And he closes this first section, the first eight verses, with this phrase again. He's made known to us your love in the Spirit. And then he's described the way in which they heard this and he's described the way in which it came to them through the faithful preaching of Epaphus. how they heard this and they learned the grace of God. This has happened since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth. You learned it from Epaphos, our beloved fellow servant. So he's mixing together all of the various aspects of how it is a person comes to saving faith. They hear this, they learn this, they understand it, they understand the grace of God truly, they understand if he's not talking here particularly about the effectual operation of grace and I tend to think that he's talking here about their understanding that they must be saved by grace. They understand the grace of God truly, that this is a part of this of the fabric of how God brings together all of these truths and brings together his work and brings together the human mind and then the human will to embrace these things. Paul is dealing with all this and then when he begins to deal with his prayer he begins to set it forth in a way in which As Paul had experienced in other churches, there were some who would believe and there were some who were genuine, there were some who would be there for a while but perhaps would not be genuine, there were some who would become heretical, there were some who would fall away because of other reasons, moral issues, because of certain issues and they would not be reclaimed. And so he sets his prayer within the context of What actually happens then when the grace of God operates in such a way as a person is brought from the condition of hearing and of knowing and of understanding things truly? What is it that actually happens? What is he praying? He's praying that the reality of this evangelistic event that Epaphos has been involved in will bear the fruit of actual saving faith. So how does he describe this? He says, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. So he's praying that the understanding that they have will become what he calls spiritual understanding. That is an understanding that is pressed upon their souls by the Spirit of God. It is that understanding that can only come when there is that internal operation of the Spirit. When the Spirit himself becomes a testimony to the truth. when the person's heart is changed so that it becomes something that is more than just a mental commitment but it becomes something that has grasped his life, his understanding of his sin, he has gone to Christ with his sin, he wants him to come to this spiritual understanding and spiritual wisdom. He wants them to know that this has something that is derived only in the wisdom of God. that this salvation that has come is something that would have been impossible for anyone else to work out because the polarities of it tend to be, seem to be, absolute contradictions. God says to Moses when he reveals his glory, he calls himself filled with loving kindness, forgiving trespasses, forgiving iniquities. filled with patience, all of these things, and he says, who will by no means clear the guilty. So if he's by no means going to clear the guilty, how is it that he's going to be filled with loving kindness and compassion and forgive iniquities and trespasses? And this is something that only the wisdom of God can contrive. It's something only the wisdom of God can do. And so we should be consistently amazed at the fact that there is a way of salvation in which God is fully vindicated, His character is fully vindicated. He can be just, not violate His character, and yet justify those who have faith in Christ. This adoration of His wisdom comes as a result of the work of the Spirit. And so He's praying that we would have spiritual wisdom and understanding. So we grasp the meaning of the gospel, we are overawed with the wisdom that is involved in the gospel and with that we walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him. Now saying fully pleasing to Him, of course, is not a contradiction to what we just heard about the character of indwelling sin. This is something that continues to operate and we grow in this. But we are fully pleasing to Him in that we understand the demands of the gospel. We understand that the gospel is built upon an absolute righteousness. We understand the gospel is built upon the person of of Christ and the work of Christ in which he himself was well-pleasing to God. And so the gospel carries with it this internal motivation that we want to be pleasing to God as Christ was. As Paul says in Philippians 3, he presses on toward the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. And this is something that is planted in us by the Spirit of God. And so we want our lives more and more to be conformed, more and more to reflect all of the various dimensions of the gospel both in the person of Christ and in the holiness of the law and in the love of God and in the sacrifice of Christ and all of these things that come together in the gospel as we learn them more and more through the word then our lives in that sense become more pleasing to God because that we're walking in a manner that is worthy of the gospel and a manner that conforms to all the moral principles that are present within the gospel. And so that when we have that spiritual understanding and that spiritual wisdom this is what begins to happen to our lives. Bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. We