QUESTION

Your teaching on the Gospel in Chairs has been impactful for me. It has been a great revelation about the heart of the Father and his grace and mercy. It gave me a new lens for reading the Old Testament. I first heard it some years ago, and then used that grace message to create teachings for our kids that they might walk in the love of the Father from their youngest days. It’s been a blessing.

Recently, while you were talking about the Sermon on the Mount, a gentleman asked you, “Do you believe we are saved through faith in Jesus?” Could you please clarify your response for me?

RESPONSE

Thanks for your important question. The most straightforward answer is, “Yes, of course. We are saved through faith in Jesus.” No doubt about it. If we include translations that use either the phrase “believe in” or “faith in” Jesus, we can gather dozens of verses from across the New Testament to make that claim.

That’s the easy part. But as you noted, in the context of the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 5-7), Jesus brings some important nuances and cautions. Three came to mind immediately:

• “Blessed are the peacemakers. They will be called children of God” (5:9). What if someone claims faith in Jesus but not only fails to be a peacemaker, but even despite their claim, reject Jesus’ call to love, bless, and prayer for our enemies? (Over 72% of Christians in America, according to one survey). In 5:44-45, Jesus says that we are “children of the Father” by imitating the Father’s example of radical forgiveness and indiscriminate hospitality (grace).

• “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (7:21). In this passage, Jesus distinguishes between those who claim Jesus is Lord from those who live with Jesus as Lord. They are not known by their claims or even their ministries (prophecy, exorcisms, and miracles — 7:22) but by the fruit of their lives (7:15-20), which he distills in verse 12 as the “Golden Rule.”

• “Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like the wise man who built his house on the rock” (7:24-27). This raises the question of “faith in Jesus” or “belief in Jesus.” This sermon has less to do with making the right claim or having the right theology, but about alignment with the revelation of our gracious heavenly Father revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. That is, for Jesus, “faith in” or “belief in” is a way of being that he also calls “following.”

So, at the very outset of Jesus’ ministry, he is already scrambling our assumptions about faith claims. See, for example, the parable of the two sons in Matthew 21:28-32. In my talk, I used the example of my friend and Muslim brother, Safi Kaskas. He does not claim to be a Christian, but he saturates himself in the Sermon on the Mount and says, “I cannot be a good Muslim unless I follow Jesus.” So he deliberately hears the words of Jesus and follows him in the obedience of a life of peacemaking.

The challenge is then whether it is better to be a Muslim who follows Jesus or a Christian who doesn’t. Which of the two brothers has actually “put their faith in Jesus”? The one who says he believes but does not follow in practice, or the one who heeds the call to follow Jesus by walking in the Jesus Way?

But that’s only the beginning. In Safi’s case, his alignment with Jesus is deliberate. What of those who live the Jesus Way without specifically knowing the good news of Jesus or confessing the Lordship of Christ?

It would be easiest to make our confession of “faith in Jesus” our exclusive criterion. We’d like the certainty of a zero-sum logic that says, “If we are saved by faith in Christ, then without faith in Christ, we are not saved.” That is, until you knowingly bow the knee to Christ, you aren’t saved. Again, Christ himself offers a huge caveat in his final sermon of Matthew: the parable of the sheep and goats (25:31-46).

This parable presents an enormous challenge to the belief that our faith claims are both automatic and exclusive. Jesus lays out a criteria for the final judgment (31) that is so unfamiliar to the gospel we see preached, even in the book of Acts, that it’s jarring. But because it’s Jesus’ own words, I don’t want to smooth over it too easily. Here are the key problems:

• The criterion for inclusion does not appear to be faith in Jesus but rather receiving Jesus through those on the margins who we serve (34-40).

• The criterion for exclusion does not appear to be unbelief in Jesus but rather, rejecting Jesus through failing to serve those on the margins (41-46).

• Most striking of all, the sheep are surprised to be included, and the goats are surprised to be excluded! Unlike my friend Safi, the sheep include those who align with Jesus without realizing it.

Here is a principle from the Orthodox tradition that I’ve found helpful: “We know where salvation is found. We don’t know where it is not.”

We have such an example in the story of Peter and Cornelius (Acts 10:1-11:18). Here we are surprised, along with the apostle Peter, to find a man whose prayers God hears (10:4), whose charity God sees (10:31), to whom God’s visions come and to whom God’s angel speaks (10:2-3, 30-31). Moreover, God considers Cornelius “righteous” (10:22), “acceptable” (10:35), and “clean” (11:9).

