Tag: Gospel

Categories
Uncategorized

The Called, Equipped

Normally when I write articles for Adopted Believers, I like to have three key points with two or three supporting points below. It is a method that I find helpful for me as I write and you as you read. However, I am going to do something a little bit different today. Today I am simply going to tell a story, a story of God’s faithfulness to me when I obeyed Him. I have decided to call this story “The Called, Equipped” to borrow from the saying “God doesn’t call the equipped—He equips the called.” That is really my story today in one sentence. But lest I bore you with endless rambling, let me tell you what God did for me.

I was recently having a conversation with someone I had just met. We’ll call this individual Sonny. Sonny and I were getting to know each other, and we were telling each other about what we wanted to be when we grew up. He told me his future plans with great enthusiasm, so I knew I had to tell mine back. Before I met Sonny, I had known that God expected me to use the place that I was at to spread the gospel, so I was more mindful for opportunities to share. This seemed like a good opportunity to talk about my faith.

When it came time to talk about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told Sonny that I wanted to be a pastor when I grew up. I then told him why I wanted to be a pastor, and that is because Jesus saved me from my sins when I was six and now I want to use my gifts to glorify Him. After that we went about our own business.

Around thirty minutes later, Sonny comes up to me and asks if in a little while we could talk about some religious questions. This is when I knew that God was at work. By all human accounts, my testimony is pretty boring. But Sonny had some questions! That’s when I knew I needed continued help form God, so I prayed to him for the words to say. I answered a few of his questions before we sat down and talked, so I got a pretty good sense of where he was at. He was someone who grew up in a Christian home but had some questions about Christianity, points that he just couldn’t wrap his head around.

When the time came for us to sit down and talk about his questions in detail, I was pretty ready. I’ve been a believer for ten years, and it also helps that as a young believer I have lots of time to read! That’s a luxury that likely won’t last too long. But that’s beside the point. My friend Sonny asked me some questions about Christianity, and I was able to answer most of them by the grace of God. God’s grace didn’t end there though.

As we were talking, two other guys happened to be sitting around while we were talking. These guys were complete strangers, but it just so happened that they were believers too! These two men prayed with us, and helped answer a lot of Sonny’s questions in a gracious, patient way. My friend Sonny was, and is, looking for truth. My hope and prayer is that he finds it in Christ—the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Whether or not God chooses to water the seeds is beyond my understanding. But what I do know is that God told me to plant, and when I trusted Him, He equipped me to plant. Is there an are in your life where God has told you to do something and you haven’t obeyed yet? If there is, my encouragement to you is to remember that God will always strengthen you to do what He commands you to, if you trust Him. God doesn’t call the equipped—He equips the called.

Categories
Articles

An Apostolic Faith

“To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ”

2 Peter 1:1

Simon Peter was one of the most powerful men in the history of the world. While he never gained power through politics or huge sums of wealth, he was indwelled by the Holy Spirit like few others have been. By all human accounts, Peter had the right to boast in his position. Peter has the honor of giving the first gospel sermon at Pentecost. That’s pretty special! He also was one of the most important leaders in the earliest days of the Christian church. Yet look at what Peter says to believers he’s writing to in a letter: “to those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours.” Peter is saying here that these believers have faith that is of equal standing, or more accurately to the Greek text, a faith that is equal in honor, to his own faith. That’s incredible! Let’s look at this more closely.

Believers have faith that is equal in honor to Peter’s own faith.

What Is Apostolic Faith?

First, we need to realize that the faith that Peter had and all true believers have is built on the gospel as revealed in the Bible. The first aspect of this faith is sin. Sin is what separates us with God, and it all started in the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve directly disobeyed God’s command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. At the heart of their sin, and the heart of all sin, was an attempt to find satisfaction in anything apart from God. Because of Adam’s sin, everyone who is ever born is a sinner from the moment they are conceived. David attests to this: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” (Psalm 51:5) From the moment we are conceived, we are naturally opposed to God and at odds against Him. Thus, we rightly deserve the wrath of God, because we looked to sources apart from Him for salvation.

Next, the faith of Peter entailed a Savior. Because of our sin, we deserve hell. The only way that we can have our infinite debt paid for is with the sacrifice of something infinite. This is where Jesus, the Son of God, comes in. Jesus took on humanity, becoming fully man as well as retaining His fully divine nature. Because He was a man as well as God, He could die for the sins of all who’d believe in Him when He went to the cross, making the sacrifice applicable to man (human-nature) and infinite in payment (divine-nature).

Finally, Peter believed in salvation. While the death of the Son of God is infinitely valuable and able to pay for everyone’s sins, it will only be applied to those who have faith in Jesus. To have salvation, man must repent from his sins and have faith in Jesus’ payment for sins (Acts 20:21). When we have faith in Jesus, the Holy Spirit comes inside of us and makes Himself evident (see Galatians 5). This salvation brings eternal life, where we will constantly be worshipping Jesus, growing in joy every day forever because we take in more and more of Jesus. This is what apostolic faith looks like.

The Humbling Nature of the Global Church

Next, we need to see the humbling nature of the global church, that is, all believers. The first thing that this global church implies is that there is only one kind of faith, with not varying levels of honorable faiths. There are no “super-saints.” No, that’s not to say that there aren’t believers who submit to Christ more than others, however there is only one type of faith, that apostolic faith that we looked at. This apostolic faith is the faith that was preached by Jesus and carried on by the apostles. This apostolic faith is believed in by the millionaire in Beverly Hills who uses her talents and wealth for the kingdom with generosity as well as the serial killer who’s given his life to Christ in prison.