yearn for the scripture. We yearn to know what the scripture means. We increase more and more in the knowledge of God. And the knowledge of God is something that does not puff us up, but makes us humble and makes us grateful and makes us desire to reflect more of his own love and his holiness. Then he goes on to pray more of these things that will be consistent with the salvation, with this full spiritual understanding. May you be strengthened with all power according to His glorious might. For what purpose? For all endurance and patience with joy. You're in a world that is hostile to you. You're in a world that's going to try to get you to reject the gospel. You're in a world that's going to tempt you. You're in a world that thinks you're stupid. You're in a world that thinks the gospel is something that's contradictory. You're in a world that thinks the standards that the gospel tries to impose, the exclusivity of it is not loving toward other people. It's haughty and it's arrogant and it makes ridiculous claims. And so we need to be strengthened with all power according to His glorious might for endurance and patience with joy. It's hard to be joyful sometimes in those kinds of situations, but it's a verification of what the Word of God says. In a strange way it's a verification that we are different from the world. because when the world talks about these things in such disdainful, such a disdainful temper, It hurts. We know. We sense. They're wrong. They don't get it. They don't understand. They don't know how precious this is. If they could just believe and embrace this, they would just see how wonderful it is to know God and to know forgiveness of sins. They would see why it is that it's completely just for a holy God who is infinitely excellent and puny creatures have violated His law and have rebelled against Him for it to be right and just for Him to subject them to a punishment that is commensurate with the nature of their sin. This is a beautiful thing. It's absolutely wonderful that we have this kind of God who nevertheless, though all of us deserve that, is willing to save sinners. And so when we are confronted with these kinds of ideas about how ridiculous Christianity is, it is a mark of saving faith that we hold it more dearly and we want to know more about it and we desire for them to drop their disdain not just because they are perhaps thinking ill of us, but because what a joy it would be to them and what glory to God it would be to have another such a rebellious sinner saved. And so it's all endurance and patience with joy. giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. This is a part of the wisdom, spiritual wisdom. We know that the Father has qualified us. Arising out of the eternal counsels that somehow are expressive of the Father's will as it is united with the will of the Son and the will of the Spirit, the Father has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He, by His own sovereign will, has delivered us from the domain of darkness, the captivity of darkness, the castle of darkness. He's delivered us from that and He has transferred us. He has snatched us out, it says, He snatched us out of the domain of darkness and He's transferred us out of that darkness into the kingdom of His beloved Son, the Son of His love. We're in the kingdom of the Son that the Father loves. And then, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. And we're reminded of 1 Corinthians 1.30 says, He, the Father, is the one who has made unto us. He has made him, he has made Christ to be unto us wisdom from God. That is, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. As it is written, that him who glories, glory in the Lord. So the Father has made him to be all of those things for us that we need. And this is a part of the growing understanding and the expansive glory that there is in saving faith. So they've heard the gospel, they've learned it. And so now Paul is praying that there will be this marvelous fruit that begins to develop in their life that is clearly indicative of saving faith. There's been a work of the Spirit to impress it upon their conscience, impress it upon their mind, to transform their understanding, to give them joy, to let them glory in everything that there is about the gospel. It continues to have this transforming effect. He wants us to walk in a manner worthy. He wants us to bear fruit. He wants us to increase in the knowledge of God. He says we're strengthened with endurance and for patience with joy. We give thanks to the Father. The Father has qualified us, rescued us, transferred us, given us the kingdom of His beloved Son and in Him has given us everything that we need, as Peter says, for life and godliness. So the person who has all of these first stages, we might say, when this comes to bear upon his mind in a way that is set there by the Spirit of God, there is a new way of believing it. There's a new way of trusting it. There's a new way of embracing this that could never have been considered before. We see also that when this happens again the Spirit embeds this truth in the heart. We've already had the passage read but we'll look at it again from Romans chapter 10. Apostle Paul is writing about justification and how it is that the gospel comes to us. In one sense how easily the gospel should be understood But then there is a transformation that takes place when one believes these things with the heart. Beginning with verse 5, he says, For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them. So again we have this affirmation