How to Lead People to Christ, Part 2: Our Invitation to Respond (John 6:35–40)

 

[Lii]

We continue with our two-part series given by Zane Hodges on how to lead people to Christ, given at the 2000 Grace Evangelical Society National Conference held at Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas. In this second message, subtitled Our Invitation to Respond, Zane looks at various problematic gospel invitations, shows how to present the saving message clearly, and provides a liberating approach to evangelism. We hope you are blessed by this message from the Zane Hodges Library and Grace Evangelical Society. And remember, keep grace in focus.

[Hodges]

If I may judge from the number of questions that were raised yesterday and the flood of humanity that, uh, poured down here around the podium area after the presentation, I got you to thinking, and I’m delighted that I did. That’s one of the main purposes of a conference like this. And I happen to believe that the grace movement needs to do some very careful thinking about some very important issues that are related to the basic message that we preach. And if I send you away from here searching the Scriptures, I’ve done my job.

That leads me to a preamble to my presentation today. I have often thought that one of the reasons that God allowed the lordship controversy to arise was for the purpose of waking up the grace people. Lordship theology really swept in while we were asleep in our post. Few of you can remember, as I can because I’m older by considerable than many of you, but few of you can remember when the Southern Baptists and the Plymouth Brethren held up the true gospel in a majority of their churches.

That situation is now gone, and alien theology is to be found almost everywhere you look. Institutions that used to be pillars of grace have become hotbeds of Reformed and, uh, lordship theology. But now that so many grace people are wide awake, we can begin to see at least part of what went wrong. We ourselves had been sloppy and fuzzy about the doctrine of salvation without realizing it.

We ourselves had clouded the gospel message by careless terminology and by an unwillingness to think in a disciplined way about our basic commitments. Without realizing it, we had added theological codicils and provisos and stipulations to our core message. We had so many of these, in fact, that even many grace people struggled with assurance. I hope you realize that that is true.

Many people in grace churches struggled with assurance because they were asking themselves the question, “Did I believe the right way? Did I believe the right things? Did I understand this when I believed? Did I understand that when I believed? Did I understand the other thing when I believed?” You’d be surprised how many people like that there have been.

We had sort of become a church of jailhouse lawyers. You know, a jailhouse lawyer spends hours in the prison library poring over the legal books to discover every conceivable technicality that might be appealed to to reverse his sentence. In the case of the church, we have invoked technicality after technicality after technicality to invalidate conversion experiences.

So I may say to someone, “Joe Smith just believed in Jesus for eternal life.” But I might get any of the following responses: “Did he have a real conviction of sin? Did he know about the deity of Christ? Did he believe in the virgin birth? Did he understand the substitutionary atonement? Does he believe in Christ’s bodily resurrection?”

And what if I said no to all of this and said he just believed that Jesus would give him eternal life? Was his faith misplaced? No. Indeed, he was believing the right Person, and he was believing the right Person for the right thing.

But when we invoke technicalities and invalidate someone’s faith, we open the door to lordship salvation, which invokes a whole new set of technicalities. Now we have, if you don’t believe and surrender when you believe, did you dedicate yourself? Did you submit yourself? And on it goes. In other words, the differences we have with lordship salvation are sometimes only a matter of degree.

The church’s fuzzy thinking about faith has created a theological monster. I would perhaps say a theological dragon, whose primary operation has been to devour the assurance of salvation. That leads me to the presentation of the day: how to lead people to Christ.

Yesterday, we talked about getting our core message to men clearly in mind. Our objective is to lead them to believe in Jesus Christ to provide their eternal salvation. The gospel message about His death, burial, and resurrection is the normal context for our presentation of this core objective. But at the end of the day, anyone who trusts Jesus Christ for eternal life is born again. And that’s what I said yesterday.

Okay. And if I’d only said that much, I probably wouldn’t have caused anywhere near the ripples that I caused, because after telling you that, I said there were no hidden provisos. There were no hidden codicils. There were no unexpressed stipulations. I got into the china shop like a raging bull, and I broke a lot of glass.

But what I have said to you is just exactly what I mean. We are trying to get people to believe in Jesus to provide their eternal salvation. Now obviously, and this I hope emerged from the question session, there are two non-negotiables here.

