Theological term
Saving Faith
65 sermons · All terms
John 1:12-13
What is saving faith, and how does it relate to knowledge, truth, and the new birth? Expounding John 1:12–13, this study argues that saving faith is not a leap into uncertainty, a vague encounter with a divine person, or something greater than opinion but less than knowledge — it is genuine knowledge of revealed truth, specifically the propositional truths of Holy Scripture concerning Jesus Christ. The study establishes four foundational principles: regeneration must precede faith, truth is the instrumental cause and object of faith, Jesus Christ is the central content of that truth, and faith ordinarily comes through the preaching of the word.
A Potential Danger Identified
Deuteronomy 7:17–26 identifies a specific temptation that would face Israel on the threshold of Canaan: the temptation to doubt God's faithfulness when confronted by nations greater than themselves. Drawing on the failure of the first generation recorded in Numbers 13–14 and Deuteronomy 1, the exposition works through Moses' five-part antidote to that doubt — a corrective, an exhortation to remember the Exodus, an encouragement from God's provision, a reminder of God's character, and a repeated command to destroy idols utterly. The cross-covenantal application presses believers to resist unbelief by rehearsing what God has already accomplished in Christ, and to cultivate a hatred of sin that guards against the gradual snare of idolatry.
The Thief on the Cross
Luke 23:39–43 presents the conversion of the dying thief and Christ's response as a window into both the nature of saving faith and the character of Christ as a willing, able, and sovereign Savior. The thief's transformation — from blaspheming Christ to confessing his own guilt, acknowledging Christ's innocence, and calling upon him as Lord — illustrates the marks of genuine repentance and the power of sovereign grace working from without. Christ's reply, 'Today you will be with me in paradise,' demonstrates that he saves to the uttermost even from the cross itself, suffering hell there so that the penitent sinner need not. The sermon closes with a warning against presumptuous delay of repentance and a clear affirmation that salvation is always by grace alone, never by works.
A Centurion Came to Him
Matthew 8:5–13 presents a Roman centurion whose faith Jesus described as unparalleled in Israel, and this exposition draws out six marks of that saving faith: it seeks mercy, confesses unworthiness, rests on Christ's word alone, recognises his sovereign authority, finds hope outside superstition and ceremony, and is always rewarded by God. The sermon opens by distinguishing miracles that illustrate sovereign regeneration from those that illustrate the reception of sinners who come in faith, placing this healing firmly in the second category. A closing contrast with Mark 6:1–6 — where Jesus marvelled at the absence of faith in his own hometown — presses the application: privilege without faith forfeits blessing, while humble confidence in Christ's word is always honoured.
The God of Heaven, Earth, and Prostitutes
Joshua 2 presents one of Scripture's most startling demonstrations of sovereign grace: God saves Rahab, a pagan harlot of Jericho, through her faith in the God of Israel. Her confession — that Yahweh alone is God in heaven above and on earth beneath — echoes Israel's own creed from Deuteronomy 4:39 and constitutes a genuine renunciation of paganism. Her conduct, conviction, and flight to the mercy of Jehovah form a textbook pattern of conversion, and she is honored in the genealogy of Christ, in Hebrews 11, and in James 2. The sermon calls hearers to marvel that God sovereignly saves notorious sinners, and that the church is not a club for the respectable but a refuge for the broken who have been brought near through the blood of Christ.