that righteousness is defined in terms of the law. The law is extremely broad. The law is extremely wonderful. All righteousness is contained in it. The beauty of righteousness is contained in this law. The person who does them, the person who had lived by everything, every principle of righteousness that is set forth in the law, would live by them. That would be characteristic of having a life that glories in the presence of the eternal. So he would have eternal life. He would live. But of course that is not the case with any of us because we are under condemnation and we are corrupt because of our connection with Adam and because of our own actual transgressions. But, he says, there is another way of righteousness. Righteousness is the thing that gives us the right to life but we don't have it ourselves but there's another way of righteousness. In one sense it's not any different than the first way of righteousness but it comes in a way that, again, only God and His wisdom. could produce. But the righteousness based on faith says, do not say in your heart who will ascend into heaven. That is to bring Christ down. He's quoting Moses about the law. The law has been given and so Moses is saying, Don't say that you can't know the way of righteousness. Don't say that God has not revealed this to you. Don't say you've got to go to heaven to find this out or you've got to go down to the depths to find it out, but it's nigh you. It's near you. God has given it to you. Now he's relating this giving of the law and the righteousness that is very clearly revealed in the law. He is applying this to Christ. He's saying, we're talking about righteousness here, so let's don't make the mistake that Moses was warning against, thinking that the Israelites could say, well, God hadn't told us anything. We don't know how to be righteous. No, he has. Don't think you've got to go into heaven and go into the depths. It's right here with you. Well, this is the way the righteousness is that Christ has brought also. Who will ascend into heaven? That is, to bring Christ down. Or who will descend into the abyss? That is, to bring Christ up from the dead. But what does it say? The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart. That is the word of faith which we proclaim. He's continually relating the reality of faith now to the righteousness that the law itself gives. So this whole idea of trying to sort of evacuate the Christian faith of of any kind of allegiance and obedience and glory in the moral law is just simply theologically indefensible. You can't understand the gospel. You cannot talk about the gospel. You cannot talk about the coming of Christ and the reason for the coming of Christ without seeing its immediate relationship to the revelation of righteousness through the law. And so that's what Paul is arguing here. You can't even grasp this passage if you don't get how closely Paul is relating the work of Christ, the incarnation, to the fulfillment of the very thing that God has revealed in the law. Who will descend into the abyss? That is, to bring Christ up. But what does this say? The word is nigh you, in your mouth and in your heart. That is, he's talking about the law in the Old Testament, but he says, that is the word of faith which we proclaim because If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart, one believes and is justified. And with the mouth, one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says everyone who believes in Him will not be put to shame. So confessing with the mouth that Jesus is Lord is to set forth before the world a proclamation that your mind and your heart are captured by the reality of why Christ became man, of who he is. We know that the Son of God has come. He has come to give us understanding and we have come to know Him in that way. We have come to know the Son of God. He has come. So we profess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord. Jesus, the one who is the man. Jesus, the one who was born of the virgin. Jesus, the one who is conceived of the Holy Spirit. Jesus, the one who went about doing good. Jesus, the one who healed the lepers and made the blind to see and the one who made the deaf to hear. Jesus, the one who is opposed by the religious leaders. Jesus, the one who interprets all the scripture in the proper way, Jesus the one who was finally rejected by his countrymen, Jesus the one who was killed, Jesus the one who rose from the dead, Jesus the one who demonstrated by his resurrection of the dead when he said, I have power to lay down my life, I have power to take it up again, has been manifested as Lord. So we confess that this Jesus who was crucified and dead and buried and was rejected by all the religious leaders of His day who should have known better, we confess this Jesus is Lord. He is the one who is revealed as Yahweh. He is the one who is revealed as the Great I Am. All the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Him in bodily form and it is out of the heart that the mouth speaks. And particularly in this way, when we confess with the mouth that Jesus is Lord, we're setting before the world the commitment that we have to the reality of this single person in whom a relationship with God is possible. This single person in whom we can have eternal life. This single person in whom we can have forgiveness of sins. This is the one. Jesus is Lord. We confess with our mouth. And we confess with our mouth on the basis of believing in our heart that God raised him from the dead. And we had a prayer a moment ago. Just