What does it involve?
Saving faith—that is faith that brings and is the proof of life with God in and through Jesus Christ—is a personal commitment of faith and without it even Jesus said the unbeliever is lost (see Mark 16:16 and John 8:24—passages addressed to those who have heard the gospel). It is more than believing that Jesus is or can do this or that; it is committing ourselves to him because we believe truths about him. Biblical faith is central to the entire human response to the gospel and too rich to be exhaustively understood.
And it’s no news that our grasp of the gospel—in our life’s response and reflection—will always be deepening and that some of us are well ahead of the rest of us in that understanding. This is no cause for guilt feelings unless they reflect our indifference and it’s certainly no cause for alarm. 2 Peter 1:5-11, Philippians 1:6 and 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24 together would come in at this point.
To believe in Jesus means that we believe Jesus Christ can and does forgive sins.
It means we believe he can do more than condemn and denounce them, that he can do more than uncover, describe, define and avoid them; he can do more than rejoice against them, more than encourage people against them; he can do more than rebuke and describe them—he can forgive them, he can wipe them away and wash us clean of them.
Jesus forgives not only little sins but big sins; he forgives not only new sins but old sins, not only occasional sins but habitual sins, deeply entrenched sins; sins that we hate and sins that we take pleasure in despite our hate of them, sins that we’re ashamed of and long for freedom from and sins that we mentally re-visit because we miss them. All these and more Jesus not only can but does forgive! To believe in Jesus is to believe that!
To believe in Jesus is to believe that first and foremost his joy in living is to glorify his Holy Father.
To believe in Jesus is to believe that as soon as he opened his eyes in the morning he rejoiced at being God’s Son and went about his daily life conscious of that relationship and making choices in light of it.
To believe in Jesus is to believe that he saw the moral chaos of this world as the alienation of the human family from his Holy Father and that one of the streams that fed the alienation is that the world does not know the Holy Father. To believe in Jesus means that we believe it broke his heart to see and hear his Holy Father maligned, misrepresented and misunderstood.
To believe in Jesus is to believe that the oppression, unrighteousness, immorality and cruelty in the world grieved him not only because it grieved his Holy Father but also because it was the ruin of the human family which the Holy Father loved. It’s to believe that our sin grieved and pained Jesus as well as offending his pure heart.
To believe in Jesus is to believe that he has accepted the will of the Holy Father that he was to set himself against sin to destroy and obliterate it. It means we embrace his agenda and methods because we can’t truly believe in Jesus and at the same time knowingly and impenitently reject his agenda and methods. We can’t have him as our Saviour and definitively reject him as our Lord.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.