The apostolic faith is the faith that was preached by Jesus and carried on by the apostles.

Next, we need to see how this one way to heaven, walked on by the rich and the poor, is encouragement to the weak. While Darwin may have gotten a lot wrong, his survival of the fittest principle seems to show itself in society. All throughout human history, those with wealth and power get it good and those without simply exist as the have-nots. However, with Christ there is life, if only we repent of our sins and believe in His work on the cross for us. No one is too much for Jesus to pay for.

On the other hand, this one way to heaven is humility for the proud. Sometimes those who have been believers for a few years grow the tendency to look down on others. We may think that we have a superior faith, while they have the B-level faith. This is simply not true, and one of the greatest saints in history, Peter, patently denies this. This ought to bring humility and point us to the grace of the Almighty God who is the source of our life.

The Source of Apostolic Faith

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the source of this apostolic faith. While we have alluded to this earlier, it is helpful to look at this again. First, we need to realize that we receive faith. This means that we do not generate it. Often in American culture, we feel the temptation to think that we were the ones who earned our salvation because we believed. In reality, we would have never believed in Jesus had we not been given regeneration by the Holy Spirit. We are dead in our sins, unable to move. Dead people don’t accomplish much. Rather, all credit belongs to God, who is the source of our salvation.

And the last observation from 2 Peter 1:1 is that our apostolic faith is founded upon the righteousness of the God-Man. If Jesus had not been a pure sacrifice, we as believers would still be dead in our sins. Jesus, however, was faultless. When He was crucified, God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21) This apostolic faith is built on the righteous Son of God.

So how has this apostolic faith changed you? Do you view other brothers and sisters in Christ as having a faith that is equal in honor as yours? Will this faith encourage you to realize that strength doesn’t come from you, rather from God? And will you be humbled and amazed by the grace of God to save the high and the low in this world?

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. May not copy or download more than 500 consecutive verses of the ESV Bible or more than one half of any book of the ESV Bible.

Categories
Articles

A Diagnosis and Prognosis of Our Condition

Built on the Bible

“All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, the flower falls.”

1 Peter 1:24

Often, when looking at the Bible and the gospel, we have a tendency to skip to the “good part,” where we see Jesus save us and we spend eternity in heaven. Obviously, that is in fact a very good thing. I know I enjoy being saved by Jesus and being assured of heaven with Him forever! However, when salvation is where we start, we have a limited gospel, and we fail to show others exactly why they need to be saved in the first place.

Depravity from the Start

To see why we need a Savior, we don’t have to look for long in the Bible. Frankly, all we have to do is open Genesis and read the first three chapters. In Genesis 1-2, we see God create a “very good” (Gen. 1:31) world. The world that God created had no sin at all. There was no pain, no death, no sickness, and no COVID-19! There was simple very good creation. God put man on this earth, but unlike the rest of creation, He created man “in his own image.” (Gen. 1:27)

Salvation is only necessary and valuable if there is something that we are saved from.

God commanded man to take care of His world. He told man to reproduce. There was also one additional command: “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Gen. 2:17) Here we are introduced to God’s moral law. We see God’s system of justice: sin against God demands death.

Obviously, people die today. Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree, and incurred on themselves and their children the wrath of God. Because of their sin, God requires a sacrifice to pay for their sins. Someone must die.

Countercultural Today

In today’s post-modern society, this truth his hard to swallow. Frankly, objective truth in general is hard to swallow. So often we see people believe that they can make their own rules, their own morality. What they think is right for them is right, and what they think is wrong for themselves is wrong. This post-modern ideology is deeply entrenched against the gospel however.

As we have seen, God makes the rules. God told Adam and Eve what was right and what was wrong. In the Bible, we see God show us even more of His moral law, how we are to live in ways that please Him and help us enjoy a relationship with Him. God expects us to align our ways with His, not the other way around. So often though our society wants to reverse those.

Salvation Rightly Viewed

So going back to our passage today, why do we need to start with death? Because we won’t appreciate God rightly if we don’t understand our limitations. We simply can’t live forever. Not only are we mortal, but we are accountable to a just God too for a lifetime of sins. No matter how much good we do, we still face an eternal sentence to hell on our own.

Now that we understand our depravity, our condition of being dead in sin and accountable to God for all our it, we can rightly understand salvation. Salvation is only necessary and valuable if there is something that we are saved from. When we understand what Jesus saved us from, we can worship Him more fully.

For believers, I implore you today to mediate and reflect on what God has done for you in Jesus. Jesus doesn’t just tell you what to do and get all the credit for it. He took away your infinite sins! Because of his sacrifice, you can have eternal life! Instead of being like the grass and fading away forever, you are promised a resurrected body and glorification with Jesus! If you don’t know Jesus, I beg of you, don’t reject Christ’s offer of salvation. He wants to have a relationship with you, but He can only do so as your Savior. Confess that you are a sinner, and believe in this glorious gospel that Jesus is the Son of God who died for you!

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. May not copy or download more than 500 consecutive verses of the ESV Bible or more than one half of any book of the ESV Bible.