many things that this means that God raised him from the dead. The stamp of assurance upon his life and his righteousness and that indeed the price had been paid and that we are forgiven of our sins because of his resurrection. That we too have a future resurrection and there's a glorified body that is awaiting us. It also means that when we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God has raised Him from the dead, we are affirming the very reasons for which He had to be raised from the dead. We are affirming that He took a condemnation that was not His own. We are affirming that He underwent the penalty of sin, that He was killed because of sin, and that even though this was something that we could call a murder on the part of men, something that they would never have done had they known that He was the Lord of glory, nevertheless in God's providence, God was setting Him forth as a propitiation for our sins. He came to die in our stead. He died the just for the unjust. When He died, He did not have a moral obligation to die for our sins. This was the most difficult of all the positive commands ever given to anyone. He obeyed all the moral commands in His life. He completely fulfilled the moral law. He had a righteousness of His own. He came to the end and He was just. He was the only just one. And there's nothing in the moral law that says a just man has to die for the sins of another man. In fact, Ezekiel proclaims to us, the soul that sinneth, it shall die. But Jesus received a positive command to die for His people, the just for the unjust, and His final act of obedience was to obey that positive command. He was obedient unto death, yea, even the death of the cross. And so when we say we believe in our heart that God raised Him from the dead, we are proclaiming that He took upon Himself a penalty that He did not have. It was our penalty. And God is fully satisfied with this obedience even to this difficult, impossible, positive command He received to die the just for the unjust and He was raised from the dead having fully satisfied everything that God has against His people. Jesus prayed and He said, for their sake I sanctify myself that they too may be sanctified. I set myself apart for this that those that you have given me may be set apart unto salvation. And when we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our heart that God raised Him from the dead, that means the Spirit has placed upon our heart, upon our conscience, upon our affections, upon the deepest part of what it means to be made in the image of God the reality that Christ has taken my place, He has died for me, He has been raised for me, He is interceding for me and the only hope that I have both in time and in eternity is to embrace Him. I believe in my heart that God raised Him from the dead because if He had not raised Him from the dead I would die physically and then I would die eternally spiritually. We believe in our heart, God raised him from the dead. Only the Holy Spirit teaches a person that. And so when we learn these things, we see the simplicity of it. Don't say, oh, we've got to go into, we can't know about this. Who knows the mind of the Lord? Ah, but we have the mind of Christ. He's come down. This is so deep. It's way down there. Who can understand this? Don't say that. The word is nigh you in your mouth. The gospel is plain. The gospel is preached. Jesus has died for sinners. You're a sinner. You must trust in him if you're to be saved. It's a simple message. If there were not such a perversion of heart against it, anyone can see that. A person can feel in his conscience it is true. And yet our perversion of heart makes us reject the wisdom of God, the simplicity of this message, even though it is something that would be impossible for human wisdom to contrive. And so we have to be brought to this by the Spirit of God so that the heart that is rebellious and that is wicked and that is deceitful above all things sees this truth by the work of the Spirit, embraces it, confesses it, and maintains it at the depth of our affections. This is effectual calling. Effectual calling is the work of God's Spirit. whereby, convincing us of our sin and misery, enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ, and renewing our wills, he doth persuade, in all the ways we've talked about, he doth persuade, and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ freely offered to us in the gospel. Well, we learn also that this moving from the stage of understanding these things to be true and yet being rather placid about their applicability to us, we see that the Spirit teaches us in a way that we will never deny it. In 1 John, we look at 1 John chapter 2, where we have an extended application of what Jeremiah talks about in Jeremiah 31, 33, and 34, where he talks about the New Covenant and where God writes the law in our heart and he says, you will not have to teach them to know the Lord, you'll not have to say know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. They will know me. And he says I will forgive their sins, their iniquities I will remember no more. So he's talking about those who've gone out from them here. There's some who've been among them, but they've gone out from them. So what is it that keeps others from going out? What is it that does not listen to these false philosophies? What is it that makes a person recognize that the kinds of logic and the kind of plausible arguments that are being used to seek to convince us of another way of thinking, to convince us that that message we have heard is not true, what keeps us from going that direction? Well, John says, verse 18, children, it is the last hour. And as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us for had they been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out that it might become plain that they all are not of us, but you have been anointed by the Holy One. and you all have knowledge. I write to you not because you do not know the truth but because you know it and because no lie is of the truth. Who is the liar? But he who denies that Jesus is the Christ. This is the Antichrist. He who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son the way that we've talked about there in Romans 10, has the Father also. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. This is the promise He's made to us eternal life. I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you. But the anointing that you receive from Him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as His anointing teaches you about everything and is true and is no lie, just as it has taught you, abide in Him." Now is John stripping away all the teachings that we have in Scripture about Christ having left of the church gifts and among those are pastors and teachers We have this reality that we need to be taught. We need to be taught doctrine. We have the pastoral epistles in which Paul instructs Timothy and Titus as to how they're to teach and they're to make sure that they instruct them, that they preach the word, that they rebuke, admonish, and correct with teaching and with patience. Is he saying that we don't need that kind of teaching? No. What he's saying is that when you're receiving all that kind of teaching, when you're hearing the Word of God, the one that really implants it upon your soul, the one that really lets you know that these things are true, is the anointing of the Holy Spirit. This is what is promised in the New Covenant. When you're taught from the Word of God, the Spirit who revealed these truths and the Spirit who inspired the words in which they're put is the Spirit who will open your heart, make you spiritual people so that you gravitate toward these truths, you see them. This is not a wisdom from the world, this is a wisdom from God. And so, if you are New Covenant people, if you actually have been brought into an understanding, then the anointing you have, the Spirit is the one who has taught you, so no one will have to say, know the Lord, as if the human words could be convincing in themselves, because in the New Covenant, they shall all know me. from the least of them to the greatest. This is one reason that it's very difficult to create a theology out of saying that there is an infant baptism in which you can introduce people into the New Covenant and that they can fall out of this because this is designed to say we're going to teach them, we're going to raise them, we're going to say, know the Lord and then they will come to a point where this becomes solidified in their experience. But the New Covenant is that no one will have to say know the Lord because the Holy Spirit Himself is the teacher. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings them into this. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes it okay to say you have no need that anyone should teach you in that sense. The Spirit teaches you. The Spirit shows you the glory of Christ. The Spirit shows you the truth of the Word. The Spirit shows you your sin. The Spirit makes your senses embrace the reality of every proposition of Scripture. And so these things that have come at the cognitive level, these things that have come at the level of understanding the truthfulness of them, now grip the soul by the power of the spirit, so that when others are led astray and others will follow liars, the spirit will keep you so tied to Christ and so aware of the glory of Christ's person and the wonder and wisdom of His work that you simply cannot see anything that is any better, anything that is truer, anything that is more attractive, anything that is worthier of your life than that one thing. And you are kept because the Spirit has opened your eyes and your hearts to see that. You've seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Then in 1 John chapter 5 verses 6 to 12, he talks here about two different kinds of testimony. He talks about the external testimony which should be convincing to anyone who was not morally prejudiced against it. It should be convincing to anyone who did not have a real heart problem. But of course the only reason that this testimony is given is because we do have a heart problem. And so John says, this is He who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ. Not by the water only, but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify, the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree." If we receive the testimony of man, the testimony of God is greater. For this is the testimony of God that He is born concerning His Son. Now what is John talking about? Well, there can be probably disagreements on this, exactly, but I think what he's talking about is just simply the historical event of Jesus coming to John the Baptist and asking to be baptized by him, and the Holy Spirit coming upon him, and John's testimony, behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. And Jesus was submitting himself to the baptism of John in order to verify the message of John and to verify John as the true prophet that would be the one that would announce the way of the Lord. He was