Before I begin with the message, let me make an announcement about some resources. Since not everything could be made available here and some of it has run out, I was asked to give a catalog of resources that the little ministry at our church makes available. We have tapes and videos and books and pamphlets and things like that. And if things are harder to get here in Australia than in America, we have everything available there and you can use email to order things and write to us, so please be aware of that.

Then if you want to get on the mailing list to just be kept up to date with what’s available, I’ll put this here, too, where you can just sign up. We send out things and our policy is to not try to make any money because if you don’t have any, we’ll just give you whatever’s in that catalog. It’s a pay what you can and if you can’t, we’ll give it to you and trust other people to cover for you. I think those are the only things I wanted to announce.

Faith and Good Works

Let me try to rehearse where we were yesterday and then connect with the questions that I said I would raise tonight. I said that the Reformation creeds, all say that the faith, which alone justifies, never remains alone but is always accompanied by good works. I quoted the Westminster Confession, knowing I should have quoted from the Thirty-Nine Articles. So I went back and found them and now I will do that so that you hear from the horse’s mouth what the truth is and it’s the same as the truth in all the other confessions. I’ll read it here under the 12th article:

Albeit that Good Works, which are the fruits of Faith, and follow after Justification, cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God's judgment; yet are they pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring out necessarily of a true and lively Faith insomuch that by them a lively Faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by the fruit.

That’s what I tried to say. There is something about authentic saving faith that necessarily causes good works to spring out so that judgment can be according to works, or your standing in Christ can be adequately declared by your works infallibly because there is a necessary connection between whether you are born again and thus have faith and your transformed life, as imperfect as it is.

Then the question I raised was, why is this so? Why is there this necessary connection between justifying faith and sanctification, or good works, or a life of holiness and love and ministerial, sacrificial faithfulness? The answer I gave was that there’s something about the nature of faith. They’re not just corollaries that incidentally always happen together, but there is something about the faith which produces that change of life. Galatians 5:6 says:

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.

Faith somehow works itself out through love and we haven’t probed that very deeply yet. The rest of tonight and tomorrow are an effort to do that in real practical ways.

Why Does Faith Produce Good Works?

The next question I asked was, well, then, what is it about faith? If there is something about faith that works itself out in love or good works or holiness, what is it? I suggested two things. First, it’s the future orientation of justifying faith. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). It has a future orientation. Abraham in Romans 4 is given as the paradigm of justifying faith and his faith was in promises. The second feature I gave was that faith is a being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus. It’s these two things I’m arguing and I’m going to try to flesh out tonight the future orientation of faith and the affectional dimension of faith, a being satisfied, which makes it inevitable that this faith produces love or the whole range of good works.

In a nutshell, just to let you know where I’m going, the reason that is so is because, take the future orientation of faith. The major obstacles to love are fear and greed. That is, if you’re presented with a possibility of some painful or difficult way of laying your life down for somebody, either the negative motivation of being afraid to do that (that you will lose measures of happiness, or you will lose your life, or you’ll lose your money, or you’ll lose your reputation, or you’ll lose your standing or something), or the positive motive that you really are greedy to be maximally materially comfortable, keep you from loving. The future orientation of faith says to fear, “No, that’s not true that I will lose because I have many promises of God that it is more blessed to love than to live in luxury.”

And it says no to greed, saying, “No, it’s not true that if I stay at home tonight in my comfortable living room watching television instead of going to the need that I will be better off and happier. That’s not true. There are many promises of future grace that show me the opposite, and therefore, I will believe those promises and I will defeat fear and I’ll defeat greed and become, therefore, a loving person.”

The same thing is true with the affectional dimension of faith, that it is a being satisfied with all that God promises to be for us. The only way that sin, which is the opposite of love, has any power over us is by the promises it makes that we will become happier if we do sin. Nobody does sin out of duty. The only motives for sin are pleasure — pleasure of power, pleasure of illicit sex, pleasure of prestige. There is a whole array of pleasures. And biblical faith is a reaching out to all that God is for us in Christ and a being satisfied with that so that the root of all these competing pleasures is severed by that superior satisfaction. So for those two reasons, faith inevitably produces a new lifestyle. If you leave faith at the intellectual level, you will never be able to explain the 12th article of the Thirty-Nine or the Westminster Confession or Galatians 5:6 and many other parts of Scripture.

