Let us turn to our Bibles to 1st Timothy chapter 4, 1st Timothy chapter 4, verse 10. We’ve already gone over these verses around here, so now I am delving in again. In part of this verse, let us listen attentively to the Word of God.
Verse 10, For to this end we both labor and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God. Let us pray. And in these words, Lord God Almighty, may this be the echo of all our hearts here this morning, that we trust in the living God.
And as we renew our understanding again of trust and of faith, Lord, and especially for those who do not have trust and faith, may this sermon help indeed all of us to get and to grow closer to you and strengthen our faith, even our weak faith, we pray by Christ our Lord. Amen. In this dense verse, verse 10, we have a number of theological points that could be their own sermons.
In this case, I thought it helpful to drill into this part of the verse to investigate the doctrine of trust or faith. But before that, I would be helpful to review the goodness of God in granting us the gift of faith itself. This is important to relearn, I think, in a day and age that emphasizes the freedom of mankind to make their own destiny, even to redefine their own race and gender.
It’s all about me and my free will, my free desires, my free decisions to remake and do whatever I want. But we read instead in the Word of God, as summarized here, in these two questions, in the Shorter Catechism, question 29 and question 30. This is just a brief summary here.
How are we made partakers of the redemption purchased by Christ? We are made partakers of the redemption purchased by Christ by the effectual application of it to us by the Holy Spirit. In other words, to ask the question, how do we get saved, is the question you would hear often today. They would ask, how are we made partakers? How do we come into access of the redemption purchased by Christ? Christ has done all this.
The Catechism spends a number of time on that in the offices of Christ, the prophet, priest, and king, and what he has procured for his people. Then the question comes home to the earth, to us. How can we gain access? How can we partake in this blessed salvation? And we can partake of this blessed redemption purchased by Christ by the effectual application of it to us by the Holy Spirit.
It does not start, because the Word of God does not start, with man. It starts with God. God from eternity past who chose his people, and God in time and space who died for his people, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit who applies that redemption for us.
And this is where we are in question nine, that it is by the effectual application, that is, the application that will come to pass. It will not fall flat on its face, as the best laid plans of mice and men do often. And so the question, how are you saved? The Catechism says, well, you need the Holy Spirit.
You need the Spirit of God. Titus 3.4 is the proof text used here. In Titus 3.4-7 we read, But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, through the washing and regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by his grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
Now that’s a mouthful, but clearly we need the Holy Spirit or what we have will never be ours. We will stay lost in our depravity without him. It is he whose power makes us partakers of Christ’s redemption brought and bought for us.
Yet the Spirit of the living God who gives us life and life more abundantly, waking up our souls to this great redemption, does not believe for us. We believe in Jesus. God does not believe for us.
And thus the next question, how does the Spirit apply to us redemption purchased by Christ? How do we get Christ? How do we get saved? You need the Holy Spirit. Okay, now that we know we have to have the Holy Spirit, how does the Holy Spirit save us? So now the question has been turned on its head, right? Modern approach, unfortunately, is often very man-centered. And they ought to be reminded, it’s not about you, but you have offended the Holy Creator of heaven and earth, and you know this deep down in your heart.
How does the Spirit apply to us the redemption purchased by Christ? That’s a different question I don’t think you hear very often in other churches outside the Reformed faith, because it’s God-centered. The answer is, question 30, the Spirit applies to us the redemption purchased by Christ by working faith in us and thereby uniting us to Christ in our effectual calling. It is by faith, but a faith that is given to us as a gift of God.
This is why I went over question 29 and 30 as the important foundation before the rest of the sermon goes into the points about what this faith is. It is not what we are called as Christians in exercising this faith and trust in our Lord and Savior. The proof text is one many of us have heard, I’m sure.
Ephesians 2.8, For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, lest any man should boast. Philippians 1.29, For to you it has been granted on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for his sake. So here we read in Philippians that for you it has been granted on behalf of Christ, not only to believe, but to suffer.
Granted, that means it’s not yours, it has to be given to you. Faith itself is not native to the human condition. Other than faith in themselves and faith in man and faith in the devil, that’s true.
The human condition has to have faith because we don’t know everything. We have to trust somebody or something. But they don’t have a saving faith.
They do not want to trust and believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. That’s the difference. And that’s a gift of God, bestowed upon us, granted to us on behalf of Christ.