the one who was pointing to the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. He was the one who was announcing repentance from sin. And Jesus is committing Himself to that message because He is going to live that message out. He is going to one that brings fulfillment to that message. So he identifies himself with the message of John. He verifies him as a prophet. He identifies himself as the one that John is talking about and he commits himself to the death, burial, and resurrection that will constitute the gospel. He submits to baptism. He is immersed in the water. He is raised up from the water. The symbol that we're given in Scripture, of course, is this of death, burial, and resurrection. Raised to walk in newness of life. And so Jesus has committed Himself to this. The water testifies to this. The announcement He is the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world. The whole symbol indicates that there's a shedding of blood that brought about his death and the Spirit comes upon him as the voice from heaven comes and says, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. And this is the testimony that God bore to Jesus at the very first public day of his ministry. and then his entire ministry was lived as a manifestation of that until he comes to the end and indeed he is crucified, he is buried, he is raised from the dead. And so this is the external testimony, the water and the blood, the testimony of John the Baptist, the baptizing of the Lamb of God, the Spirit testifying at that time and then the Spirit continuing His testimony in the life of Jesus. A part of the confession of faith of the early church according to 2 Timothy 3 was that He was vindicated by the Spirit. The second article of that confession. God came in the flesh, He appeared in the flesh, He was vindicated by the Spirit, He was seen by angels, He was proclaimed among the nations and He was believed on in the world and He was taken up in glory. Now the phrases vindicated by the Spirit and believed on in the world are according to the structure of that passage, parallel passages. So it's like the first line, He appeared in the flesh and the last line was taken up in glory are parallel passages. He came down in the flesh and then His flesh was glorified, He was taken up in glory. He was vindicated by the Spirit but also right before it says he was taken up in glory it says he was believed on in the world. The Spirit vindicates Christ by his constant attention to Christ leading him all the way to the end of his life as one who was blameless according to the witness of Hebrews 9 of 14. He presented himself blameless before God by the work of the Spirit. And so this Testimony of the Spirit, this vindication of the Spirit is the same work that causes that message that is preached to be believed. He is believed on in the world. As He vindicated Christ in His incarnation, so He vindicates Him in the proclaiming of the gospel so that people believe this message. Whereas few believed it during the time of Jesus Himself, after He ascends into heaven, the Spirit comes in full power and blesses the preaching of the apostles and the church begins to spread throughout the Mediterranean basin. He is believed on in the world. The Spirit is bringing about belief. He is vindicating Christ. And so the Spirit is testifying to the reality of Christ. The Spirit and the water and the blood agree and this is the testimony of God. And anyone should believe on the basis of that testimony because it is a powerful testimony. If you study it within the context of Scripture and with the context of the life of Jesus and all of these things, this is a testimony that is powerful about this single individual who gave himself as an atonement for sin. But left to ourselves, we will not believe it because in the same way that the Spirit vindicated Christ in his life, he vindicates Christ in the preaching of the gospel so that he is believed on in the world. So John goes on to say, whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar. because he has not believed in the testimony that God is born concerning His Son, the external testimony that God has given. All of those things that God has given to vindicate Christ, sinners have not believed that. So how does a person believe it? It's when the testimony comes into himself. So this is the work of the Spirit in bringing this testimony which is given externally, which people should believe but do not believe, but then the testimony comes into a person by the effectual operation of the Holy Spirit. Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. This is the testimony. God gave us eternal life and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son has life. Whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. So this is the testimony. I remember that in my own case, I think I went through each one of these particular stages in coming to saving faith. I was reared in the Southern Baptist Church. My earliest memories in my whole life were going to Sunbeams, Monday afternoon. Leave kindergarten, go over to the church for Sunbeams. I remember training union, right after they changed it from being B-Y-P-U as just B-T-U, Baptist Training Union. I was trained what the Bible was, what Baptist doctrine was. Sunday school, I had loving Sunday school teachers. I was just, had a great preacher, believed the Bible, loved Christ. Just every week, three or four times a week, I'm hearing this. I'm getting all the facts. It presses on my conscience. I listened to my preacher carefully. He