Faith, Love, and the Holy Spirit

Now, that’s all rehearsal. Here are the questions I said I would raise tonight, and let me go through them one at a time and then take some text of Scripture that practically demonstrate how faith yields love. What’s the role of the Holy Spirit in this? I haven’t mentioned him much and in Reformation teaching he has been historically made the main producer of the fruit of love without reference to how faith produces love. Let’s just stay with Galatians. Let me show you three texts in Galatians that you can keep in your mind to put faith in the Holy Spirit and love together.

In Galatians 5:22, the fruit of the spirit is love. So it’s manifest on the face of the text that the agent in us by which we are enabled to love is the Holy Spirit. Galatians 5:6 we’ve already quoted, but it becomes very crucial now in relating the spirit to love and faith:

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.

So now you have the Holy Spirit producing love (Galatians 5:22), and you have faith working itself out in love (Galatians 5:6). What’s the link? How do they work? What’s the interrelationship of the work of the Spirit and the work of faith in the production of a life of love? That’s the goal of all Christianity, I believe. And the answer is in Galatians 3:5, which says:

Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith . . .

Here you have the link between the Spirit and faith and this miracle working power that’s described in the fruits of the Spirit, at least. There may be more to it, but it is at least that. Here’s my effort to put it together. If you ask me, “Where does the Holy Spirit come in?” I would say, “Faith is that instrument along which the Holy Spirit moves and comes powerfully into the life of a believer, overcoming fear, overcoming greed, defeating sin, and producing love.” The Holy Spirit does not produce his fruit apart from faith’s hearing and believing promises. This is not a magical thing separated from faith which embraces words.

Now, therein lies, in my judgment, a weakness of at least some Reformation explanations of how faith produces works. It skips this link of conscious embracing of promises and jumps over that to the Holy Spirit. If you read Calvin on how it is that justifying faith is always accompanied by good works and he jumps and simply says, “If you have faith, you have the Holy Spirit (jump). The Holy Spirit always produces love.” End of exposition. Well, all that’s true, but it does not help me psychologically know what to do in order to become a loving person. Do I just then wait? Do I say, “Okay, I’m a Christian now. Spirit, do something. Make me love.” And then we wait?

That’s not right. According to Galatians 3:5, “Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by . . .” It’s as though there’s something by which he does it. He’s not just doing it. He’s doing it by something and he rules out works and he says, and then he doesn’t just say “faith.” He says, “Hearing of faith,” which I take to mean gospel promises are made and faith, the future orientation of faith, reaches out and is embracing, resting in, and being satisfied by the promises that God has made in the gospel and in his word. And in doing that, the powers of unlove are broken.

The Self-Effacing Member of the Godhead

Now, there’s something really, really important here about the way the Holy Spirit works. The Holy Spirit is the humble member of the Trinity, in the sense that he is utterly self effacing. His ministry as J. I. Packer in his book, Keep in Step with the Spirit, drives home again and again simply from the gospel of John that his ministry is to glorify the Lord Jesus.

How does the Holy Spirit glorify the Lord Jesus in enabling us to produce works of love? He does it by staying underground and insisting that the means by which we move toward love is faith in all that God is for us in Jesus. He doesn’t zap you and make you a loving person and make you just wake up and suddenly be a loving person and you hadn’t thought about Jesus, you hadn’t thought about promises, and you hadn’t exercised faith. You’re just loving. But Jesus would not get glory if that happened. Jesus gets more glory in you becoming a loving person if the means by which you become a loving person is by becoming so satisfied in all that God is for you in Jesus that now you are consciously freed from the alternatives to love.

There’s something very profound here about how the Holy Spirit chooses to go underground, as it were, disappear beneath promises and disappear beneath faith, and say, “I’m down here and I’m enabling the whole thing. You couldn’t make one millimeter of a move of faith or love without me, but I want your conscious focus to be on the promises of the Lord Jesus. I want you to read his word. I don’t want you to wait just for me. I want you to read his word and get your heart so satisfied with all the gospel promises that Jesus has made and bought, that when you succeed in being so satisfied in him that you break the power of the satisfying promises of sin, he gets the credit, not the Holy Spirit.” That’s an amazing thing that the Holy Spirit chooses to do. We know he is doing it. We will praise him.

