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Hello, I'm Kevin DeYoung, pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and you are listening to Doctrine Matters. Each week on Doctrine Matters, we explore the rich doctrine of the Christian faith. We'll pull from the church's long history, complex debates, and over the course of the year, the hope is that we'll begin to frame out what is a clear, accessible, systematic theology, be looking at different Christian doctrines and their relationship to each other. And the hope, Lord willing, is we will grasp more and more the riches and the beauty of God's word. Thanks for listening. Let's turn to this week's Doctrine Matters. We continue this week on Doctrine Matters with the Ordo Salutis walking through this logical order of salvation. These different theological categories, they don't all happen in a temporal sequence, but they do help us understand the various facets of this salvation diamond. We talked last week about effectual calling, regeneration, irresistible grace, how God works monergistically by the One working, not in cooperation with us, to cause us to be born again. But now we come this week, say, well, what do we do? So this is not what we do to contribute or to cooperate with that divine grace. But having been sovereignly, unilaterally, effectually called and born again, now we do exercise a renewed will, so to say it once again. The reason why we are not puppets on a string. People say, well, you Calvinists, God's sovereignty, your puppets on a string. No, a puppet does not have his own will. Their movements are manipulated by an outside force. And that is not what Calvinists believe, or at least not what we should believe. Here's Dort again. The divine grace of regeneration does not act in people as if they were blocks and stones, nor does it abolish the will and its properties or coerce a reluctant will by force, but spiritually revives, heals, reforms, and in a manner at once pleasing and powerful, bends it back. That is a very important section from the synod of Dort. 1618, 1619, the triumph of authentic orthodox Calvinist theology over Arminianism. And it says there, our wills are not eradicated. We're not stocks and blocks, we're not puppets, we're not robots. But they must be renewed. And once renewed, then given this gift of faith, we exercise faith and repentance. Those are two sides of the same coin. We'll come to faith in just a moment. But just to say a couple things about repentance, this is, in my mind what is most often missing in today's preaching of the Gospel. Lots of preachers and churches and books and tell you about the, you know, to embrace Christ, to trust Christ, to come to Christ. And you'll have a better family. You, you'll have purpose. You won't feel alone, you won't feel bad about yourself. And some are even more robust than that. You'll have your sins forgiven. You will no longer face the wrath of God. Come to Christ. Believe in Christ. So there's lots of emphasis on faith. What is so often missing is the other side, which cannot be separated from true biblical faith, and that is repentance. Conversion involves turning from sin and turning to God. The gospel calls for an evangelical repentance, not a legal repentance. So a legal repentance is, I'm earning something, or this is how I prove myself. This is how I, how I make myself worthy before God. I'm gonna. You'll see how sorry I am. No, an evangelical. That is a gospel repentance. So we distinguish between repentance as turning to Christ in an act of saving faith and repentance. In the ongoing life of Christian discipleship, we have both aspects. What we're talking about here is really the necessary element in becoming a Christian. But it is also necessary in living as a Christian. It only takes a glance at the New Testament to show that we have not understood the message of the gospel if we do not talk about repentance. When John the Baptist prepared the way of the Lord, he preached repentance. Jesus launched his Galilean ministry in Matthew 4:17, saying, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. That's how Mark's Gospel begins. Jesus understood the purpose of his ministry, Luke 5:32, to be calling sinners to repentance. Before he's ascended into heaven. The resurrected Christ tells his disciples to be his witnesses, Luke 24, that repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached to in his name to all nations. If there is a one sentence summary of Jesus preaching, he said a lot of things and we don't even have a fraction of it recorded for us. Mark gives that one sentence summary at the beginning of his Gospel. Now, after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel. There's that pair. The two are virtually synonymous in the New Testament. Not that they mean the same thing, but they are signs of the same spirit. Prompted work. The proper response to the gospel involves faith and repentance. Now, sometimes in the New Testament, only one Item is mentioned. Faith. Sometimes it's the other one, repentance. Often it's both. Both are implied. Any gospel that refuses to speak of repentance is not an authentic gospel. Sometimes that's what the gospel is. It's given. Repent, turn back, that your sins may be blotted out. That's Acts 3:19. Sometimes the gospel message in Acts only looks like the message to repent. That's because faith and repentance are considered two sides of the same coin. You're turning from sin, you're turning to Christ. By definition, to repent is to turn away from sin to Christ. And by definition, true biblical faith in Christ is not just in a mental ascent. It's not just a sense of God's going to do wonderful things. For me, if you're turning to Christ, you're turning away from something else. We must have this preaching of faith and repentance. So what is faith? That is a massive topic. Faith is sometimes that which must be believed. You talk about Jude 3, contend for the faith. But what we're talking about here is the exercise of faith. So the believing not what we believe, but faith by which we believe. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this single word. The noun pistis, faith, or faithful, and the verb pistuin, to believe. They occur together over 240 times. We are by definition called believers. Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. He was a man of faith. The gospel age in Galatians 3 is called the coming of faith. So what is faith? Well, we can think about historical faith involves mental ascent to the facts about God. So King Agrippa may not have been converted, but he believed the prophets. So on the level of mental ascent, even the demons believe and shudder. So a kind of historical faith. I affirm that these are facts. Second, faith of miracles. Now, this can be taken in a passive sense. I believe God still works miracles. Or in an active sense, I believe that a miracle just happened. This type of faith may or may not be accompanied by saving faith. So think about the crowds in the Gospels. They had this faith. They often marveled at the signs and the wonders, but they did not follow him as disciples. It is possible to believe in Jesus, but only for the signs and not for Jesus himself. That's John 2:23, 25. In fact, there's a play on words in the Greek. Says they believed in Jesus, but he did not believe in them. They had a kind of faith. It was a faith in miracles. It was not a Saving faith. Then there's a temporary faith, so short lived, springs up for a time, withers away, choked out, parable of the sower in the soils. And then finally there is a justifying faith, a saving grace wrought in our hearts by the Spirit and the Word of God. This object of faith is in a general sense God's word, the Scriptures, and in a specific sense, trusting in Christ and the promise of salvation. Now let's just press it a little bit farther and talk about the acts of faith. A C T S. Because given the importance of faith, theologians have spent a lot of time trying to be very careful to say, well, what do we mean by faith? Because this is the instrumental cause of our justification. We want to be absolutely clear, well, what does this look like? What does it sound like, what does it feel like? The acts of faith here I want to make a distinction, are a little different than when we talk about the experience of faith. And this gets cloudy as we read. There's all sorts of things we might talk about, sort of the experience of faith. And you want to experience your faith with assurance, you want to experience with joy and with treasuring how you experience this faith, you know, deep affection, piety. But here we're talking about something even a little narrower, so those things will flow as a result. But Reformed theologians were very careful to talk about the acts of faith, meaning an act of the soul. Experience suggests something that is passively true for us. And here's why I'm making this distinction. If you just say, what does faith feel like? Well, passions render us passive, passions come over us and then you're left saying, well, I don't know that I feel something where action does something. So Reformed theologians, when they talked about justifying faith, not just about the whole life of faith, there's lots of wonderful devotional sentiments, true biblical sentiments, about what is the life of faith. But they're trying to narrow in and say, what does faith do? What is its act when it is justifying faith? It's an act of the soul because it originates in one of the faculties, the intellect or the will, or both, where an experience may involve the intellect and the will, but is not necessarily an activity from them. And then an act of the soul terminates on an object. So what we know what truth we assent to, what person we trust, while an experience suggests what we ourselves are the object. That's a very important difference. Faith is terminating on some object, a thing, a statement, a person in whom we trust. Whereas if we talk about that, so that's the act of faith. We talk about the experience of faith, it terminates on us. What do I experience in this? And that's not unimportant. But when we talk about justifying faith, Reformed theologians wanted to be very careful, because it's one thing to say faith treasures Christ. That's the language of an act. Treasure. It's another thing to say implicitly or explicitly. Faith must be experienced as treasuring, or it is not saving faith. See the difference? Are we talking about, okay, what do, what does, what am I feeling? Or what? What is my faith doing? Faith, in simple terms, has often been said to consist of three things. Noticia, I.e. knowledge, ascensus, ascent and fiducia. Trust. And that is a helpful way to knowledge, assent, trust. And the last element is key. It's not enough to just understand, to use a simple example of a chair, it's not enough to just understand the chair exists. That's knowledge. Or to affirm, yes, the chair can hold me up. That's ascent. Yes, I believe propositionally, this chair is solid and firm, and if I sit in it, it will hold me. You have to actually sit down in the chair. That's the fiducia, that's the trust. Other theologians have explained these basic categories in different ways. So Turretan, always one to add some helpful complexity, speaks of six acts of justifying knowledge, theoretical ascent, practical ascent and persuasion. Refuge arising from persuasion, that is running to Christ, reception, that is embracing Christ, and a reflex act whereby we conclude that Christ certainly died for us. He also mentions an act of consolation and comfort that arises from possession of Christ. But he says this seventh act is not, strictly speaking, part of the essence of faith. Faith Ursinus, principal author of the Heidelberg Catechism, says the act which belongs to faith is to apprehend and apply to itself the righteousness of Christ. Faith is nothing else than the acceptance itself or the apprehension of the merits of Christ. John Owen says there are two acts essential unto faith, ascent of the mind and approbation. And then he goes on in John Owen character and gives several other very big words. Wilhelmis Abracal, the Dutch theologian, gives a wonderful Eightfold description of saving faith. But importantly, he does not unfold the experience of saving faith into the act itself. He summarizes the act of saving faith as trust in Jesus and in entrusting oneself to him. So the Reformed tradition will describe the acts of faith with affectional language. That's true. Not embarrassed by that. They want to guard against a bare cognition, a heartless ascent, a kind of what faith the demons have and they shudder. The tradition does not, however, include the experience of love or joy as constitutive elements of justifying faith. And they were very, very careful on that. They were very they were loath to smuggle back in having having rescued the gospel from works they did not want to smuggle now a work back into faith. We know that faith works itself out in love. That's what faith, that's what the life of the Christian will look like. But when we're talking about justifying faith, if you say, well, it has an element of love, you've you've just put works back into this faith principle. Here's what the Westminster Confession says. The principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving and resting in Christ alone. And that's good. It's the nature of saving faith to look away from itself. So faith does not rest in what it does or what it experiences. It rests in Christ. It is the faith of the open hand resting in Christ, receiving His blessing because of all that he has accomplished for us. That is saving faith. Thanks again for joining us on Doctrine Matters. I'm your host Kevin DeYoung. Our hope and prayer is that this has been helpful to you as you look at scripture and try to understand the best of our theological tradition as Christians. Christians, please consider subscribing to doctor Matters. And if this has been encouraging, consider passing it on to others. If you'd like to learn more about this week's doctrine, you can ask your pastor for good resources or check out my year long mini systematic theology book called Daily Doctrine. It's available in print or audio from Crossway.org the Doctrine Matters podcast is produced by Crossway. To learn more, visit crossway. Org.