That’s amazing language, isn’t it? So you may know Ephesians 2.8, but put in Philippians 1.29 in your Bible if you want, next to that little topic there in the back of the white page, I suggested, if you want to put all those there in your notes. This foundation that God sends the Spirit to stir up our souls by working faith in us is important. It relieves us of worry and a concern about our obedience and even our faith itself.
Because the Spirit of God will not fail. Yes, our faith is weak and stumbles, yet it’s never extinguished because our Lord and Savior is a living God and He will keep that faith alive in our hearts. We trust in the living God.
We trust and follow Jesus because God first sent His Son and both sent out the Holy Spirit to bring us from death into newness of life. God is at work in you both to will and to do His good pleasure in His time and in His way. And that new life always breathes trust in the living Lord and Savior.
So the first point, we’re just now getting to the point here, Christians trust in the living God. Are you Christian? I should maybe put the you in there. Trust in the living God.
Christians Trust in the Living God
What is faith then? Faith, question 86 of the Shorter Catechism, what is faith in Jesus Christ? Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace. There it is again, it’s a grace. It comes from God.
It is not merited, it’s not something from us, whereby we receive and rest upon Him alone for salvation as He has offered to us in the Gospel. That is saving faith, more precisely, not just faith in general, but particularly faith in the object, that is the person, Jesus Christ. Faith has to believe in something.
I just have faith. We have the songs about faith and commercials about faith and little bumper stickers about faith often. At least they did when I was growing up.
I’ve seen it now and then. But it has to be faith in something. What do you believe or trust in? It’s supposed to be Jesus Christ.
That’s what this point is, saving grace. Saving grace, saving of course, delivering us from our sin and its consequences. Salvation.
Grace, unmerited favor, kindness instead of deserved judgment. That’s why they use that language in the Shorter Catechism. Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace, unmerited favor given to us.
An unmerited gift in particular. In fact, there as you may recall when I went through 1 Corinthians, you don’t know the Greek of course, but often you’ll see the translation gifts. That same word could also be translated grace.
Because a gift is something given to you. You don’t deserve it. And so the word grace is also a proper translation depending on the context.
Specifically a gift from God of course. Saving faith. Ephesians 2.8 as we read before, For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves.
It is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. And if you believe and teach, and people do, too many unfortunately, that faith itself is native to man. And we just have to rile them up and convince them somehow to exercise that native ability to trust and follow Jesus, that they’ll be saved.
And that’s the wrong way to go about it. Because first and foremost, of course, it’s simply not true. If they believe it is their faith, they will certainly boast in it.
I have chosen Jesus, the rest of you haven’t. But we’re all condemned under the law of God. And we all have no faith outside of the work of Christ, the Holy Spirit in particular working in us.
Christ is offered. So in the Confession here, the definition of faith, Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace, we talked about that, whereby we receive and rest upon Him alone for salvation. Rest upon who? As He is offered to us.
That is Jesus Christ as He is offered to us in the Gospel, in the Good News. In particular the preaching, but not exclusively the preaching. John 20, verse 30 and following.
This is the Apostle John writing in his book. And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, or the Messiah, or the Anointed One, chosen by God Almighty to save and deliver His people, the implication, comma, he continues, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.
So there you tie faith to Jesus, because Jesus is the source of life. And that faith must rest and receive upon Christ, and Christ alone. So I give the definition of faith, summarizing the Catechism.
But how does the word trust fit in with faith? I titled it trust, and the word here is translated trust. Trust in the living God. Trust, or confidence, or hope in, is often a synonym for faith, but other times describes a part of faith.
And what do I mean by parts or acts of faith? So we’ll see this in the Confession itself, chapter 14, on faith. But the principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life by virtue of the covenant of grace. Faith, as I pointed out in Sunday School class, is not only there in justification, specifically faith alone, but also is exercised in sanctification, that is, faith working through love.
Galatians tells us this. Accepting, receiving, and resting. Larger Catechism, question 72.
Not only does faith assent to the truth of the promise of the gospel, but receives and rests upon Christ and His righteousness, therein held forth for pardon of sin. And so from here, we see the clearer definition, because the shorter Catechism is just that short. It’s not going to say everything about it.
The larger Catechism and the Confession and the Bible itself, as I go through the text, you’ll see here, has faith accepting, receiving, and resting. Accepting, receiving, and resting as three primary elements. Accepting, to acknowledge the truth of Jesus and the gospel.