I sing songs of praise to the Holy Spirit. I pray to the Spirit, I thank the Spirit. He’s God, but his way of working is to really get us onto Jesus. That’s my answer to the first question. Please write down your questions and ask them at the end if anything is perplexing or you think it’s biblically out of whack here.

The Role of Gratitude

Here’s my second question: What’s the role of gratitude? The origin of that book, Future Grace, in large measure, was this conflict over the role of gratitude as I heard Christian leaders explaining it, including some that are my heroes. Let me try some really wild statements on you.

Nowhere in the Bible that I have been able to find — you can correct me if you can and I will, in the second edition of the book, fix it — is gratitude connected explicitly with obedience. Nevertheless, almost everybody in evangelicalism that I hear talk says the primary motive for obedience is gratitude, and you can’t find that in the Bible, period. That’s a weighty contention. I spent years deciding whether to go to print with that and asked many people to challenge me on that. The key word is explicit because I hear people saying, “Well, but what about this word on gratitude?” I say, “But there’s no explicit connection with obedience.” They say, “Well, what about this word?” I say, “But there’s no explicit connection.” It’s a theological construct that is so fixed in our brains that we see it where it ain’t, unless you see something I don’t see, which you’re welcome to point out to me later.

For example, Christian obedience is called a work of faith. It’s never called a work of gratitude. We find expressions like, “Live by faith,” and “Walk by faith,” but we never hear, “Live by gratitude,” or, “Walk by gratitude.” We find “faith working through love,” never “gratitude working through love.” We find “sanctification is by faith in the truth,” but we never find “sanctification is by gratitude.” We find “the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith,” but never “from sincere gratitude.” We find “faith without works is dead,” but not “gratitude without works is dead.” We find Jesus deals with the disciples’ hesitancy to seek the kingdom first because they were worried about food and clothing. He says, “Oh, men of little gratitude.” Is that what he said? No, that’s not what he said. He said, “Oh, men of little faith.” Faith in future grace, not gratitude, is the source of radical, risk taking, kingdom-seeking obedience in the Bible.

The Deficiency of Gratitude as a Motivation

Now, why is this important to me and I think it should be to you? I’m going to say something positive about gratitude a moment because it’s an absolutely essential affection if you’re a Christian and you’re not one if you don’t have gratitude, but here are three reasons that I have great concern about the way evangelicals talk about the source of obedience in gratitude.

Number one, it very easily slips into — I’ve heard it, I’ve seen it in hymnology, and I’ve heard it in Sunday school lessons and I’ve heard it from a very articulate Christian spokesman — a debtor’s ethic, which talks in terms of paying God back even though we can’t. It says that you should try.

Thy life was given for me; What have I given for thee?

Now, you can’t pay God back, period, ever, not one little bit, and the reason is because every effort at virtue that you make — every effort to love, every effort to believe, every effort to worship — is a new gift of grace and you just go further into debt. That’s the first reason. You cannot pay God back at all because every little effort at doing a right or good thing toward people or God is another work of sovereign grace that puts you further in debt. It does not help get you out of debt by payback.

Here’s the second reason. If we could succeed in paying God back a little bit, to that degree, grace would no longer be grace. It would be a business transaction. The atonement did not establish an amortization schedule for a lifelong of paybacks called obedience. It didn’t. It can’t. Grace would not be grace if you could pay any of it back.

The third reason is that the whole talk about gratitude being the ground of obedience or the motive of obedience directs our attention backward instead of forward, where true power exists to release obedience. In other words, if I’m right in everything I’ve said up to this point, that it’s faith in future grace which is the power to sever the root of sin, the whole talk about getting your strength from gratitude sets you looking in the other direction, namely backward, which I think lames the church. I think the church is lame because they have not discovered the glory of faith in future grace.

