The guardians of ‘free-will’ have exemplified the saying: ‘out of the frying-pan, into the fire.’ In their zeal to disagree with the Pelagians they start denying condign merit, and by the very form of their denial they set it up more firmly! By word and pen they deny it, but really, in their hearts, they establish it, and are worse than the Pelagians upon two counts. In the first place, the Pelagians confess and assert condign merit straightforwardly, candidly and honestly, calling a spade a spade and teaching what they really hold. But our friends here, who hold and teach the same view, try to fool us with lying words and false appearances, giving out that they disagree with the Pelagians, when there is nothing that they are further from doing! ‘If you regard our pretences, we appear as the Pelagians’ bitterest foes; but if you regard the facts and our hearts, we are Pelagians double-dyed.’ (Luther, Bondage of the Will)
To the Reformers, the crucial question was not simply, whether God justifies believers without works of law. It was the broader question, whether sinners are wholly helpless in their sin, and whether God is to be thought of as saving them by free, unconditional, invincible grace, not only justifying them for Christ’s sake when they come to faith, but also raising them from the death of sin by His quickening Spirit in order to bring them to faith. Here was the crucial issue; whether God is the author, not merely of justification, but also of faith; whether, in the last analysis, Christianity is a religion of utter reliance on God for salvation and all things necessary to it, or of self-reliance and self-effort. (“Historical and Theological Introduction” to Bondage of the Will)
According to Packer and Johnson (in their “Historical and Theological Introduction” to Bondage of the Will) it is a crucial issue in Christianity of whether faith is thought to be of self or of God. Without going into all or even many of the issues of faith, a true and living faith can only come from life Himself. A true and living faith cannot come from sinners who are dead in sins and trespasses, but it must come from life. In other words, a dead sinner cannot have a living faith, but instead must be made a living soul that it may be a “faithing” soul. The words of Christ are received by those dead in sin as dead letters, but those with life in their souls receive the words of Christ as life.
There are so many wrong kinds of faith and deceptive things about false faiths that we must be very careful here as well. All people have some kind of faith, and all those who have any sort of belief in God have some form of faith in God. But few of those have true faith because few of those have a faith that came from God. Instead, we have so many who trust in themselves to have faith and so their faith is a fleshly faith and so a fleshly faith has as its real object of faith the flesh. True enough a fleshly faith will use religious words and Christian words, but it is still a faith that came from the flesh and so it can never have in reality a faith that is greater than the flesh. This should show that the origin of faith is vital to a true and living faith.
If God is not the author and sustainer of faith, then the flesh is the author and sustainer of faith. If the “free-will” is the author of faith, then faith comes from a source that is free of grace as well. So we are left once again looking at whether a faith that is free of grace can produce a salvation that is of grace alone. No, it cannot. For a salvation to be by grace alone faith must be by grace alone as well. This is why the issue of whether God is the author of faith or not is indeed crucial and not just something to ignore. To the degree the issue of faith is thought of as unimportant in regards of justification is the degree that justification by grace alone through faith alone is misunderstood or ignored. This issue is so crucial that it is at the very heart of Christianity and the Gospel. The sinner must look to God alone for justification and all that goes with justification and all that is needed to be justified or the sinner must look to himself or a third party for what is lacking. When the sinner does not look to God for faith, the sinner is looking to himself or a third part what something that is essential for salvation and that of necessity means that the sinner is not trusting in Christ alone.
No matter how one slices it or how one plays with words, the sinner is either looking to himself or to God for faith in order to be justified. Even if we ignore this we are teaching people something about faith and its origin. If we do not teach people the origin of faith and their great need to be broken from looking to themselves for faith, they will look to themselves. It is at this point that so many who are Reformed in creed are actually teaching (perhaps by silence) what at the heart of it is Pelagianism. If we teach a justification that is orthodox all the way through except we don’t teach people about the crucial issue of the origin of faith, we are more dangerous than those who teach a false gospel openly. It is that serious. But as Luther says, ‘If you regard our pretences, we appear as the Pelagians’ bitterest foes; but if you regard the facts and our hearts, we are Pelagians double-dyed.’
God Loves... Himself 
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