How can you know that the gospel is at work in a church?

‘So now faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love’ (1 Cor. 13:13).

Life as a Christian can be summed up in three words: faith, hope and love. They appear together time and again in the New Testament, and form the abiding shape of the Christian life. They provide the climax of Paul’s great chapter on love in 1 Corinthians 13. They define a church shaped by the gospel. How can you know that the gospel is at work in a church and bearing fruit? Because its members are marked by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, love for all the saints (other Christians), and hope in what God has stored up in heaven for us (Col. 1:4-6).

Sometimes Paul mentions just faith and love (e.g. Eph.6:23; 1 Thess.3:6; 1 Tim.1:14; 2 Tim.1:13). Occasionally he mentions faith and hope (Titus 1:1-2). But the three really belong together (1 Cor. 13:13; Col. 1:4-5; 1 Thess. 1:3). Can I encourage you to pick up a Bible and look up those references, by the way? It will do you far more good.

Even when the apostles don’t list them together, faith, hope and love often form the structure of Christian experience in key passages in the New Testament (Rom. 5:1-11; 1 Peter 1:3-9). And they are at the heart of the way Paul prays for his churches (Eph. 1:15-23). If we are thinking Biblically, faith, hope and love will become a habitual way of thinking about our lives and praying for ourselves and others. A life lived for the glory of God is a life of faith, hope and love.

It should not surprise us that faith, hope and love – sometimes called the ‘theological virtues’ – have been recognised throughout church history as central to teaching and living the Christian faith. In the rest of this article, I’m going to consider faith. God willing, in two later articles, I’ll consider hope and love.

What is faith?

In our time, faith is often opposed to knowledge. It’s regarded as ‘blind faith’. If you become a Christian, you’ve left evidence and reason behind and taken a ‘leap of faith’. Faith is something private, just a personal opinion. But the Bible views things differently.

Faith is different from the knowledge we gain by experience, or by reasoning something out from first principles. It’s not something we can get from carrying out experiments, or watching how Christians behave, or assessing our feelings, or making logical deductions about the way the world must be. Those are all valid ways of gaining certain kinds of knowledge. But faith isn’t like that. Faith is knowledge based on testimony. It involves listening to someone telling you something. To believe is to accept something as real or true because someone tells you that it’s real or true. This means that faith is always personal and relational. Faith requires accepting someone else’s authority. But that doesn’t make it random. You can know true and real things by faith.

Believing in Australia

Let’s take an example. I’ve never been to Australia, so I haven’t seen it with my own eyes. And there’s no obvious reason why Australia must exist, so I can’t just think hard and work out that Australia must be there somewhere. There may even be times when I don’t want it to exist – I’m an English cricket fan, and I don’t like poisonous snakes. So, if I’ve never been there and seen it with my own eyes, and there’s no inevitable reason why Australia must exist, how can I know it’s there? And if it’s there, how can I know what it’s like? Do I just have to take a blind leap into the dark?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it? I had geography lessons at school. We have a globe at home. I grew up watching cricket and rugby, and Neighbours and Home and Away. I’ve seen news reports and read books about Australia. I have Australian friends who mostly seem to tell the truth. Putting these things together, I can be very confident that Australia exists, that I know where it’s located on planet earth, how many people live there, what kinds of people live there, that it has kangaroos and koalas and spiders and snakes. I can know quite a bit about its history and culture, and why its cricket is so good and its beer is so bad. The origins of the Australian accent may be a mystery to me, but I can recognise it whenever I hear it, and I immediately know where it comes from.

My knowledge of Australia takes the form of beliefs about Australia. It’s faith-knowledge – knowledge based on the testimony of others. But because I’ve learned it from reliable people (and their books, globes, TV programmes, personal stories), my faith in Australia is real knowledge. It’s knowledge of things that are true. And it gives me a real (though very incomplete) grasp of what I could expect if I ever moved there and saw it with my own eyes.