You can’t run your car on gratitude for yesterday’s gas. That’s the phrase that helps me most. You cannot run your car on gratitude for yesterday’s gas and all of our cars run out of gas at the end of the day. You need new grace for tomorrow’s obedience, not gratitude for yesterday’s grace. You can’t run the car on gratitude for yesterday’s grace. You wind up a legalist if you do that. You have to have new grace for tomorrow’s new obedience and whether you believe that grace is going to be there for you tomorrow is where you get your power to love. If you don’t believe there’ll be grace for you tomorrow in the hard challenging ways of love, you will either muster your strength to do it and become a legalist or you’ll despair and drop out of the ministry, and neither is a very good alternative.

Sacrifice by Confidence in Future Reward

I’ll give you a very concrete illustration of where I got all riled up about this two years ago. I won’t tell you the name of the person. Everybody in this room would know the name of the spokesman, but I was on a speaking schedule with this person and I heard him give a talk. He articulated the debtor’s ethic perfectly and I thought deplorably, and I was scheduled to speak the next morning. I stayed up all night, wrote a new message. I got up and the main thing I was responding to was an illustration that went like this. It was a powerful illustration. I love it. I used it in a book. Some of you’ve read this, I think it’s recorded in Bridge Over the River Kwai.

In the Second World War, there was a concentration camp situation and the Japanese were holding Americans and there were 20 Americans and they did menial hard labor and at the end of the day, they’d come in, put their shovels up against the wall, and they’d count the shovels. If they were all there, they’d go back to their barracks. One day they put the shovels up against the wall and the Japanese guard counted them, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and got 19 shovels and turned around, infuriated at these 20 Americans, and held his gun up and said, “I’m going to shoot five of you dead if the delinquent person who broke or lost his shovel doesn’t step forward right now.” At about five seconds, a 19-year-old boy stepped forward, took him to the side, and shot him dead. And then before he dismissed them, he counted the shovels again just to make sure that there was not another one missing and there were 20. He miscounted.

This 19-year-old boy gave his life to save his friends and this speaker said it was an illustration of the gratitude ethic. Jesus had done so much for him and now out of gratitude, he would do it for the others. As I sat there, I thought to myself. We’ll get to these texts where I get this in a moment. I thought, “If I were that 19-year-old boy, no doubt there might flash through my mind quickly the cross and the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus.” But what would happen in my mind, I hope and I pray, is that I would think of Romans 8:32, which says:

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. I’m going to step forward because the cross purchased my future and death is gain. That’s faith in future grace. To die is gain. And with that in mind, I’ll step forward, “Take my life.” I was lying in my bed last night just thinking about this, thinking that if this guard had given him a chance to say anything, what would he say? Because he doesn’t want to lie. See, he doesn’t want to say, “I stole the shovel.” He doesn’t want his last act to be a lie. I think he would say, “It would be an honor, sir, to die for these men and to go be with Jesus.” I think that’s what he ought to say.

The Ground of All Future Grace

I don’t know whether this sounds like a big deal to you, but to me, to turn from looking backward to the cross where Christ died to looking forward to what he died for is how we should live. But to me, that’s the difference between a life of radical, sacrificial love and a life of duty-bound legalistic striving. Because if grace isn’t coming to me in 5 minutes and in 50 years and in 5,000 years, and I try to do the Christian life in the future on the basis of something that I experienced or that God did in the past, I’m living on my own strength and that will be a defeat. If you ask me, “What’s the glory of the cross?” I would say it’s Romans 8:32. That is my favorite verse in the Bible:

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all . . .

That’s past grace. That’s bygone grace. It is absolutely and gloriously the foundation of and purchasing of everything in my future, because the rest of the verse says:

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

The whole point in the flow of thought in Romans 8:32, is, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” And he moves right on into peril and sword and the fact that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. You stare your future right in the face and if it’s a sword, if it’s nakedness, if it’s peril, it doesn’t matter because that cross bought this future and you can trust this future grace because of that security. The function of looking back is for the assurance of looking forward. That’s the reason to look back to the cross, not to be fixed there as though faith were a past-oriented thing. That’s the platform on which we stand in order to look confidently into the face of all the threats of the future and keep on loving and keep on sacrificing and keep on serving.