Number one, no salvation anywhere for anybody apart from the name of Jesus. Now, by that, we’re talking about the Jesus of the New Testament, not Jesus Espinosa who lives in the barrio in Los Angeles. And we’re certainly not talking about Mr. X in whom we have believed, and, oh, we discover later that it’s Jesus. No, in this age, you have to believe in Jesus, the Jesus of the New Testament. That’s one non-negotiable.

The other non-negotiable is that you must believe that He guarantees eternal salvation, or that He gives everlasting life. Dr. Charles Ryrie used to say, “If you could lose everlasting life, it has the wrong name. It’s not everlasting.”

So the two non-negotiables are very simple. Number one, the Jesus of the New Testament must be the focus of a person’s faith, and the person is believing that the Jesus of the New Testament provides and guarantees his eternal destiny.

Today, I want to talk about the process of seeking a response of faith from those with whom we share our good news. Yesterday’s talk laid the groundwork for much of what we would like to say today. Now, today’s presentation is divided into some subsections.

So, subsection number one is, “Believe that Jesus died on the cross.” In recent years, I have become aware of a way of presenting the gospel invitation that kind of bothers me. I believe I have heard it from my earliest years, and I admit it really didn’t bother me for a long time. Now it does.

I have heard people say this: “In order to be saved, you must believe that Jesus died on the cross.” In the context of this discussion today, I mean that this is their summary of the requirement of faith. This is not just one item. Okay? You say, “How does a person get saved?” They say, “Believe that Jesus died on the cross.”

Whenever I hear that nowadays, I get extremely uncomfortable. For one thing, is there anyone in a Christian church, unless it is a radically liberal church, who doesn’t believe that Jesus died on the cross? For that matter, even some very liberal theologians would consider that a true statement. Although they might balk at the doctrine of resurrection, you can see why I feel uncomfortable.

Now, I know that the statement I’m evaluating leaves a lot of things unspoken that are implied, or at least usually implied, by the speaker. Most of the time, people who say, “You are saved by believing that Jesus died on the cross,” mean by that that He died for our sins. In fact, that’s often added: “You must believe that Jesus died on the cross for your sins.”

But even with that addition, there is still unspoken material that the person usually has in mind. They usually mean to say, for example, that this belief in Christ’s death is all that is necessary for salvation. The statement they make doesn’t quite say that, but that’s what they usually mean. Thus, they are normally proclaiming salvation by faith alone.

Also unspoken, but usually implied, is the idea that Christ’s work on the cross is sufficient to provide for our salvation. Thus, they mean to say that we are trusting in the sufficiency of His work of atonement. But the statement by itself doesn’t communicate that.

Let me be honest. I don’t like this way of doing a gospel invitation. The very first disadvantage of this kind of invitation to faith is that it cannot be found in the Bible. Just think for a minute of John 3:16, John 5:24, 6:47, Acts 16:31, and so on. Not one of these verses invites us to get saved by believing that Jesus died on the cross.

Why is it that we like to verbalize our message in ways the Bible does not do? What is wrong with biblical language? Whatever happened to Bible language? And the associated question is this: what is wrong with our language?

The simple fact of the matter is that the statement I am criticizing is technically incorrect. People are not saved by believing that Jesus died on the cross. They are saved by believing in Jesus for eternal life or eternal salvation. If we say it in the biblical way, we will be able to support our claim by direct biblical statements.

But suppose a person I am witnessing to says, “Where does the Bible say that we are saved by believing that Jesus died on the cross?” What am I going to do then? In that case, I would be compelled to take him to a number of Scriptures and try to combine them to prove my point. But even then, I would not really have a statement of the Word of God that was exactly in line with the point I was making.

I would like to see grace people abandon this form of invitation to faith. Let us always point men to Christ Himself as the object of faith rather than to some idea or concept that must be theologically clarified before it can really be understood.

Subsection two, which I call doing the two-step. Here is another technique that bothers me. Many good grace people employ what I would call a two-step approach to faith. First, they invite people to believe the basic facts of the gospel, and then they ask them to appropriate the truth for themselves.

In describing the second step, they often prefer the word trust to the word belief. I happen to think that people who take this approach to evangelism are at least sometimes running scared. They do not want to be accused of making faith mere intellectual assent. Thus, they try hard to make clear that just believing the facts doesn’t save us.

Appropriating those facts for ourselves, that is, trusting Christ for our own salvation, is the crucial issue according to them. This approach to things opens the door for the famous illustrations about the chair or the elevator or something similar.

