Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my thirty sixth episode. Tonight I want to talk to you about God’s work of salvation. I’ll be honest with you, I struggled for about a month with the concept of salvation and I finally worked out some ideas I believe to be true. So that’s what I’m going to share with you tonight. But first, what do I mean when I say salvation? Salvation is simply the work that God does to redeem you and grant you access to heaven when you die. Salvation is to be saved.
The entire Bible is crystal clear in pointing to the fact that the only way to the Father is through Jesus Christ. Jesus, the Son of the triune God, came to earth as a man so that he could bear the sins of all human beings past, present, and future. His death provided atonement, which means it made guilty people innocent in the sight of the Father. Something you need to know is that human beings are born sinful. You don’t have to teach a child to bite, steal, lie, and do other sinful things. When discussing the perfect standard of God, Jesus tells us that if we’ve ever sinned in the least of ways, we are also guilty of sinning in the worst of ways. The perfection of God puts us into a situation where nothing we can ever do will make us righteous enough to be in His presence. You might be thinking: isn’t it kind of unfair that we are born sinful and commanded to a level of righteousness that God already knows we can’t satisfy? And you’re right, it is unfair. That’s why God Himself came to earth to die at the hands of wicked men.
Imagine you are standing in front of the tallest mountain you have ever seen. In order to be welcomed into heaven you must climb to the summit of the mountain. Now imagine doing this with broken legs while a never-ending avalanche is thundering down on you. It would be more possible for you to summit this mountain than it would for you to satisfy God’s perfect standard – and make it into heaven on your own. God has always known this. Because He loves you, He has decided to come down the mountain Himself and carry you to the summit. All you have to do is put your faith in Jesus Christ.
So all of that sounds pretty easy. But now I want to tell you about my month of struggling with this idea of salvation. I think it will be helpful because you might avoid a similar misunderstanding. The core of the problem started when I tried to define the most fundamental expression of faith. Is faith simply saying you trust in Jesus? What if you’re a good person who rejects Jesus? Is it possible for someone to trust Jesus in their heart while criticizing Jesus in their mind? These are the questions that bedeviled me in my pursuit to describe a system of salvation. I want to take you through this by addressing each of these questions one at a time.
The first question: is faith simply the act of saying that you trust in Jesus? You might picture crowds of people gathered at an altar call after a church service professing their faith in Christ. I think there are many Christians who believe in this surface level understanding of faith. But here’s where it gets muddy: what if you profess faith in Christ but you live as if you have no faith? Surely, it’s possible for an evil person to just say that they belong to Jesus while they are in church and then go on doing evil when they are not in church. I’m sure you all know someone like this. I thought I might be able to find Scripture addressing this issue, and it turns out Jesus Himself addresses this in Matthew 7:21-23:
21 “Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter. 22 On judgment day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.’ 23 But I will reply, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God’s laws.’
Some people have called these verses the most frightening words Jesus ever said. The idea here is pretty clear: simply saying that you have faith in Jesus Christ does not absolve you of all responsibility against evil. You can’t run through life raising hell, being evil to yourself and to others, while thinking that Christ is going to save you at the end of it. But isn’t that a direct contradiction to the idea that human effort accomplishes nothing in the way of salvation and that the road to heaven is by grace through faith in Christ alone? It would, if the meaning of faith was simply professing that you trust in Jesus. So I was satisfied that verbal or mental assent was not the most fundamental expression of faith. This led me to a discussion on what is called the fruit of the Spirit, in Galatians 5:19-23:
19 When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, 20 idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, 21 envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.
22 But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!
Reading this, I began to suspect that anyone who demonstrates the fruit of the Spirit must have some element of faith in them. And it appears as though Jesus affirms this idea when he discusses the tree and its fruit in Matthew 7:15-20:
15 “Beware of false prophets who come disguised as harmless sheep but are really vicious wolves. 16 You can identify them by their fruit, that is, by the way they act. Can you pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit. 18 A good tree can’t produce bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t produce good fruit. 19 So every tree that does not produce good fruit is chopped down and thrown into the fire. 20 Yes, just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions.
So if Jesus is telling us that the fruit of the Spirit is how we can tell good people from bad people, then that must mean those who have the fruit of the Spirit are expressing faith in Christ. The problem is, there are many, many people who demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit while being professing atheists as well as adherents of other religions. Does that mean all roads lead to God? Or does that mean these people are trusting in Christ with their hearts while disavowing Him with their minds? I wanted to investigate this possibility of acting out a worldview that you think you don’t believe in. Is it possible that people can really be this painfully confused about their existence? The answer is a resounding yes. In fact, it’s very likely that you act out things every day without knowing exactly why you do them. Consider your brain. You use your brain every second of every day but it almost never occurs to you that you actually have one. Seriously, do you think about your cerebellum when you stand up and walk across the room? But without your cerebellum, you would never have the balance and coordination required for that type of motor function. Also, professing agreement that your cerebellum is the region of the brain that controls these functions is not required for it to do its job.