Biblical Evidence for Faith in future Grace

Well, let me move, finally, then, to illustrate from some texts how the New Testament, especially the book of Hebrews, shows love to come from faith in future grace. Before I jump to Hebrews, let me take you to Matthew 5. I’ll just show you. These are samples. I could do what I’m doing right now in dozens of texts, but we’ll only have time for a few. Matthew 5. I did my dissertation at the University of Munich on this text. I hardly understood it in those days, I think, compared to what I understand now and all the academic gobbledygook that I had to deal with in German university. There may be a tenth of the book that’s something I’d want to hold onto today. It’s not that I deny anything in it. It’s just that you have to deal with so much junk, That’s the price of scholarship.

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:43–44).

Now, let’s just pause and ask, where does this come from? Loving your enemies is a very unnatural way to live. It goes against almost everything in human nature. We hate our enemies. We want to get the last word, we want to put them down, we want to show that we’re right, and we want to get them in their place. Love, prayer, compassion, suffering, and sacrifice for them? No way. That is not a human thing to do. So where does it happen? Where’s it come from? Let’s go back to the beginning of the chapter. Keep in mind that Matthew 5:44 said, “Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.”

Now let’s go Matthew 5:11–12:

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you . . .

This is the same situation, okay? Love those who persecute you in Matthew 5:44 and here Jesus says:

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you (Matthew 5:11–12).

Now when I put those two texts together and ask, “Which is harder, to pray for your enemy, or to rejoice and be glad when you are reviled and persecuted?” I think it’s much harder to rejoice than to pray. I can dutifully pray that my enemy would get saved, or that things would go well for them and they would meet God. I could do that, but to be happy?

Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount puts it even more strongly. It says, “Be glad and leap for joy when you are persecuted.” The word is like a lamb coming out of the stall. Now, that’s weird. Where does it come from? Now we have an answer in this text. We have an answer: “Rejoice and be glad.” Why does it say that? You tell me. What’s the text say? It’s because your reward is great in heaven. That’s future grace, folks. Do you believe that?

He says the reason you can rejoice and be glad when you’re persecuted and reviled is because great is your reward in heaven. That’s what the boy, the 19-year-old boy, thought or should have thought. When he stepped forward, among all the swirling Christian truth he’d been taught as a child, should rise among other thoughts, a decisive thought, “Jesus said it’s blessed to do this sort of thing. I can be happy at this moment in laying down my life for this persecutor because great is my reward in five minutes — Jesus.” The power of faith in future grace is awesome to produce love.

That’s an illustration from Jesus. I could take you to Luke 14:12–14, where he says to take into your home the lame and those who can’t pay you back. Why? It’s because you will be paid back at the resurrection of the just. That’s faith in future grace. I could take you to Luke 12:32 and show you that you should sell your possessions and give alms. Why? It’s because you provide for yourself purses that do not grow old, a treasure in the heavens that does not fade. That’s future grace. But I’m not going to take you there. I’m going to take you to Hebrews as we draw this to a close.

Future Grace in the Book of Hebrews

I want to show you a train of thought in the book of Hebrews that gripped me some years ago and gave me tremendous confidence in preaching these things. I have no doubt that faith in future grace is a dynamite power to produce love. After I show you these three or four texts in Hebrews, I just hope it’s so plain that you will say, “Goodness, that’s just as obvious as the day is long. How can it be controversial?” Let’s start in the middle then jump backward and then jump forward.

The one text I already quoted is Hebrews 11:1, which says:

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Then all of Hebrews 11 describes people who were doing things by faith, a lot of different things they were doing. Faith works. This is a bunch of workers here in Hebrews 11. You hear, “By faith, by faith, by faith.” And what is faith? The assurance of things hoped for, so by the assurance of things hoped for, they were working. Now, look at Hebrews 11:6 just to spell out a little further the nature of faith:

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

That’s future grace. That’s the assurance things hoped for, and the reward is fundamentally God. All that God is for us in Jesus is the reward that we must believe in if we have faith to come to God. So those two verses (Hebrews 11:1 and Hebrews 11:6) set up the definition of faith in the book of Hebrew.

A Better and Abiding Possession

Now let’s go back to chapter 10:32–34. I love these people. Oh, I love this paragraph. This is one of my favorite stories in all the Bible:

But recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings . . . (Hebrews 10:32).