But of course, demons believe in that sense. They can acknowledge this is a true fact, but what do they care? And so, they want to make sure, because the definition they’re usually formulating here in the Confession is against the Roman Catholics’ definition of faith. It’s not just simply, yeah, yeah, okay, Jesus is real, so what? There are people like that, I’ve not met a lot of them.
But they exist, it’s kind of interesting. It’s sad, to be sure. And it continues on here.
Not just accepting, but receiving and resting. That is, trusting and relying upon our Lord and Savior. This is where the facts of history are not just irrelevant tidbits that we learn in school, but received as something meaningful for us today.
Oh, those are my ancestors. Isn’t that cool? I’m the great, great, great grandson of Cotton Mather. I heard about this a little earlier.
Someone married into the Mather family. That’s more meaningful to you, right? You take it personally, this is kind of cool, this is neat. It makes a change upon you.
And so, when the Confession talks about, in some ways in the Bible, accepting, yeah, the truth of it, but receiving and resting. You make it your own. Jesus died for me.
Not just Jesus died, that’s interesting, but Jesus died for me. And he suffered for me. And I rely upon that.
I believe he covered my sins. Past, present, and future. Trust is the full end result of saving faith.
And that’s why it’s often used as a synonym for it. So you can make proper distinctions in faith, and they do that in systematic theology. I was going to go that route, but it uses some Latin phrases, and I don’t want to confuse it.
There’s a lot going on here already. But the Confession just simply says, accepting, receiving, and resting. You can see, I hope, a progression of movement in the act of faith, but of course it’s simultaneous, more or less, in believers.
I hear it, I believe it, I receive it for myself, and I believe Jesus died for me, and I trust in him personally. It’s not my parents’ faith, it’s not the pastor’s faith, it’s my faith, it’s my trust in him. Just as what? We trust and believe in our parents as kids.
That’s certainly the image for us before our God, our Heavenly Father. The word, as I said again, often a synonym for faith itself, that is trust, because it is certainly part of faith. Galatians 2.20, so here’s one of the texts.
Galatians 2.20, where we read about personal appropriation of the truth that one believes already. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, Paul writes.
In the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. I can say he gave himself for you with a qualifier if you repent and believe, because I don’t know your heart. But if you do repent and believe, you hate your sin, and you embrace Jesus Christ, this passage reflects you.
It’s not just Paul, you can have the same language, who loved me and gave himself for me. That’s the call of every Christian, is that I trust in Jesus, that he lived and died for me, and therefore I’m, what, resting upon his finished work for me, and not hedging my bets, as it were, and doing a couple of good works to make up for Christ’s perfection, maybe not fully covering me or something like that. That’s the idea of resting.
It’s a concrete trust. Acts 15.11, there’s another text, Acts 15.11. But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we shall be saved in the same manner as they. They too, they look to a concrete event of those who are saved and delivered, we too can and will be like them.
That’s that personal appropriation or trust that God, through Christ Jesus, is working and will work upon us as he has worked upon the saints of old. It’s more than just accepting that Jesus existed, it means receiving Jesus’ person and work as for you. Trusting upon him, and at least two important ways that faith, of course, is used in the Christian life.
First, justification. Trusting in Jesus’ person and work for our justification. That is his perfection, his obedience to the law of God as the perfect man, living on this earth, in the stead of or in the place of his people, imputed to them by faith alone.
There, we see that faith, and faith alone, it’s not just, yeah, Jesus died and justified people, but he died and justified me. That’s the trust. And I believe that’s to be true for me, and I rely upon him, therefore, and I’m not working my way to heaven.
That is, I’m not trying to justify myself as a warrant to get into the pearly gates, as they say. That he died and lived for me, and trusting and relying upon that fact as children rely upon their parents, as a baby relies upon the mom who holds her in her arms. That’s a righteousness that never wavers or changes, even though your faith may waver and fluctuate and move about and grow weak.
That justification will never change. That’s a glorious fact. If we didn’t have this truth in God’s word, sanctification in the Christian life would be most miserable indeed.
Because sometimes you feel like you have no faith. What kind of a Christian acts this way? Towards my spouse, or towards my kids, or towards my church. This is terrible.
What am I doing? And you realize, you repent. And flee to Jesus. His perfection is always there for you, and you will always be forgiven.
Second, faith, specifically trust, the final fruit of faith, as it were, the final act, is sanctification, of course. Trusting and hoping for the completion of our godliness to be more like Jesus. Here, faith is accompanied by other gifts of the Spirit, of course.