would preach about the Bible and preach about the inspiration of Scripture and demonstrate so many things about the Bible that were unique testimonies to its full truthfulness and to its revelatory character. I came to believe the Bible was the Word of God. I believed what the Bible said. I came to believe that Jesus Christ was indeed the Son of God, the only Savior of the world. He would preach apologetic messages about Christ and showing why we should believe He is God and why the resurrection is something that is true and the testimony of Scripture is something that cannot be doubted. It made sense to me. I believed it. I went to college and had what I thought were Christian roommates, Christian friends around me. just one after another, they began to become atheists. Well, I'd become a youth director in the church. I couldn't become an atheist, lose my job. But also, also, those things resonated with me. I just, I knew that what that testimony was true. But I began to have a severe lack of assurance This began to happen after my junior year in high school. I met a real Christian at Glorietta Baptist Assembly. It was roommates with a guy that was just a real Christian. And we spent a week just, he would go to the prayer garden there and he'd pray and he had so much fun praying. And I'm thinking, man, I've never met anybody like this. And so I'd pray too. I'd hear what he's saying, I'd say what he'd say. He loved to hear the preaching. He'd talk about the preaching afterwards. So I thought, I've never met anybody who seems actually to enjoy being a Christian. To me, it was just like, oh, I've got to give up dancing and I've got to, man, I've got to watch my language and I've, you know, all these things I've got to do in order to demonstrate that I'm a Christian and it was just a burden. And this guy, Ruffin Snow is his name, he was just like, he just loved it. I'd never met anybody like that. Well, I had, I had met Joe Neeson, but we didn't talk about a lot of those things while we were doing the gondoliers down at Southern. But so I came, I thought there's something different what he is and what I am. So I tried harder. I began to develop more convictions. I tried harder and I said, I decided, no, I'm not going to University of Southern Mississippi. I'm going to go to Mississippi College of Baptist School. So I went to Mississippi College. That'll give me assurance. I'm going to a Baptist school. And then all those friends began to believe the philosophy they were taught, and they began to fall away. And I thought, whoa, this is really, really bad. And the thing that sort of kept me in the faith, though I was not a person that was saved at that time, was the testimony, the external testimony that had been given. I believed it was true. I just didn't know that if I had any of the experience of it. So I went through all my years at Mississippi College. I decided that I know what it is. I'm majoring in music education now. But I want to be some sort of a choir director in high school. But that's not it. I'm going to be a music director in a church. That'll do it. That'll settle it down for me. So I surrendered to be a minister of music. I didn't do it. I still felt insecure. So then I decided, I know, I'm going to surrender all the way. I'm going all the way with Jesus. I'm going to be a preacher. So I surrendered to be a preacher. Then I decided that I was going to go to seminary because after I surrendered to be a preacher, I still had these insecurities. They were increasing more and more and I was saturating myself with anything I thought that might help me. We had a charismatic movement. I tried to speak in tongues. I couldn't do that. We had the deeper life movement. I was reading Watchman Nee and I was reading Rev. Roy Hesham and I was reckoning myself dead in the sin and I was confessing all my sins and I was doing the blue booklet of the campus crusade. I was doing everything I could to try to find something to hold on to. I went to seminary and I thought, boy, I get it, seminary, I'm going to learn it. There's some little key missing, I'm going to go to these classes and something's going to click and I'm going to be satisfied. And I would walk across the campus and I remember seeing these big buildings and on the sides of the buildings they would have pictures of people who had contributed to Baptist life and all of this and you know some of them were old and gnarly people that had beards and I would think, How can a person live their whole life under this kind of tension? How can you get that old and still believe so that you give your life to it? Man, I was sinking. And then I was leading this thing in a revival meeting one night, and I shared these doubts with a friend who was a pastor at the church. He said, well, There's nothing I can do for you. We've been in meetings before. You know all the verses I would quote to you. He says, you just got to get along with God and find out what's going on. And so he began to pray. I began to pray. As I prayed, it was like something became clear that had never become clear before. I was working on Jesus being the one giving me purpose, Jesus being the one that wanted me to have a rich and wonderful life, and I was working for that. I even talked to my young people at Broward Drive about purpose in life, and Christ gives purpose in life. You can't have purpose unless you know Christ. You've got to have purpose. You've got to have a rich and wonderful life, and Christ will give you that. But I just, you know, the whole idea of dying on the cross