Now here is the mindblower: all the above is true before he becomes a Christian, before he knowingly puts his faith in Christ. Unless, that is, his faith is already in Jesus Christ, although he doesn’t yet recognize it.

Notice, too, that while Peter is shown by Jesus that Cornelius is a God-fearer who is righteous, acceptable, and clean before God, two very important add-ons follow in the story. (1) Peter still tells him the story of Jesus, and (2) the Holy Spirit falls in a new way on Cornelius (again, before he responds to the gospel… unless coming to Peter’s house to hear the gospel already counts (10:33)!

If Cornelius is already righteous and acceptable, why share the gospel of Jesus with him? As I mentioned in my talk, John Wesley asked the same question when evangelizing Indigenous people in North America. He was surprised to discover that many “First Nations” people already had an active faith, knew God in an authentic way, and had responded to the Light they had been given. Indeed, without knowing his name or his story, they had already turned to “the true Light who gives light to everyone that comes into the world” (John 1:9).

That raises the question, “Then why share the good news of Jesus?” I love Wesley’s two-fold answer, and I see it in Peter’s actions:

• We share the good news of Jesus with those who have already turned to the light of the one true God so that they experience the full assurance of their faith. Many who know God are still “God-fearers” like Cornelius, who wonder if their prayers are heard, and their lives are accepted by God. But in coming to know Jesus Christ, they become “God-lovers” who know the joy of what God-in-Christ has done for them. “You are accepted, forgiven, reconciled, beloved children of God!”

• We share the good news of Jesus with those who have already turned to the light of the one true God so that they experience the full inheritance of their faith. That is, they come to know and relate to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in a deeper way, receiving the gift of the Spirit who was already speaking to them, drawing them, and transforming their hearts.

So as an evangelist, I seek to invite everyone, claiming Christian faith or not, into a deeper experience of and participation in the grace of God. And this means that we don’t need to separate faith and deeds (as both Paul and James clarify). Rather, we speak passionately and obsessively about Christ, the Light of the world, and invite everyone who will listen to turn to the One who never once turned from us and come to the One who has already come for us.

As a critical  P.S. to that last statement, the New Testament phrase “we are saved by faith in Jesus” can often, equally, or perhaps better be translated, “we are saved by the faithfulness of Jesus.” It is actually Jesus, not my faith, that saves me. But, yes, a response to Jesus brings me into an experience of the salvation that he has achieved for me, is achieving in me, and will ultimately achieve for us all.

(Sidenote: This is why I cringe a little when we refer to the day when we confess Christ as “when I got saved.” I was saved 2000 years ago, I am on a salvation journey before, during, and after my confession, and I will be saved completely when I am raised from death to eternal life. So I tend to say of my conversion, “When I came to Christ” or “turned to Christ.” That was a landmark in the much longer and bigger story of my salvation).

For a more in-depth study on this topic, with many Cornelius-style examples, see my book, IN: Incarnation & Inclusion, Abba  & Lamb.

Book Description of IN:

The question addressed in this brief work is how Christ-followers might hold the tension of these two abiding and complementary truths: 1. Christ’s one-of-a-kind revelation 2. Abba’s all-inclusive love. Bradley Jersak believes that Sacred Scripture and Christ himself affirm both these doctrines in mind-blowing fullness.

And yet those who enthusiastically profess either one of these two truths frequently do so at the expense of their complement. Jersak argues for both the unique revelation of Christ and the all-inclusive love of Abba.

IN lays out biblical and experiential evidence for integrating and celebrating both these truths together, espousing the beautiful gospel of Christ’s unique revelation of Abba’s all-inclusive love. By “Christ,” Jersak refers not to some abstract, ethereal or disincarnate spirit. Following the Apostolic tradition, he specifies Christ as” our one Lord Jesus Christ,” the Lamb crucified and risen, whose singular revelation unveiled God as our eternal, cruciform, and loving Abba.

His primary lens for this synthesis is the prologue of John’s Gospel, where we see: God’s One and Only Lamb, crucified and risen—this Word who speaks ALL into being, this Light who shines on all and in all, this Life who breathes life into all, this One unveils God as Our All-merciful, All-embracing Abba.

God’s banqueting table is wide open because of Christ. The higher our Christology, the wider we will perceive the reach of Abba’s love. The banquet metaphor is a way to think about both the uniqueness of Christ and the inclusivity of his Abba. The Master of the feast instructed his servants to invite and compel all to join in the feast. There’s a seat and setting reserved for every human in history. IN magnifies both these glorious truths clearly.