Here is an elevator. They would say, “Do you believe that it can carry you to the top story of this building?” If the answer is yes, the next question is, “What do you need to do to get to the top story of this building?” The answer is supposed to be trust in the elevator by getting on.

Now, in the distant past, I used such illustrations myself, and I confess this fact with embarrassment. If I could wear sackcloth and ashes this morning for doing so, I would. Illustrations of the type I’m referring to do show considerable creativity. But I am afraid the creativity here is badly misused.

What is created is another idea that is absent from the Bible. Where in the New Testament do we find any such presentation as this? Sorry, friends, it just isn’t there. And if you heard yesterday’s talk, you will know one of the reasons that it is not there.

You see, as we noted yesterday, the facts surrounding the gospel message, such as the death and resurrection of Christ, are important facts for what they tell us about the reasons for trusting Christ. But believing these facts doesn’t save anybody. People are only saved when they believe that Jesus gives them eternal life the moment they believe in Him for that.

Let’s return for a moment to that deserted island in the Pacific Ocean that I invented for yesterday’s talk, and where apparently a lot of you were trapped. My hypothetical unsaved man has just read the words of Jesus in John 6:47:

Most assuredly I say to you, he who believes in Me has eternal life.

I, I hasten to add here, because somebody asked me this question, how does he know he’s believing in Jesus? Because the verse doesn’t say the name Jesus. That’s why I said he got a scrap of paper that included John 6:43-47. And he could read 43 that said Jesus said, and he read 47. So the name of Jesus is in this illustration, just to clarify that.

So he reads the words of Jesus in John 6:47:

Most assuredly I say to you, he who believes in Me has eternal life.

All this person needs to do is to believe that statement, and eternal life is his. There is no two-step process at all.

The issues involved in eternal salvation are significantly muddied by the two-step approach I am discussing. The two-step approach seems to imply that two acts of faith are essential to one’s salvation. The first of these is belief in the facts. The second is an act of personal trust.

So this approach ignores the instrumental value of the facts of the gospel in bringing men to faith in Christ, and it tends to elevate them to the level of a preliminary condition which must be followed by a second step, namely trust.

Please notice that the approaches I have objected to so far in this talk tend to blur the necessary focus on the person of Christ as the object of faith. In the case of “believe that Jesus died on the cross,” the focus is on an action He performed. Admittedly, an indispensable action.

In the two-step scenario, we approach Christ first by believing certain facts about Him. The simple truth is that Jesus can be directly believed for eternal salvation apart from any detailed knowledge of what He did to provide it. I’m not saying that happens often, but when it happens, it’s real.

In other words, the sufficiency of Christ is the true focus of the faith that brings salvation. Can I repeat that? That’s a core statement. In other words, the sufficiency of Christ is the true focus of the faith that brings salvation.

I am contending today that until we have that concept clearly in mind, we will be vulnerable to making appeals to faith that tend to cloud the issues rather than clarify them. If I didn’t think there was a danger here, I wouldn’t be talking to you this morning about it.

If anybody in the world should be able to present a crystal-clear gospel message and a clear appeal to faith, it ought to be grace people like ourselves. But in a lot of cases, we are not doing nearly as good a job as we should.

Subsection three, “Ask Jesus into your heart.” I’m not going to say much about the famous invitational phrase, “Invite Jesus into your heart,” because I suspect that most of the people in this audience would not be tempted to use this phrase in leading people to Christ. It has often been pointed out that this phrase is not biblical, and this fact is reason enough to leave it alone.

Of course, we could also note that a person who used it could have a lordship message in mind. He could mean that we are to invite the Lord in to take charge of our lives, and that’s sometimes what is, in fact, actually meant.

However, everybody on the alert here, we should remember that people have gotten saved this way too. If they are being told to believe in Christ for eternal life, and they are being told that Jesus comes in when they believe and gives it to them, they are being told the truth.

When I believe in Christ, He does come in, and He Himself is eternal life. 1 John 5:20. Thus, as 1 John 5:12 says,

He who has the Son has life.

But even after saying that, the unbiblical character of the phrase “invite Jesus into your heart” is too heavy a burden to bear.

Our own terminology is never better than the Bible’s. Never. Did you know that our own terminology is never, never, never better than the Bible’s? And if we think so, we’re kidding ourselves. And the chances are, we are also probably confusing people.