The fruit of patience and love and long-suffering. The fruit of obedience. Faith working through love.
Galatians 5, 6, there’s your notes up here, on the board. And, of course, again, the process of holiness has its ups and downs, and you’re still supposed to trust that God is working in you in spite of your sins. And it’s not a lonely work.
And God has given us each other as we go down this path. That’s why I covered there at the end. What’s the context of the path of sanctification? What’s the environment we find ourselves in? Are we a bunch of lone wolves, some lone gunmen, as they say, out there doing your own thing? No, you’re in the context of God’s covenant people.
The covenant promise there, we’ll cover this afternoon, you shall be my people, and I shall be your God. It’s a bunch of people. Not just you shall be my person, but my people.
And part of those people are pastors. And that leads us to the next point. Ministers, trust in the living God.
Ministers Trust in the Living God
This is more immediately the point, of course, of this letter. It’s written to the young pastor, Timothy. But to the extent that Timothy is also a Christian, just like the rest of us, he can, as it were, abstractly take off his office and put it aside.
I don’t preach. I don’t do public activities as a pastor. And everything else in the letter is applicable to you.
And you can see it. The vast majority of the verses. Like this.
It’s not just the pastors who are supposed to trust in the living God, and the rest of you, you don’t need to trust in God. Don’t worry about it. Of course, it’s all of us.
But here, it’s specifically for pastors, and so I have the point here more immediately. What’s the immediate object of Paul’s concern is that there, of course, is a converted ministry. That the ministers must be believers in what they preach.
That’s a big problem today, in one sense. At least by voice, and the way we are raised up in evangelical circles, as a general rule. I don’t think there’s any serious disagreements there.
Of course you want your pastor to be saved, a believer in Jesus. But of course, it could still happen. And so we pray that pastors would not take the ministry just as a paycheck.
And whenever I dwell upon that thought, my first illustration in my head is the Victorian era. My wife, and I’m sure a number of you out there have listened to all those stories and writings of that time period. And what you have there, I remember watching a couple of them.
Who’s that guy again? That’s the parson. That’s the old word. And you’re like, that’s the parson.
No one really took him seriously, apparently. And I understand, historically, some of those books were written that way to make fun of the parson and the like, because to them, it was just a paycheck. It was just a paycheck.
They’re just doing enough and you don’t want that in the ministry, of course. That’s what I’m talking about. But again, it’s not, I think, especially a big problem today, although you do have people still pretending to be faithful ministers but are actually predators, and that’s a sad state of affairs.
But more likely, the ministers are going to be struggling in this day and age, I think. You need to pray that they don’t lose hope. That they stand firm in the front lines of the lies and attacks against them and against the gospel and against the churches.
And, of course, the world’s going to try to say, you need to, therefore, adjust your standards, adjust your beliefs, adjust your practices because of this error. Because if you did it our way, you wouldn’t have this sin in your church. No, that’s begging the question.
Because we always believe that even if you have the right doctrine and practices, there’s still going to be sinners. So the real debate is, what’s the right practice and doctrine? Not use this occasion to beat us over the head so we can change things to your advantage. That’s what’s going to happen when the church leadership, our denomination, other denominations that happened in the past, lift them up, brothers and sisters.
Not just me and our leadership here at Providence, but our presbytery and our denomination leadership, that they would withstand the peer pressure around them. We had it at General Assembly a couple years ago where there was claims of racism. And, unfortunately, there was peer pressure.
People gave in. They made proclamations, and it turned out to be nothing. It was a nothing burger.
That peer pressure. Pastors must be public examples. What we have here, of course, is a public letter written to Timothy to exhort him how he ought to exhort others and teach and instruct them as a minister over the church there at Crete.
And in this encouragement for this, and we labor and suffer reproach. You, Timothy, are suffering reproach. You are struggling as well.
I am with you. It’s we together. And why is this? Because we trust the living God.
And it must be publicly noticeable and obvious to the world and to Paul in particular that he is trusting in the living God. And people are persecuting him accordingly. And so this implies that pastors, of course, are being looked upon and that we are examples before the world of those who trust and follow and depend upon and rely on our Savior.
If they are weak in their confidence in his gospel and in Christ, they shouldn’t be in the ministry. Some people think that pastors are too bold and don’t have enough humility. They misuse the words winsome and kind.
There’s a proper usage of those words and a proper context for those activities in the ministry even. And I’ve highlighted those at times in the past. And unfortunately, they end up turning him and their ideal of the pastor into something less than a publicly confident minister of the gospel.