Believing in God

Faith in Jesus Christ is a bit like that (though we’ll see that saving faith is also more than that, and far more wonderful). Faith in the Bible’s God isn’t an irrational leap in the dark or a bit of wish-fulfilment. It’s knowledge based on testimony – God’s testimony to Himself in the words of the prophets and apostles recorded for us in the Bible. That’s why Paul can speak of faith as being the fruit of what we ‘heard before in the word of truth, the gospel’ (Col. 1:5). Faith comes from hearing God’s gospel. And because the gospel is true, it gives real knowledge to all who believe.

This brings us to something really important.

The most important thing about Christian faith is not the act of believing. The most important thing is not the Christian who believes. The most important thing about your faith is not how strong, or weak, it is. The most important thing is the God in whom you believe.

If you put your faith in a liar, you are sunk. In the Garden of Eden, Eve put her faith in the serpent’s words: ‘You shall not surely die’ (Gen. 3:4). But Satan has nothing to do with the truth. It’s his character to lie (John 8:44). So, when Adam sinned, death came into the world and spread to everyone (Rom. 5:12).

How different God is. God is a ‘God of knowledge’ (1 Sam. 2:3), who knows Himself perfectly. The Father knows the Son and the Son knows the Father (Matt. 11:27). The Holy Spirit knows the thoughts of God to their very depths (1 Cor. 2:10-11). And as everything comes from God, He knows everything perfectly by knowing Himself as their Creator. God is perfectly wise (Rom. 11:33), far wiser than men (1 Cor. 1:25). He is perfectly good (Mark 10:18). And he never changes (Num. 23:19; Ps. 102:27; Mal. 3:6; Heb. 13:8). He never loses knowledge. He also never grows in knowledge because there’s nothing he doesn’t already know. This is a deep foundation for confidence in God’s truth. We have every reason to trust Him!

What do you believe?

So, faith believes God. Which means it also believes everything God says. Every word of Scripture is God’s word. ‘All Scripture is God-breathed’ (2 Tim. 3:16). Although the Bible was written by human authors, they ‘spoke from God’ because they were ‘carried along by the Holy Spirit’ (2 Peter 1:21). God put His words in their mouths (Jer. 1:9), so their words are also His word (Jer. 1:1, 4, 11, 13; 2:1).

As the word of the truthful God, the whole Bible is true in what it teaches. So we should believe it all. But saving faith has a more specific focus. Saving faith believes what Scripture sometimes calls ‘the faith’. In Scripture ‘faith’ refers most often to the act of believing. But sometimes the word ‘faith’ refers to the thing that is believed. Jude wrote to urge Christians ‘to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3; see 1 Tim. 3:9; 2 Tim. 4:7; Titus 1:13; 3:15). Jude speaks here of a set body of teaching that God has given to ‘the saints’ (Christians) to believe, hold fast to, and protect from false teachers. When Paul wrote to Timothy, he referred to this teaching as ‘the faith’ (2 Tim. 3:8), ‘the truth’ (2 Tim. 2:18, 25; 3:7, 8), ‘the pattern of sound words’ (2 Tim. 1:13), ‘the good deposit’ (2 Tim. 1:14), or simply ‘the gospel’ (2 Tim. 1:8, 10; 2:8). These phrases all suggest a well-ordered set of truths that form a definite message.

Therefore, to be a Christian, you must believe someone (God, speaking through the apostles and prophets). And you must believe something (God’s gospel message). So Paul tells us that, while all Biblical truth is true, some truths are more important than others – Christ’s death for our sins, burial, and resurrection on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3-5). And to be saved, you must hear the gospel, the ‘word of faith’ (Rom. 10:8, 14-17), and ‘confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead’ (Rom. 10:9).

The early church summarised this ‘pattern of sound teaching’ in the Apostles’ Creed:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ,His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; He descended to the dead. 
On the third day He rose again; He ascended into heaven, He is seated at the right hand of the Father, and He will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
Amen.

The Creed is not meant to add anything to Scripture. Rather, everything in the Creed is drawn directly from Scripture. The Bible is a long and rich book, which is great, because it means we get to know God better. But because the Bible is so long, it’s helpful to have a simple summary, an outline of ‘the faith once for all delivered to the saints’. That’s what the Apostles’ Creed is.