Subsection four, “Commit yourself to Christ.” Even less needs to be said about this phrase, it seems to me. “Commit yourself to Christ,” and all of the variant forms of that. Such a phrase could mean entrust your eternal destiny to Him, but it could mean a lot of other things too, including surrender of the life in the lordship salvation sense.

What’s the point of employing phrases that are not only unbiblical, but liable to misrepresentation and misunderstanding?

Subsection five: what about “trust Christ”? I know that many grace people like to invite the unsaved to trust Christ for eternal life. I really do not have a strong objection to this phrase, and occasionally I use it myself when I want to use a synonym for belief.

But mark it well, I never use the word trust as my exclusive or preeminent term for the faith that brings salvation. However, I do resist the idea that is sometimes advanced that trust is a better term than the word belief.

Of course, trust is often a synonym for faith in the English, uh, language. But often in the English language, trust has a diminished force that is equivalent to something like this: “I just have to hope he will do it.” In that kind of statement, the speaker is expressing a significant degree of uncertainty. This is not what we mean by faith.

I may even use the word trust of someone I don’t really trust. I may say, for example, “Jim asked me for $20 to pay off a bill, and I was afraid he might use the money for something else. But I said to myself, maybe he does want to pay a bill. So I gave him the 20 and decided that I would just have to trust him to do what he said. I hope he will.”

Not very much certainty there. Do you agree? But that’s an understandable, uh, sequence in English. Presumably, all of us recognize that this use of trust is perfectly acceptable and fairly common in English.

Of course, the word believe can be used that way too. I may say, “I believe he will come,” when I’m not really certain that he will. Usually, however, when we use the word this way, we signal our doubt by a tonal inflection. “I believe he will come.” If I said, “I believe he will come,” then you take me to be certain about it.

But it does seem to me, at least, that the word trust more easily expresses some lack of certainty, as when I say, “I trust he will come.” I think an element of doubt is indicated just by using the word trust in certain kinds of statements.

However, let me add a proviso. Uncertainty is very far from being the normal implication of the English word trust. In the American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, in the discussion of trust in relation to synonyms like faith, confidence, reliance, dependence, the statement is made that all these nouns reflect a feeling that a person or thing will not fail in performance.

Trust implies depth and assurance of such feeling, which may not always be supported by proof. So the note of complete confidence belongs to the word trust, just as it does also to faith and to the verb believe. So, in that sense, trust is an acceptable synonym for faith.

The fact remains, however, that no English translation that I’m aware of has opted to use trust as a replacement for believe in any significant number of contexts. If you know of a translation that does that—and there are some translations that do strange things, so there might be one out there somewhere—but no major translation that I know of does it.

It just so happens that believe works better where the text is specifying the content of belief. For example, 1 John 5:1:

Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.

It would sound strange in English to say, “Whoever trusts that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.”

The English word believe has the distinct advantage of working well in almost all of the salvation verses. Thus, the word trust is only helpful if we are looking for a synonym to assist the unsaved person to understand what it means to believe. But since our English Bibles use the word believe consistently and constantly, I think we are better off using the word people find in their Bibles.

To trust may be a synonym for to believe, but there are no real grounds for preferring it when we do evangelism. If, for some reason or other, we are afraid of the word believe—and there are some people who are afraid to use believe because they think it carries undesirable connotations—if, for some reason or other, we are afraid of the word believe, we ought to reexamine our fear and get past it.

And as I have already said, the use of trust to express the second part of a two-step process of believing has no foundation in Scripture. I would certainly urge that we firmly reject any alleged distinction between believing and trusting which is thought to favor the word trust over the word believe. That would amount, it seems to me, to a misuse of one or both of these words.

That leads to the sixth and final subsection, inviting people to believe. So now, let’s talk about leading a person to faith in Christ. In my discussion to this point today, I have been largely clearing away brushwood. I’ve been trying to point out that there are some mistakes that are made in inviting people to believe.

Now, let’s consider the issue from a positive standpoint. Let’s suppose I am talking to Ralph. It just so happens that the man who introduced me is named Ralph, but I’m not talking to him. He’s a saved man. Even if he thinks I’m going to miss the rapture, he’s still saved.

Let’s suppose I’ve been talking to Ralph, an unsaved young man. I have given him the gospel about the death and resurrection of Christ. I have emphasized the point that the Lord Jesus, by His death on the cross, has completely satisfied God in regard to Ralph’s sins.

Christ has paid for all the sins Ralph would ever commit, from the day of his birth to the day of his death. Thus, Jesus has purchased Ralph’s way to heaven. When I’m talking to an individual, I always go through that. Okay.