Because confidence apparently is too much pride in their thinking, which is unfortunate. Rather, we ought to follow our Lord and Savior and the apostles’ examples, which the word bold is used a number of times in the book of Acts. Another translation for boldness could be open.
They have no fear, is the idea of the openness there. That’s why it’s translated boldness often. They’re out there.
This is the truth. Repent and believe. Follow Jesus or be punished by hell because of your wickedness.
Meekness and humility before God as ministers is knowing their place before God in the office that he has given them other people don’t like it, they’re offended. That’s not meekness before God. A pastor’s place is public confidence in preaching of Jesus Christ and him crucified.
Specifically, of course, the example of the pastors, Timothy, is the public functions that they have. When doing the job as a pastor, preaching or ministering the sacraments or teaching outside of the church context or within the church context, wherever they are exercising this office, they should exercise it by trusting him and relying upon him and showing others that this is real to him, that God is with them as they do their responsibility as a pastor. People will take encouragement from this and see this and want to emulate it, I hope.
That’s part of, of course, here in particular, he’s trying to encourage Timothy not to give up because he is under reproach. People hating him and the like and he ought to embrace that apparently others are denying. And so this is another way for Paul to reinforce the truth in Timothy that he would stand firm with boldness and continue to exercise that faith in the living God, the God who renews his spirit, renews his heart, renews his ministry even because without it the ministry falls flat and withers away.
Pastors, not only in their activities and their public function of the gospel, must also in particular not just act upon it in their particular duties at times through prayer and the administration of sacraments, for example, but specifically preaching and teaching the content of their ministry and their words. This means going over, of course, the facts and the truth of the gospel. People can’t accept the truth unless they’re taught the truth.
So you’ve got to have at least that one or two principles in. That too must be taught. It’s not here.
Paul doesn’t spend much time on it because Paul is writing a letter in a specific context to Timothy who already knows a number of things. He’s already had a ministry doing these things and there are specific problems he’s dealing with. But we know from the rest of the Bible the pastor has the responsibility at the appropriate time, more or less depending on how we alleviate the consequences of sins for our life, what justification is, what sanctification is, and the like.
That’s the content of the gospel, the redemptive work of Christ in particular. Ministers must preach the whole counsel of God, in other words. At least summarize the key points now and then, dig into some others, of course, to have faith in Jesus.
Not to have a simple knowledge of Jesus or that his act of redemption is for me but that I rest and rely upon his redemption for me and not upon my faith, my feelings, or my good works. And therefore includes the call of repentance. Repentance is there.
We perhaps call it the gateway to heaven insofar as you have to repent. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t bring Christ’s righteousness to you.
That is by faith and faith alone. But believers will repent. They will acknowledge their sins.
Even if you don’t hear it, they acknowledge before God in their hearts. And hating sin, of course, is not enough. They must urge their listeners to go beyond the knowledge of Christ to a personal trust, reliance, dependence upon him because they’re trying to play on their emotions and use some peer pressure.
There’s a place for peer pressure. I grant that. Church discipline is a good place for peer pressure in that regards.
They put it on the wrong end, as it were. But as we, even to this day, I hope, with godly parents, trust them. They’re not lying to me as we wouldn’t, especially when we were kids.
A little daughter comes up to me and asks me a question. I’m like, why are you asking me this question? Because you’re a dad. You know everything.
Well, you’re going to find out I don’t know everything, kid. But thank you for the confidence and trust in me and my word. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
In one sense, Christianity and being saved to save you, the uttermost, from hell. To justify you, to adopt you, to sanctify you. Rely upon him.
Believe in him. But it’s the hardest thing in the world as well because people don’t want to give up the belief and reliance upon themselves or upon others. And that’s the difference between having the Holy Spirit and not having the Holy Spirit.
Pray, brothers and sisters, that our trust will continue to grow young and old. For it is in him and him alone that we are able to stand the trials of sin and death around us. Pray that the presbyteries and church officers would find godly and good men and they would stand firm as public examples to others and teachers of Christ in the call of trust in the living God above.
Let us pray. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, help us, we pray and ask and implore you, Spirit of truth, to renew our hearts if we have grown hardened and especially for those who are not saved by our Savior, how he suffered for us, suffered, God, even death itself on the cross, the painful death for his people, that they would personally rely and trust upon that and not their own goodness. We ask and implore you, God.
We pray by the blood of Christ. Amen.