But if that’s the God we believe, and the content of ‘the faith’ that He’s given us, what does it mean to believe? What is true saving faith?

What is saving faith?

This was a debate at the time of the Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church before and after the Reformation taught (and still teaches) that faith consists of two things: knowledge and assent. To truly believe you must know the content of ‘the faith’, and you must agree to it. Specifically, you must assent to whatever the Church of Rome teaches.

Now, knowledge and assent, or agreement, are both vital – you can’t be saved if you don’t know, or if you refuse to accept, that Jesus died for your sins and rose from the dead. But the 16th-century Reformers looked back to Scripture and realised that saving faith requires something else. After all, the devils know the truth and accept that it’s true! They ‘believe – and shudder’ (James 2:19). There’s a way of believing the gospel that does you no good at all.

Jesus also teaches that it’s possible to hear the gospel, be moved by it and believe for a little while (Luke 8:13), but with a faith that falls short of true saving faith. Saving faith is not a temporary thing. It endures to the end, because Christ will keep all who come to Him in faith and bring our salvation to completion (John 6:35-40; Rom. 8:30-39; Phil. 1:6; Heb. 13:5).

So if there are various kinds of non-saving faith, what is true saving faith like?

The beginning of John’s explains: ‘But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God’ (John 1:12). When God’s Son took on flesh and came into the world, he received a hostile reception. The world did not know him (John 1:10). His own people did not receive him (John 1:11). Christ met ignorance and rejection – unbelief. But by a miracle of God’s grace, some do believe, and by believing become children of God (John 1:12). How do people believe in Christ for salvation? John tells us that it’s by receiving Him (see also Col. 2:5-7). Saving faith trusts Christ and receives Him.

As our Mediator, Christ fulfilled the law. He died for our sins bearing our guilt and punishment. He liberated us from sin, death and Satan. He rose again from the dead and ascended into heaven where He sat down at the Father’s right hand. From there, by His Spirit in the gospel He offers Himself to us as our God, Lord, Saviour, Shepherd, Lover, King, Friend, Guardian, Way, Truth, Life, Wisdom, Righteousness, Holiness, Redemption.

Can I ask you to pause for a moment and relish each one of those descriptions of our Jesus and the gifts He gives us? But don’t rush over these most wonderful words of all: in the gospel, Jesus offers us Himself.

It’s not enough, though, just to understand the gospel, or to agree that the gospel is true. We must taste for ourselves and see that the Lord is good (Ps.34:8). Saving faith, filled with desire for Christ and delight in Him alone, receives Him in the way a bride receives her bridegroom.

God’s gracious gift

This faith is not something we can stir up in ourselves. As sinners, by nature we are utterly helpless. We are spiritually blind and darkened (2 Cor. 4:4; Eph. 4:18). We are spiritually dead, unable to do any good, following Satan and hostile to God (Eph. 2:1-2; 4:18). We are slaves of sin – it’s what we love and choose (John 8:34). Apart from Christ and His Spirit, we’re so lost, we can’t even believe!

But God is rich in mercy (Eph. 2:4). And so, in the gospel, He shone the light of the glory of Christ into our darkened minds (2 Cor. 4:4, 6). He raised us to new life in Christ (Eph. 2:4-6; Col. 2:12-13). He liberated us from Satan and his kingdom (Col. 1:13; 2:15; Heb. 2:14-15). He set us free to know the truth and embrace His Son (John 8:32, 36). By God’s grace, we are set free to believe in Christ and to receive Him.

And when we receive Jesus by faith, we receive all His gifts. We are justified by faith alone, not because of our good works, but because of Christ’s righteousness counted to us (Rom. 3:24-26; 5:1; 8:1). We are adopted – united by faith to God’s Son, we are welcomed into His family as children of the same heavenly Father (John 1:12-13; 20:17; Gal. 4:4-7). We receive eternal life (1 John 5:11-12), an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade (1 Peter 1:4-5).

None of this is our doing, not even the faith by which we receive Christ. All of it, including faith itself, is a gracious gift of God (Acts 5:31; 13:48; Eph. 2:8; Phil. 1:29).