The one thing Ralph needs now is eternal life. People who don’t have this go to hell, according to Revelation 20:15. Without new birth, we are unable to enter the kingdom of God despite Jesus’ death for our sins, John 3:3. And the alternative to eternal life is to perish, John 3:16.

However, I tell Ralph, eternal life is available on one condition alone, and that condition is faith in Jesus. I now turn to verses like John 3:16, 5:24, 6:47, and very especially John 6:35-40, one of my favorite passages for evangelistic purposes.

I spend time on these verses, but I particularly want to focus the individual, if possible, on John 6:35-40. Let me now give my presentation to Ralph in the first person. I’m going to speak as follows to him.

Ralph, notice how Jesus stresses the fact that believing in Him has permanent results. In verse 35, He insists that the person who comes to Him for the bread of life will never get hungry for that bread again. The person who believes in Him will never be thirsty for the water of life.

He that cometh to Me shall never hunger. He that believes in Me shall never thirst.

Let me put it this way to you, Ralph. If a person could lose the bread or water of life after coming to Jesus for it, he would be hungry or thirsty again, wouldn’t he? But notice Jesus says that can’t happen. He says the same thing in a different way in verse 37. There He says that if a person comes to Him, He will never throw him out.

Look also at verses 38-39. Here Jesus says that He came down from heaven to do His Father’s will. And His Father’s will is that Jesus should lose none of those that the Father’s given to Him, and that He should raise them all up at the last day.

And then I say to Ralph, and then notice how He repeats this idea in verse 40. Everyone who believes in Him gets eternal life and will be raised up at the last day. Notice, Ralph, that it all depends on Jesus doing God’s will, not on us doing God’s will.

If I believe in Jesus for eternal life, I get it, and He does the rest. He does God’s will. So He will never throw me out. He will raise me up at the last day. I will never again hunger for the bread of life, and I will never thirst for the water of life.

Do you think you understand this, Ralph? Hopefully, Ralph says he does. If he says he doesn’t, I will ask him, “Well, what seems to puzzle you, Ralph?”

Now, my experience in working with unsaved people tells me that at this point in the presentation, I will often get a question like this: “Oh, do you mean that if I believe in Jesus for eternal life, that I can go out and do anything I want and still go to heaven?”

I want you to know I’m delighted when I get that question because it indicates to me that I have gotten it over, that this is a gift and that it is not withdrawn from us even if we behave badly.

My usual way of responding to that question is that being born again is like being born into a family. We are always members of that family, even if we are scoundrels. But if we have good parents, they’re not going to let us run wild. They will discipline and correct us and do their best to get us on the right path.

Then I point out that after we get eternal life, God is our heavenly Father, and He is the best parent we could imagine. He will not let us run wild. He will spank us if need be, and may even take our physical lives away. But Jesus will never cast us out of the family.

I’ve used this explanation over and over, and I’m here to tell you that, so far as my personal experience goes, I have not ever found anyone for whom it was not an adequate answer. Especially parents, they understand this. My kid is my kid, good, bad, or indifferent, from the day of his or her birth.

No matter what they do, even if they go down to the courthouse—and sometimes I actually elaborate this a little bit—even if they go down to the courthouse and change their name. If I had a little Zane Hodges Jr., and he says, “I don’t want to be the son of a rabbi who’s going to miss the rapture.”

So, so he goes down to the courthouse and changes his name to, you know, Zane Wilkin. He isn’t Wilkin’s son. He’s still my son. We all recognize that. Uh, the relationship we have to our parents when we’re born in our family is a permanent relationship. You can’t go back and undo it.

You can leave home, you can run away, you can resist, you can rebel, you can do all these things. But good parents step in appropriately at the appropriate moments, and God is a very, very good parent. So people usually find that a satisfactory answer.

So if I have successfully answered Ralph’s questions, and he tells me he understands what I’ve been saying to him, I can get down to the bottom line. Here is one approach that I feel comfortable about.

Okay, Ralph, you say it’s all clear to you. And maybe as we talked, you not only understood Jesus’ promise, but you also believed it. If you have believed, then you now have eternal life.

Do you remember how we went over John 5:24? Well, if you have heard Jesus’ word and believed it, that verse says that you have eternal life, that you will never come into the judgment before God to decide your eternal destiny, that you’ve already passed from death to life.

