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But it is not as though the word of God has failed.

Romans 9:6

When we see a Christian brother or sister in spiritual failure, does this mean that God has failed?

The doctrine of grace creates many questions. If God forgives freely, then why try to do the right thing? If God loves sinners, then why not just sin all the more so that God will love us even more?

These questions are addressed in the first eight chapters of Romans and the inspired concepts of Paul explain to us that to sin and to be unrighteous is not true freedom or true life, rather it is death. The grace gifts of God are life and peace. We may not gain forgiveness through our works, and we cannot gain life through our disobedience, but we may gain both of these through Christ and through His Spirit, which we receive through faith. It is the old man, the old sin nature, that rejoices in sin. It is the new man, the new person created by the Spirit of God that delights in obedience and in the life in the Spirit.

But another question relates to the nation of Israel: Did their spiritual failure mean that God had failed? At the heart of the answer is the nature of the Old Covenant, or Old Testament, and what this means for the New Covenant of grace we have in Christ? Since salvation is by grace through faith, and not by works, where is the dividing line between what we do and what God does? Where is our responsibility and where is His and how are they divided?

Paul responded that those who do not believe are marginalized by God - and this is true whether we speak of saving faith or day-to-day faith as we seek to live obediently to God. God looks for faith in our hearts, simple trust in God and obedience to His word and His Spirit. Those who lack saving faith are blotted out of His Book of Life, and cannot expect to spend eternity with God. Those believers in Christ who lack obedient faith to live for Christ, and not for themselves, are also marginalized from what God is doing.

But then in the end, does this mean that in a round about way that God had actually failed, since the object of His word to bring faith and transformation was not achieved? The answer is that God’s word brings clarity and His Spirit brings conviction, yet there is still the responsibility to believe and obey. Isaiah 55:11 avers: “My word that comes from My mouth will not return to Me empty, but will accomplish what I please, and will prosper in what I send it [to do].” The word of God embraced in faith results in salvation; the word rejected still achieves its purpose of judgment against the unbeliever.

A law on the books of society’s legal rules does not fail when a criminal disobeys it. And a sign on a life vest in a sinking ship has not failed if someone fails to heed the warning and take the means provided for his salvation. The word of God teaches both the standards of God’s righteousness and His rules for life that we should obey, and it presents the means whereby we may receive His grace and forgiveness in Christ.

This is why so many times in the Scripture we read of encouragements and urgings to respond to the word of God and the witness of His Spirit immediately. God has given us some responsibility to obey and though we will probably not be able to sort out in our theology exactly where that line between His election and our faith is - salvation always retains a great mystery of the way that God deals with us - He does hold us accountable to our faith or lack of it.

So today is the day of God’s witness to us and our time to respond. If we respond with faith and obedience, we are in the center of what God is doing in the world. God’s word never fails.

Doctrinal Studies election, faith, salvation

The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

1Timothy 1:14

One cannot read the Apostle Paul very much without gaining the distinct impression of his intelligence. He is always thinking, pondering circumstances, reflecting on how to put it down in writing, and as the Spirit inspired him, we can find layer after layer of his thoughts in his writings. There is no inappropriate manipulation by him; he does not play on our sympathies or try to outwit us. Quite the opposite: there is a simple straightforwardness in his style. Yet in afterthought we can see something profound was in his mind that we may not catch at first glance, and here is a case in point.

He has written about sincerity of faith to Timothy and in the following verses he demonstrates it, but he does so appropriately. He demonstrates it not by boasting about himself but rather by revealing his need of grace and his faith in Christ. Christ gets the headline, not Paul. He admits his former blasphemy and persecution of the church - describing himself as a violent man. The only positive admission about himself was that his was unbelief in ignorance, at least partially so, out of the bias against the new Christian faith based on his Judaism.

Mercy came to him and it is the mercy that he magnified, not himself. In God’s mercy Saul the Pharisee, the chief persecutor of the church, found the truth of the gospel he sought to destroy. He embraced the gospel and the Person of Christ, and embraced them fully. The center was the Person of Christ, and secondary was the gospel itself. This is also true for each of us that the center of our confession and our experience is always Christ Himself, not first or foremost the gospel of Christ. It was the “grace of our Lord” that is poured out on us, not the grace of the gospel.

The character of all heresy is that it diminishes the person of Christ in some manner or another, the Christian message is distorted and the first distortion is to move it away from Him and toward a set of concepts and ideas. Once we leave the Person of Christ, once He is forsaken and separated from Christianity, it appears to be relatively easy to inject false ideas and teachings contrary to the clear teaching of Scripture.

Christ is the central Person and focal point of the Christian faith and of our day to day living. We do not merely follow dictates and ideas. We follow Him. We commune with Him. We worship Him. He is the center of it all. The faithful saying that Paul follows the verse above with has echoed down through the centuries: “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am the worst.” Of this John Calvin wrote:

In the doctrine of religion, indeed, the main point is, to come to Christ, that, being lost in ourselves, we may obtain salvation from him. Let this preface be to our ears like the sound of a trumpet to proclaim the praises of the grace of Christ, in order that we may believe it with a stronger faith. Let it be to us as a seal to impress on our hearts a firm belief of the forgiveness of sins, which otherwise with difficulty finds entrance into the hearts of men.

Let all of us establish for ourselves here and now that the Christian life is about Christ, not about us. Only as our lives may reflect Him and His grace are we of true and eternal value. He is searching for those people who grasp this truth and who, like Paul, are willing to let Him be the main part of our stories.

Doctrinal Studies, Evening Devotionals, The Core centrality of Christ