It was in one of those lines in a song we sang. I wish I could remember the exact wording, but it was that in our sufferings we show the glories of our Christ. Suffering is normative. The Great Commission will not be completed without martyrs. There are no closed countries. That’s a blasphemous idea. It’s totally unintelligible to the apostle Paul. What in the world do we mean? You might be killed? Of course, you might be killed. How else will the gospel spread? Do we wait until we won’t be killed to spread the gospel? What kind of Christianity is that? What book does that come from? I mean, it’s just asinine missiology. Well, excuse me.

They were enlightened. It continues:

You endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property . . . (Hebrews 10:32–34).

Now stop right there. Be careful. Stop right there. Get the scene. In the early days of this church, they were mighty in their witness and some of them immediately were jailed and some were not jailed. The ones who were not jailed went underground for a few minutes and they talked: “What should we do? Because if we go and visit them in the jail, like Jesus said love does, they might throw us in jail. Then what would our children do? And what about our property?” And they said, “Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. The body they may kill. God’s truth abideth still. His kingdom is forever. The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life. Let’s go.” And they went. That’s what it means when it says, “Sometimes you were partners with those so treated, for you had compassion on the prisoners.”

What happened as they headed for the jail? It says their goods were plundered. Other versions speak in the language of more official confiscation. It doesn’t really matter. They lost their homes and their furniture. Their houses were on fire. They looked over their shoulder, they were throwing chairs out in the street, rocks through the windows, a big mob scene, and what was their emotional response? Tell me. It was joy. This is a very strange thing. Christians are strange people. There aren’t many Christians around today in America. In America, if you touch my property, I’m not going to be happy. Get out of my face. I’ve got my right.

They joyfully accepted the plundering on your property. Now, here comes the reason, which is the same as Matthew 5:12. It says:

Since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one (Hebrews 10:34).

How can we not believe in the power of faith in future grace? I’ve got a possession, folks, called the presence of Jesus and I would rather have that than anything in the world. Everything is rubbish compared to that. It is a better possession and an abiding one and if I have that, then if that Lord calls me to this sacrificial service of love and it costs me, I can sing. I don’t know if you noticed this, but in those two adjectives, “a better possession and an abiding one,” I hear a psalm. Anyone hear a psalm there, a verse? I hear Psalm 16:11, which says:

You make known to me the path of life;
     in your presence there is fullness of joy;
     at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

The presence of the Lord is what we’re talking about here. Do you believe it? Now, the word “believe” is “being satisfied by.” Are you so satisfied by the promise of the presence of the Lord Jesus when you die, or when you suffer the loss of your property, that you can let goods and kindred go and this mortal life also, joyfully? Until we can, we’ve not yet learned to live by faith in future grace. That was a loving thing for them to do and they did it, according to Hebrews 10:34, since they knew that they had a better possession and an abiding one — that is, they had faith in future grace and it released love.

Forsaking the Fleeting Pleasures of Egypt

Look at Hebrews 11:26 for another illustration. These are so close in their construct of thought. I happen to think Barnabas wrote Hebrews, but that’s a wild guess. I wrote a paper one time and argued for Barnabas. Nobody knows who wrote Hebrews, but I named one of my sons Barnabas and I would like to think that he wrote a book in the Bible. But whoever it was, if he were standing right here, I think he would be saying to me, “You got it.” I mean, there is a lot I don’t get about Hebrews. It’s a hard book, but the moral motive paradigm in Hebrews 10, 11, and 12, I think I’ve got. Look at Moses here:

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin (he’s a Christian Hedonist). He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward (Hebrews 11:24–26).

There it is. Where do you get the strength to leave Egypt behind, America, Australia? Call it what you will. Where do you get the strength to leave it behind and embrace abuse as wealth with joy? Answer: You look to the reward called, in my vocabulary, future grace. It’s the faith in future grace that severs Egypt. This cuts the root of Egypt right out of your life. Egypt controls the church. Why is the church so controlled by Egypt, driven by materialism, in love with their second and third houses and cars and toys and not about to let their sons or daughters, let alone themselves, be sacrificed in anybody’s closed country? What is that? That’s unbelief in future grace. It’s never having fallen in love with and being satisfied with the reward.