At this point, of course, I can ask him directly if he does believe. It depends on the situation whether I will ask that or not, or let him volunteer it. If he says yes, I can also ask, “Then do you know for sure that you have eternal life and will be with the Lord Jesus forever?”

If he also responds affirmatively to this and gives me no reason to doubt his veracity, I can and should regard him as saved.

At one of the conferences we had, I told the story about the young Hispanic man that I was witnessing to. And I said to him, after going through this process, I said, “Now, I don’t want you to tell me anything right now. It may be that you have believed while we were talking.”

Uh, and if you have, uh, your girlfriend—he was, uh, hoping to marry a young lady from our church—you should tell your girlfriend. I’d like to know about it too, uh, after you tell her. And I said, “It may be that you’ll believe somewhere down the road, and if that happens, uh, why then just go ahead and tell her and, and tell me.”

And I said, “But you don’t need to say anything right now.” He violated my instructions radically. He said, “Zane,” he says, “I do believe. I know I have the gift of eternal life. I’ll be with you in heaven.” The evangelistic process was over at that point. After that, it’s all discipleship.

Notice, please, that I do not ask the person to pray, or to make a decision for Christ, or to do any of the many other things that people often ask unsaved people to do. All I have done is ask if he has understood the truth we have discussed, and I have asked if he believes it.

I absolutely insist that this is all the personal worker needs to do. I am encouraging the unsaved person to believe, but I can’t make him do that. If he does believe, a prayer is unnecessary. If he doesn’t, a prayer will be confusing, since I may direct him to say things that he doesn’t yet understand or doesn’t yet believe because God has not yet opened his heart.

I should know about this problem. You see, when I was a little boy, I went forward at an evangelistic meeting, and I said a prayer before I really understood what I was doing. Actually, I was saved years later. But that prayer confused me because I spent years wondering if I got saved when I prayed it.

I don’t think I could actually say that I believed the prayer saved me. But I had gone through the process that the pastor had given me. And so I wondered if, you know, maybe it worked.

The pastor even thought I had. He thought I’d gotten saved because he came to visit my mother and told her. So that was news to her because I hadn’t told her, and it was kind of news to me because I wasn’t sure about it.

I can remember listening to him talk to her in the other—I wasn’t in the room with them, but I could hear the conversation—and he informed her that I was saved, which, however, was not correct.

I now realize that no one is saved by praying a prayer. They are saved when they understand God’s offer of eternal life through Jesus and believe it. That’s when people are saved, and that’s the only time when people are saved.

All of the excess baggage that we bring into our encounter with unsaved sinners is just that, excess baggage. In this brief make-believe encounter with Ralph, I tried to give him something to believe about Jesus Christ. I wanted him to realize that you could believe Jesus’ promises about eternal life, that when you did, you were saved forever. That’s all I basically wanted.

Everything I might have included in my presentation, and as I’ve suggested, I, I would include a great deal, everything I might have included in my presentation leading up to the issue of faith was designed to prepare the way for that faith.

I work on the conviction that if a person understands God’s provision for salvation through the cross of Christ, that will be easier for him or her to believe in Jesus for eternal life. But the bottom line is this: I want people to know that the moment they believe in Christ for this free gift, they are saved and saved forever.

Let me add one final word. I find this a most liberating approach to evangelism. I have done my part if I have presented the message clearly. But faith in the heart is the work of God’s Spirit, not a function of my technique and not a function of my evangelistic dynamism.

The simple Word of God responded to in simple faith. That’s what leading people to Christ is all about.

Questions? Let me grab a glass of water before you, Steve.

I’m walking the aisle.

I didn’t ask you to. Go ahead, Steve.

Wouldn’t you also say that when a person believes, it’s not a volitional act? It’s not that they can decide to believe something. They, if they’re 99% certain of something, they have not believed it.

So they can’t make a decision to believe. And so when we use that nomenclature, we kind of confuse the issue, as if, you know, the chair, I, I believe the chair will hold me, but I’m not certain. Well, therefore, then they really don’t believe.

But it’s not a volitional act, that they decide to believe something of which they don’t really hold to.

I agree with that 100%. I cannot decide to believe something that I’m not sure is true.

Correct.

And I’ve often used the illustration, if somebody told me Bob Wilkin is the biggest crook in Dallas, I can’t decide to believe that because I don’t think that’s true. There are bigger crooks.

Ralph, here’s Ralph. Here’s the real Ralph.