If you’re confused at this point, that’s a good thing. So was I. Salvation was becoming more and more complicated by the hour and I couldn’t figure out the meaning of the many passages that discuss it. I spoke to other pastors and church leaders about this gap between the heart and the mind and nothing they could say to me seemed to make sense of what I was reading. I knew going into it that salvation could not be earned by our own effort, but here I have Jesus saying that our actions are what determine whether we are good or bad – and that not all people who say they have faith in Him will make it into heaven if they are actually evil. It was beginning to look like a works based faith, which would be a terrible, terrible thing for us if it were true. That would mean you and me climbing the mountain with broken legs through an avalanche. In an effort to confront this idea, I consulted the book of James 2:14-20:
14 What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don’t show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone? 15 Suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing, 16 and you say, “Good-bye and have a good day; stay warm and eat well”—but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do?
17 So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless.
18 Now someone may argue, “Some people have faith; others have good deeds.” But I say, “How can you show me your faith if you don’t have good deeds? I will show you my faith by my good deeds.”
19 You say you have faith, for you believe that there is one God.[a] Good for you! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble in terror. 20 How foolish! Can’t you see that faith without good deeds is useless?
Reading this passage just made everything worse. Could James be more clear? He’s saying explicitly that if you don’t have good deeds then your faith is dead. How is that at all different from a works based salvation? So now I was at a point where I thought professing faith with your mouth was not enough and doing good deeds was the fundamental expression of faith. The mountain between humanity and God was getting taller. So I called a meeting with a pastor who was far more experienced and far wiser than myself. I went into the meeting loaded with all of the passages and notes that I worked out through a month’s time. For the first hour of our discussion, we mostly agreed on everything we were putting on the table. He agreed with the idea that many people have this false idea of Jesus Christ in their mind and that it is likely they are allotted some forgiveness for rejecting Him mentally or verbally. Especially if the straw man was put in their minds by false teachers within the church. But then we also came to the conclusion that there is no way for a person to go to heaven if they die without faith in Christ.
So I was beginning to think that my quandary would not be resolved during this meeting. And then he said something that I wasn’t expecting and that he didn’t know I needed to hear. He said, “God is the One who converts people and saves people through the Holy Spirit doing work in their hearts.” As soon as he said that, everything snapped into place. I immediately realized that my fundamental issue was that I was attempting to describe a system of salvation that did not involve God. I was trying to take God out of the equation. This was causing all of the passages and all of the equations to become scrambled and to not make any sense.
All this time the fruit of the Spirit were attitudes that manifested themselves in a person as a result of the Holy Spirit working in their heart. Good deeds were actions a person took when the Holy Spirit led the person to do them. Profession of faith was something the Holy Spirit made possible by allowing the person to know the true and living God. All of these things were just part of a process that God Himself does in the soul of a person to save them. Because I was trying to save people myself, I was looking for a finish line that people could cross. The truth of the matter is that a person’s salvation is in God’s hands alone and thankfully so – because He never makes mistakes and we do. If you can imagine it this way: let’s say that a person has to get from 0 to 100 during their lifetime in order to go to heaven. My job may be to get them from 78 to 79, but the entire journey is God’s work alone. And God can get a person from 0 to 100 literally in an instant.
Think about the conversion of the Apostle Paul. When he was Saul the Pharisee, he was hunting down Christians to imprison and kill them. He was trying to snuff out the name of Jesus Christ from the earth. Then one day, when he was on the road to Damascus, the Lord Jesus Himself got a hold of him. Now, Saul was not an ignorant man who would just listen to anyone. He knew the Jewish law down to the letter and he came from a family that had status. And he was militantly against Jesus. But this one encounter with God Himself flipped Saul in an instant. For days Saul could not use his eyes, he did not eat and he did not drink. Now listen to what happened in Acts 9:10-19:
10 Now there was a believer[a] in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord spoke to him in a vision, calling, “Ananias!”
“Yes, Lord!” he replied.
11 The Lord said, “Go over to Straight Street, to the house of Judas. When you get there, ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul. He is praying to me right now. 12 I have shown him a vision of a man named Ananias coming in and laying hands on him so he can see again.”
13 “But Lord,” exclaimed Ananias, “I’ve heard many people talk about the terrible things this man has done to the believers[b] in Jerusalem! 14 And he is authorized by the leading priests to arrest everyone who calls upon your name.”
15 But the Lord said, “Go, for Saul is my chosen instrument to take my message to the Gentiles and to kings, as well as to the people of Israel. 16 And I will show him how much he must suffer for my name’s sake.”
17 So Ananias went and found Saul. He laid his hands on him and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road, has sent me so that you might regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” 18 Instantly something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he got up and was baptized. 19 Afterward he ate some food and regained his strength.
Saul of Tarsus became the Apostle Paul and went on to write most of the New Testament. So you see, God can work with anyone and any situation to make good come out of it. God can redeem anyone and He can do it in an instant. For most of us, this journey is going to be process that takes a lifetime. But I can tell you this: when people are on their deathbed, their sense of hearing is often the last thing to go. If God can convert the Pharisee Saul into one of the most important Christian actors in history, he can surely bring anyone into eternal peace with Him in heaven. God does not send good or bad people to hell against their will. He doesn’t trick people into choosing separation from Him. He does the opposite. God makes it perfectly clear to all people that Jesus Christ lived and died so they will be forgiven. God makes it perfectly clear that if you trust Jesus to save you, no one or no thing is strong enough to take you away from Him. And finally, God makes it perfectly clear that his judgment is always right and He never gets it wrong. This is why salvation belongs to God and why He will never allow anyone else to do that job for Him.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
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