Faith is faith is faith

It was in the 16^th and 17^th centuries that theologians began to think about how the soul and spirit interplay in the inner man, developing what they called the “doctrine of the kenosis.”

Of course, kenosis (meaning theology) is as old as Philippians 2; Paul thought about it originally.

After the 6^th and 7^th centuries, there was no doctrinal development inside the institutional church for almost a thousand years. It wasn’t until the 15 and 1600s, with the Reformation, that the great topic in theology called Soteriology (salvation) emerged.

“The issue of salvation in the Reformation was really the issue of the application of redemption,” explains Jordan. “Romans 1:16 says, ‘For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.’ If you don’t get the proposition straight, the rest of that verse won’t help you . . .

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“I don’t know if you’ve ever read any of the writings of Pope John Paul II; I have. This man talked constantly about Christ dying for his sins, about Jesus Christ being resurrected, about Him being ‘God in human flesh come to intercede in the sufferings of humanity.’

“He was schooled, and he genuinely filled his mind with all that information on a daily basis, it seems. But Romans 1:6 doesn’t say that’s how you get saved. It says the way you get saved is by relying exclusively on that information.

“See how close you can get to it and miss it?! You can get real close! It can look—you can have all the Is dotted, Ts crossed, the doctrinal statement exactly right and look like you’re there, but miss it.

“Because having it or not having it isn’t in organized religion’s theology; it’s in the Bible. It’s understanding that the life is ‘Christ in you the hope of glory’; not how shiny your doctrinal statement is.

“Romans 1:16 is a verse of Scripture you need to get clearly fixed in your understanding about the clarity of the gospel. That issue of the proposition—and that’s where the ‘Lordship Salvation’ comes in, that’s where the ‘Easy-Believism’ stuff comes in—all that confusing stuff you hear comes in from just a failure to make the issue the issue, and the issue is relying exclusively on faith; no works involved.

“And it’s not just knowing all about it—people say, ‘Well, they didn’t really have saving faith; they weren’t really . . .’ Listen, faith is faith is faith! There isn’t but one kind of faith and that’s just faith!

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“ ‘If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater,’ says I John 5:9. If you know how to trust somebody who tells you, ‘We’re going to meet at a certain time at a certain location,’ and you follow the map, and come that day because you took their word for it, you know how to have faith.

“That’s how you have faith in God. The thing about God is, though, He’ll never lie to you. I might. God won’t make a mistake; I sure will. God won’t let you down. The witness of God is greater, deals in greater things—eternity.

“But faith is faith. There’s no value in my faith; the value’s in what I’m trusting. And what God says is, ‘You have to trust me exclusively—nothing else.’ And that’s what quote ‘saving faith’ is. But that’s a Calvinistic term because they think that there’s a bunch of merits and different kinds of faith, and that’s this theology business.

“Do you think anybody understood justification by grace through faith before Martin Luther? Sure they did. Where do you think he heard about it?! We’re going to see there are people all through church history . . . For 1,600 years there’ve been people preaching it. Luther was just a guy with a lot of political clout who came to believe it and made the headlines.

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“The only visible, organized religious system that God ever established was the nation Israel. That’s why if you can’t identify the difference between Israel and the Body of Christ, you’re never going to get straight the issue of where the real life of the Body of Christ really is.

“Institutions, councils, crusades, church boards, worship services, images, clerical garb—all that stuff is not the issue. That’s focusing on things that aren’t the issue. The issue is sound doctrine, truth, I Timothy 2:4: ‘Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.’

“So, to study real church history, what are you going to study? Well, you’re going to study what is the real issue, aren’t you? Which would be people, saints and sound doctrine. It would be the outworking of sound doctrine through God’s people, not the institutions of ‘religionized’ Christendom.

“You understand when you read a church history book, most of them are really giving the history of the ‘anti-church’? The false church?

“There’s a guy who calls us ‘hyper-dispensationalists.’ You haven’t lived until you’ve been called an ‘ultra-dispensationalist.’ I got a friend who responds, ‘Well, if I’m a hyper, you’re a subtra.’ In other words, ‘If I went too far, you didn’t go far enough.’

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“What I wish I could make the people who dismiss me as a ‘hyper-dispensationalist’ understand is that, according to the Bible, Believers will one day participate in the running of the government of the heavens and our job assignments will be based upon our grasp of the Word.

“In II Timothy 3:7, Paul warns about those who are ‘ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.’ In heaven, people will always be coming to more and more knowledge about the truth.

“Just as one event in your life leads to another event and to another event, and causes maturity and growth, and understanding and expansion of knowledge, everything God wants you to know is already in the Book, but you’re going to have an eternity to learn about it.”