I know that, um, you’re right that assurance is the essence of, uh, of sal—you know, saving faith.

Saving faith.

Um, you quoted a verse in 1 John, um, that, uh, “Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Son of God—is the Christ, is the Christ—uh-huh, uh, hath everlasting life.” Okay. Is that—is everlasting life a result of believing that Jesus is the Christ?

If you would get that one verse on that island, um, I, I have a problem with that verse, uh, understanding it. And is, is everlasting life a result of believing that Jesus is the Christ?

Yeah.

Okay. Um, well, what if a person, because I had this problem one time in my life. I believe that Jesus is the Son of God. I believe He’s the only begotten. I believe all of that. But I was having trouble with assurance.

I believe that Jesus, you know, I believe that verse. But if that’s a result of believing that, where does assurance come in there? If you got that only, that verse is the only thing you got. Well, I’m assured that Jesus is the Son of, you know, is the Christ. Okay. I’m assured of that.

But the other part of it, the results of it, where I’m having a problem with assurance, that—what about—how you, how do you explain that?

Okay. My answer to that has always been that when John says that to believe that Jesus is the Christ, we must believe that He is the Christ in the sense in which John means that.

So then we must ask the question, what does John mean by the term Christ? And the easiest place to go for the answer to that is John 11:25 and 26.

You know, Jesus saying to Martha,

I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in Me, though he die, yet shall he live. Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?

And her answer is a Johannine confession:

Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God that should come into the world.

That’s John’s way of telling us that to believe that He is the Christ means to believe that He is the One who guarantees resurrection and eternal life to everyone who believes in Him.

Now, if I walk out on the street and say, “Do you believe that Jesus is the Christ?” almost everybody’s going to tell me yes, because that’s, that’s become a personal name. And so the key here is to understand the term Christ in the Johannine sense of the word.

To believe that He is the Christ is to believe that He is the One who guarantees salvation. And therefore, to believe that He is the Christ brings assurance.

Okay. Thank you, Ralph. Uh, Joseph, go ahead.

Um, well, some verses that talk about salvation by faith, uh, center on the result of eternal life, and others, um, kind of focus more on the result of justification. And what if someone was on a desert island and all they got was Romans 5:1?

Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

And it doesn’t say eternal life in that verse, but, of course, that’s the result of justification.

And let’s say they understood that, you know, justification was God declaring them righteous, and they believed in Christ for that. Could they be saved that way also?

Yes.

Thank you.

Oh, we’ve got guys over there. Uh, okay. Let me go this back and forth. You mind? Go ahead, Bob.

Uh, Bob—Zane, I might have missed, uh, your talk with Ralph. Did you, did you start with John 6? You, I didn’t hear you say anything before you started talking to him about John 6. Were you jumping into the middle of your discussion with him?

Yes, I was moving to my appeal section, uh, because that’s what this discussion is about. But I did mention in the presentation that I had gone over the matter of the, the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, the fact that Christ died for all of Ralph’s sins from the day Ralph was born to the day he died.

In other words, I, I set my appeal in the context of the work of the cross.

So if you, in talking to Ralph, you would have already explained death, burial, and resurrection for, for our sins?

Yes.

All right.

Yes.

And do you have—could you comment on, um, a passage or a way that you explain that part of it?

Well, you could, of course, uh, use, um, 1 Corinthians 15 for this. Uh, you could use, uh, 2 Corinthians 5. Uh, you could use Romans 3, uh, if you needed to do this.

Uh, but, you know, since my presentation this morning was how do I elicit, uh, faith from him, I, I, I passed over this part lightly, which would have been a very substantial part of the conversation up front.

I, I may want to know, for example, before I start with Ralph, where he’s coming from religiously. And very often I will start a conversation, “What do you think it takes, uh, to get to heaven?” or something like that.

And then I get them to articulate, and then I will give them the biblical alternative, starting with the provision that God has made for it.

What weight would you put on the Gospel of John, using the Gospel of John, not 1 Corinthians, since John was written to tell us how to have eternal life? The preliminary part about explaining about the death, burial, and resurrection for our sins. Would, would you have a comment about the importance of using John in that explanation?

Well, I could use only John. Uh, you know, “Behold the Lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world.” Uh, my exposition of that passage would be informed by other Scriptures, but I could start with John at that point.