So that’s what faith is. But what difference does it make?

What difference does faith make?

The short answer is that faith changes everything. By God’s grace, saving faith is the seed of new life and the root of new action. Listen to these words of Martin Luther: ‘Faith is a divine work in us. It changes us and makes us to be born anew of God (John 1:13); it kills the old Adam and makes altogether different people, in heart and spirit and mind and powers, and it brings with it the Holy Spirit … Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a person would stake their life on it a thousand times.’ There’s so much we could say, let me suggest a few things briefly.

First, faith rests. Christ has done everything we need for life and salvation, and He and all His gifts are ours by faith alone. And so faith rests: ‘Come to me, you who labour and are heavy laden’, says the Lord Jesus, ‘and I will give you rest’ (Matt.11:28). There’s a beautiful picture of salvation in the Song of Songs: ‘Who is that coming up from the wilderness, leaning on her beloved?’ (Song 8:5) Christian believer, pause and picture the scene – that is you, rescued from the wilderness of sin, leaning on Jesus your beloved! There’s a similar image in John’s Gospel, where John, the beloved disciple, reclines at table and leans back ‘in the bosom of Jesus’ (John 13:23). It’s a beautiful glimpse of the rest and intimacy with Jesus that faith brings. Just as Christ is ‘in the bosom of the Father’ (John 1:18), so believers rest against the bosom of Christ. Faith receives delightful intimacy in union and communion with God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Secondly, therefore, faith rejoices. As the old hymn goes: ‘ ’Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus, Just to take Him at His word, Just to rest upon His promise, and to say, “Thus saith the Lord”’. It’s sweet to trust in Jesus because Jesus Himself is sweet. As we rest upon His promise, we rest upon Him. ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good!’ (Ps.34:8). How could our souls not rejoice? ‘Though you have not seen him’, says Peter, ‘you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls’ (1 Peter 1:8-9). Yes! Faith rejoices!

Thirdly, faith seeks. Faith delights in everything it has of Christ. It tastes the sweetness of the Lord, and in its delight, it wants more. Faith hears the voice of God saying: ‘Seek my face’. And faith replies: ‘Your face, LORD, do I seek’ (Ps.27:8). Faith says to other believers: ‘Seek the LORD and his strength! Seek his face continually!’ (Ps. 105:4). The life of faith is the life of God’s people urging one another: ‘Let us know, let us press on to know the LORD’ (Hos. 6:3).

Fourthly, this means that faith grows. We’re not saved by the size or strength of our faith; we’re saved by the Saviour we believe in. But saving faith is always eager for more. With Paul, it looks for God to work so that faith remains steadfast and so grows abundantly (2 Thess. 1:3-4). And when faith struggles, it cries out in prayer: ‘I believe, help my unbelief!’ (Mark 9:24).

Finally, faith works. Because faith is God’s work that makes us new, it is the root of energetic action in the world. Although good works cannot save us, faith apart from works is dead (James 2:26). In the 16th century, Luther did so much to regain the good news of justification by faith alone. But he saw this clearly, because he understood what true saving faith is like: ‘O, it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith; and so it is impossible for it not to do good works incessantly. It does not ask whether there are good works to do, but before the question rises, it has already done them, and is always at the doing of them.’

And here we end where we began, for faith, hope and love belong together. And the only thing that counts, says Paul, is ‘faith working through love’ (Gal. 5:6).

Further reading

If you’d like to think more about what true faith is, and what it believes, here are three recommendations for further reading.

Something Old: Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (Crossway, forthcoming in 2023). It is a Reformation classic on justification by faith alone and faith working through love. Also available online.

Something New: Ian Hamilton, The Faith Shaped Life (Banner of Truth, 2013). Forty-three short chapters (3-4 pages) packed with Biblical content and pastoral wisdom.

Something Stretching: Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, Vol. 2: Faith in the Triune God (Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), pp. 3-42. A masterful treatment of saving faith, with Biblical grounding, doctrinal exposition, polemical clarifications and practical applications.