We can now move into a discussion on the issue of faith. With the last BLOG in mind, we can question if faith is either a spiritual act or the act of the natural man. Man must believe in Christ, true enough, but what does that mean? Does it mean that man has the capacity within his fallen nature to believe on Christ and be saved? Is man commanded to do what he has in his natural power to do? We know that all the commands of God are really ways that men are to love God. While man has the capacity within his fallen nature to do the outward commands of God, man does not have the capacity in his fallen nature to love God in doing the outward commandments. While it is true that man may have some capacity to have an external belief in some way in Christ, it is not true that man can believe in Christ from a love for Christ. Only the faith that is accompanied or consists in love is saving faith.
Many believed in Christ in biblical times but were not converted (John 2:23-25). They saw a miracle or heard His words and believed in some way, but were not converted. Nicodemus was told that he must be born again to see the kingdom. In John 6 Jesus fed thousands and the people believed in some way and sought Christ. But they did not seek Him out of love for His Person; they sought Him for more free food. By the end of the chapter they had all left Him. They believed in a sense but their deepest convictions and loves were not for Christ but self. What we must see, then, is that true faith operates in the spiritual realm. The Gospel is not just a list of historical facts; it is the display of the glory of God. A person cannot just have some sort of historical belief in Christ that the natural man can come up with, but that person must see the glory of God in Christ in order to savingly believe. Man cannot believe in Christ with a love for Christ while maintaining a core belief in and love for himself.
One cannot believe in Christ apart from believing who He really is. Christ was the very temple of the glory of God and the very outshining of the glory of God. To believe in Christ is to believe in Him as the display of God. To believe in Christ in truth is to see Him as the shining forth of the glory of God. To believe the Gospel is to see the glory of God in the Gospel. No man has natural ability to do this; it is the work of the Spirit of God. This is clear in other texts, but especially clear in II Corinthians 4:4-6 which teaches us that the Gospel is the shining forth of the glory of God in Christ. Faith in Christ is not the kind of faith that the fallen man has the capacity for, but instead this kind of faith is one that requires man to have a spiritual capacity given to him. One must have the capacity to see the glory of God in Christ and so the Gospel is far more than a belief in some historical information, it is a change of heart so that one trusts in Christ alone because one has been changed from a self-centered heart to one that loves Christ and delights in the glory of God in Christ as it shines in the Gospel.
The natural man is bound up in self-love and cannot see the Gospel of God as good news if he has to repent of his self-love. To believe the Gospel of the glory of God requires that man no longer be the center of his own love. The Gospel requires that man die to self and repent of his selfish actions and even die to the very core of his self-centered being in order to love and believe in what is truly good news. No natural man will ever believe in the Gospel of the outshining of God’s glory in Christ. Men hate God. If we change the Gospel to make man the center of it, then men will flood to it. If the Gospel is presented to where man is still in control just a little and make it all about him, then man is not humbled and brought to a point where he is even able to trust in Christ alone. Man has to stop trusting in what he can do in his fallen nature and that capacity. Man has to look to Christ alone with spiritual eyes and that only happens by grace and grace alone. A true faith from a spiritual capacity will only happen when man does not trust in himself to believe but is given a true faith in Christ with a spiritual capacity.
Faith is either an act of the natural man and is within the fallen man’s capacity or it is the act of a man made new in Christ with a spiritual capacity. We must force ourselves to look at this in this way. If it is an act of the natural man and can be done within the fallen man’s capacity, then we will have to instruct man or evangelize him in that way. If saving faith is not within the fallen man’s capacity but instead is something that man does by a new capacity given to him by grace alone, then we have to evangelize and instruct man in accordance with that. If man does not have the capacity within his fallen nature to savingly believe, that instructs us in regards how to instruct the people we speak to. If we teach people in a way where they believe they have that ability to do from a capacity that they do not have, then we are instructing them falsely and in a way that can and does lead to many being deceived. Jesus told us that no one can come to Him unless the Father draws him (John 6:44). In the next verse he tells us what is meant by that. It is the Father teaching them. It is only those who hear and learn from the Father that will come to Christ. That is not the same thing as having the capacity to do it themselves. We must teach this.
God Loves... Himself 
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