Okay. Over here, on the subject of, uh, of synonyms and defining faith. Um, first, uh, Titus, Titus 1:1 and 2, uh,

the faith of God’s elect, the acknowledgment of the truth, and the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began.

Is, is that a description of faith that saves? Is that—are those a series of three synonyms? The faith of God’s elect, the acknowledgment of the truth, and the hope of eternal life, understanding hope to be assurance rather than, uh, pie-in-the-sky type of thing?

I think I would be inclined to say that that certainly covers what is essential to faith, but that more is implied in that than just the, the, uh, basic facts of the gospel.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, particularly that second phrase. Read the, read the, uh, “the acknowledgment of the truth.”

The sentence continues,

which accords with godliness.

Yeah. So all of that, uh, this is, of course, an epistle, uh, written to Titus, which, uh, Paul, I think, presumes will be read to the, the larger audience. And he wants to relate their fundamental faith to the appropriate lifestyle, which is—so this is the, the truth that is according to the godly lifestyle that he is enjoining.

But I think obviously contained within these statements are what we would call, uh, core gospel, uh, convictions.

Thank you. And over here, um, we’re told several, several ways that, um, you know, eternal life is indeed eternal. Um, one of them being, um, that we can’t be snatched out of His hand.

And, um, we’re told that He’ll lose none. But in talking to, uh, several different, uh, lordship salvation people, they want to hold to the free grace issue, um, you know, that you make the decision either to believe or to not believe. That’s all your decision.

And then that there’s nothing in the Bible that says that you can’t decide to walk away from it. And then you point them to, well, you can’t be snatched and He’ll lose not one. He’s instructed not to lose any.

And they say, well, He’s not losing them. They’re choosing to walk away. So what foothold do you take on that?

I would say, uh, you’re treating this with sophistry. Uh, if you admit the person is saved up front and then, uh, ceases to be saved, you’re really contradicting what Jesus said.

But what most Reformed people believe is that, uh, if, if the proper conditions are not met up front or not met down the line, the person wasn’t saved in the first place. So nobody is really lost from that point of view. But it depends on the theology of the, the individual you’re dealing with.

I think if they really believe that, uh, that you can be eternally saved and then, uh, lost, then it seems to me that’s a flat contradiction, uh, of the John 6 passage. No matter how they try to dance around it, uh, they are contradicting what Jesus said.

John.

Yes.

Zane, I’d like for you to address a little further the concept of the passive nature of faith and the concept that it’s not decisional. One of the things that we teach at seminary is, with regard to Acts 28:24, the response to the last sermon that Paul delivered in Acts being a practical definition, or synonyms for faith are being given there.

The, uh, response was that,

And some were persuaded by the things which were spoken, but some disbelieved.

And so we have, on one hand, some people being persuaded, a passive concept. The alternative is expressed as some others disbelieved, and we use that in order to illustrate that faith is passive. It is not something that we decide to do.

Yes. Okay. Thank you, John. I think that’s an important consideration. This may be the last one I’ll be able to, to answer.

But basically, as I was using Bob Wilkin as an illustration, I cannot believe that he’ll—he’s the biggest crook in Dallas until I’m persuaded that he is. And, uh, if nobody is capable of persuading me, uh, then I will never be able to believe he’s the biggest crook in Dallas.

But let’s suppose that the FBI and the DEA and all of these people come to me on the side, and they present all sorts of proof. And I may be very reluctant to accept their proof, but I have no way of challenging it. And so at that point, I’m persuaded that, uh, what they are alleging is true.

Now, that’s not an act of the will because a persuasion is different than an act of the will. And, uh, we have, I think, uh, muddied the gospel waters considerably by telling people they can decide to believe. Nobody can decide to believe. They can be persuaded.

And therefore, that leaves a very significant area in which the Holy Spirit must operate.

God who commanded light to shine out of darkness has shined into our heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

God, in the final analysis, must persuade the heart. And therefore, uh, until a person has, uh, the divine illumination that, uh, amounts to persuasion, uh, they will remain an unbeliever, and they can’t decide, uh, differently.

Now, that’s not the same as saying that man does not have the capacity to believe. He does, but he does not have the capacity to believe the gospel without the assistance and ministry of the Holy Spirit.

I think we need to keep that balance. Otherwise, we will think, if I have led this person through the proper routine or the proper prayer or whatever technique I use, that that does it. Uh, if he has decided to do what I told him to do, then that does it.

No, a man is not saved until he is persuaded that the gospel message is true.