and forgiveness of sins, I mean, that's not nearly as good as purpose. So I was working for purpose in life, While I was praying, it became clear to me, you are a sinner and you don't need to worry about purpose in life or anything because you're going to go to hell looking for purpose. And Jesus died for sinners. That's the point. Jesus died. You've never come to grips. Oh, I knew all the verses. I could quote all of those things. I knew that those things were in the Bible and those things were probably true. They were true, but that just didn't seem to be the central core of it to me. There was something else. It must be some hidden thing you can get that will really jab you up inside. And so it was like I was just emptied out of everything. It's like, goodness, I've just been looking at the wrong thing and this is so simple. I've ignored it so long, I can't be helped. And so I got off my knees, I sat down on the couch and my friend looked at me and said, well, what? I said, I'm lost. And he went down on his face again and said, let's ask the Lord to save you. And so I thought, what? You mean just like that? Well, anyway, in that process, the Lord opened my mind. He opened my heart. He showed me the reality of what forgiveness of sins was, that my offense against God was the main thing that needed to be dealt with. And then all these other things would follow if I could come to an understanding of what my offense against God was and that Jesus had shed his blood for sinners. And I became convinced. this is it. I had had stage 1, I had had years of stage 2, but it had never settled on my conscience and in my heart the reality of the need for forgiveness of sins. And when that became clear to me, it transformed my whole view. I went back over and my call to ministry. I said, do I even have a call to ministry? Have I wasted a year? And I went back over that and I found out in my own soul I would like nothing better to do than to preach the gospel and teach the gospel and try to figure out just how to go about doing this. So I entered my second year of seminary and I began to read everything I could about this and came across Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God by J.I. Packer. I began to read Baptist Confessions. Within six weeks of having been saved, I had become a full-blown Calvinist. I had a teacher, forgive me for taking this long, I'm sorry about this, but it's an illustration, it's a personal illustration of what I think these first three levels are. I had a teacher in systematic theology that would say, now the class, we have three different views we're going to look at in every one of these doctrines. We have the old view, And he listed Warfield, Hodge, Boyce, and Dagg. Then we have the liberal view. And he would mention Bushnell, and William Horton, and William Newton Clark, and Harry Empson Fosdick, and others, just real liberals. Then he would say the class view. which was sort of an amalgamation. It was sort of a neo-orthodox evangelicalism kind of thing. Well, I began to go and read the old views and I found they were just so cogent and so biblical and so refreshing and witnessed so much to what had actually happened. I'm not saying that my experience determined what I believed, but when I began to read the truth, it had such an immediate witness to what I had experienced. And I did have the level of knowledge about Jesus did die for sinners and we had to repent and believe and so forth. It just didn't seem to have any pizzazz to it. But man, it just got all kind of pizzazz after the Lord showed me what this was. And as I began to read those, I said, this is the truth. I've never heard any of this. Now I had a group of Mississippi friends that we went around with and I just became I guess the classic cage stage. I just talked about this all the time. They just thought I'd gone crazy. But it became something that was such a powerful and refreshing reality of truth in my mind and to realize it was not something that I was just inventing. It was not something where I was just sort of coming up with it on my own. But this was the witness that had been given by people who studied the Bible seriously and who sought to synthesize the Bible's teaching on all these subjects. And when I read about effectual calling, and then I read that article in the Second London Confession, I don't know how I read the Second London Confession. I mean, no one talked about it there at that time, but I read it. And I said, that's it. That is what happened. That's the truth. And so, when there is the testimony outside we need to take heart that the testimony we give can keep people within the framework of believing that the Christian faith is true even when they may be confused about whether or not they really believe it. There can be such powerful testimony and such a witness of these external aspects that they can convince the mind that these things are true. And God will use that in His own time and for His own purpose then to give this internal testimony. Whoever believes in the Son of God, and this word belief is not the devil's belief, this is that belief that is trusting, this is that belief that really affirms and loves who the Son of God is. Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. And it comes that way. This testimony in himself comes when the testimony has been presented faithfully in these other ways. Let's pray that the Lord will make us faithful to that and trust him and his wisdom to bring it to bear with power upon the lives of those to whom we preach. Let's pray.