The thought is, “We are satisfied, thank you, with our retirement plan and with our good schools and our nice neighborhood and anything that would jeopardize our security and our comfort cannot be the will of my loving Father, who wants me to be happy now on Egypt’s terms.”

For the Joy Set Before Him

The last illustration, and then I’m done, is one you all know in Hebrews 12:1–2. It’s the Lord Jesus:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Jesus endured the cross and despised the shame for the joy that was set before him. He did it by faith in future grace.

Questions and Answers

You said we shouldn’t be motivated by gratitude but what about the book of Deuteronomy when Israel is told to obey God because he brought them out of Egypt?

Well, you need to show me one of those texts in Deuteronomy because that’s the book that’s thrown up and nobody has been able to point those out to me, so you come to me afterwards and show me one of those texts. I don’t think there are any there. I think what you’re doing is very appropriately pointing out the dynamic of the backward glance that is enabling the future obedience, but the question is, how does it? What’s the psychological dynamic? What I did not do is read page 48 of Future Grace to show how I see the interplay of gratitude fit with this. I don’t know if this will help any, but for me, I think gratitude in the Bible is always something for what God has done in the past. So when I look back at the glory of the Exodus as a Jew, say, and I feel that he brought me on eagle’s wings out of slavery and loved me that much and I’m overwhelmed with the grace of God’s acceptance of a recalcitrant people in Egypt and he willingly preserved me in the wilderness and the shirt didn’t wear out on my back and the shoes didn’t wear out of my feet and manna came from heaven and quail came from nowhere and water came out of the rock — what a God — as I turn now toward taking this land, what works?

He says, “Come on, Caleb, Joshua. Go, I’ll do it.” And 10 of them don’t believe he can do it and two of them believe, “Of course, he can do it. How do we know that? Look what kind of God he is. Look what kind of power he had. Look what kind of grace he showed. He will do it.” But the power to enter the promised land was faith that he would do it. It’s faith in future grace. I don’t know that we’re saying two different things, but I’m really stressing that it would be a mistake to turn toward the future and instead of trusting God’s future grace to split the Jordan and defeat the enemies, I’m going in the power of gratitude somehow to do it myself.

You say that saving faith means being satisfied in all that God is for us in Jesus, but wouldn’t it be better to say that’s a necessary proof instead of saying that faith is being satisfied in God? Isn’t it more accurate to say that faith is dependence upon God?

I tried to give a little bit of a textual basis for it last night. I have two chapters on it in Future Grace. I do not mean to define it exclusively as being satisfied with all that God. I’m saying that is an essential element. Now, you’re saying it’s a necessary proof. Is that a fair statement? The reason is because when I try to bore in experientially on the metaphors depend, rely, trust, and leave out the component of being satisfied by, I don’t think they are adequate. I don’t think they are genuine faith until there is something more. If I say I’m supposed to lean on the promise of God, depend on it, trust in it, rest in it, I mean, how can you say that and not say, find it satisfying? Because if you say, “I lean on it, I depend on it, I trust in it, but it doesn’t satisfy my soul,” I can’t call that faith.

I’ve written three books to argue that we’ve missed massive categories of pleasure and delight and satisfaction, all Christian Hedonism categories. For generations neglected, to our great, great weakness in evangelicalism. You may be absolutely right that my pendulum is over here.

If all we can do is go deeper and deeper into the debt of God’s grace and never merit anything, then how do we account for rewards in heaven?

I think all of the rewards I will ever receive are total grace. I don’t think I’ll ever earn a single thing from the Lord. Wow, you’re a classic covenant theologian, then. I don’t think it’s possible to earn anything from the Lord because the only energy and effort that I have to offer him, he supplies. Hebrews 13:21 says, “May the Lord supply you with everything good, working in you that which is pleasing in his sight.” So what I’m going to get rewards for is being pleasing in his sight and he’s the one who produces what pleases him, therefore, I cannot earn it. He owns the money. What do I have that I did not receive and if I received it, how can I boast as though it were not a gift? I don’t have any category in my theology whatsoever for earning anything from God.