Leaning on Jesus, his word, a creed, or the church's faith?

A month ago in an Anglican church, I heard a sermon on doubt and disappointment in the life of the believer. It included the following comments:

"We've had a couple conversations in our catechesis class this past fall. And I know a couple people in that class shared very openly, like, use the language of the dark night of the soul. I'm coming, but I feel distant from God. And one thing we talked about is every time we gather on Sunday, on the weekend, on Sunday, for us, Saturday, to worship Christ. And we stand together and we recite the Nicene Creed as most Christians throughout history have done all around the world. We say we believe in God, the Father Almighty. We go through all these words, our belief in Christ. Many of us, when we say that, we don't fully believe.

"We struggle. We doubt. We're disappointed, right? But we come back again and we trust God as best we can with, you know, our very little bit that we can offer. And Jesus is faithful to that, right? He honors that just standing up. Sometimes these aren't even words that make sense to you, but it's the church's words, right? The church carries you. The church's faith carries you. This is one of the reasons why we baptize children and infants, right? Because the true faith is not just about your individual faith. It's about the communal faith of the church. We all need each other. And if some of you are disappointed in Christ, I commend you for showing up today and standing in a couple minutes and saying the creed, just like John the Baptist is saying 'the Christ'. He's letting those words appear on his lips, even though he is uncertain and doubting."

As I hurriedly drafted this post over a bowl of Vietnamese noodles before Burmese church one Sunday afternoon in January, I didn't have access to the recording or transcript, but I summarized it from memory as:

"If you are struggling to believe all the words of the creed that we stand up and say together today, God bless you. Please know that you are not saved by your personal faith and confidence in every part of the creed, but rather you are held by the faith of the entire church, and so when God hears the voice of the entire church on heaven and earth together reciting the creed, he credits their faith to you. [Here my mind was drawing on the medieval idea of the Treasury of Merit.] This is also why we baptize our infants and young children, right? They are held by the church's faith."

This saying disturbed me. And I have thought about it ever since. I asked ChatGPT for some advice, and it reminded me of a letter that Augustine had written to Bishop Boniface (Letter 98, written AD 408), in response to questions on why the church has sponsors affirm the creed on behalf of the infant who is baptized. Augustine proposed some complicated rhetorical reasoning, saying essentially that baptism is the sacrament of the church's faith, and since the infant receives this sacrament of faith, in a sense it is appropriate to say that the infant believes, although it is only by proxy through the sponsors and the church as a whole, and the infant needs to be brought up to believe for himself or herself. 

I think there is a sense in which this is true, and a sense in which it is untrue. In the Gospels, sometimes Jesus healed children or slaves because their parents or masters asked in faith. And in the case of the paralyzed man who was let down through a hole in the roof by his friends, Jesus saw their faith and first told the man "Your sins are forgiven" and then told him, "Get up, take up your mat, and walk." Commentators think that Jesus was looking mostly at the faith of the friends, although presumably the man wasn't brought there against his will, and he at least exercised faith by standing up when Jesus told him to.

The theological question is, "What does it mean if Jesus forgave the man's sins because his friends believed?" Does that mean that proxy faith justifies? I am not comfortable with that at all, and in fact, Kevin DeYoung in The Biggest Bible Storybook tells the story with the interpretation that the man must have had faith, or else Jesus wouldn't have told him "your sins are forgiven", because he justifies those who have faith.

If proxy faith justifies, does this mean that we can pray for the salvation of those who have already died outside of the faith? Ordinarily, by that time it is too late. 

But notice too that Jesus raised the dead son of the widow of Nain -- we don't know if the son was a believer before he died. I imagine he was after he came back to life. 

And in other gospel stories, whole families believed after Jesus healed their child or servant. 

And on a plain and simple level, Jesus prayed for those who crucified him and mocked him at this death, saying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." But at Pentecost, Peter boldly pleaded with this same crowd, "save yourself from this perverse generation!" So this forgiveness that Jesus asked for was either only for the sin of crucifying and mocking him, or it was conditional on their repentance and faith, which was mediated through Peter's preaching. Following Tom Schreiner and Ardel Caneday's arguments in The Race Set Before Us, this idea of God using means to bring about active faith leading to obedience on the part of the hearers in fulfillment of his promises makes a lot of sense to me.

At the same time, with edge cases like babies dying in infancy, or unbelievers brought back from the dead, there is a lot that we don't know.

And I'm not even going to get into stories like Augustine's friend who was baptized while he was unconscious for days with a fever -- when he finally woke up, people told him he was baptized, and he took it so seriously that he rebuked Augustine for joking about it. In his mind, he was now fully a Christian, even he hadn't chosen it when it happened. And not long after, he died, still firmly believing. This experience shook Augustine, and he wrote of it later in his Confessions (4.4.8, written AD 397-400). Maybe it was one of the things that together accumulated to draw Augustine himself to finally commit himself to the Lord. Can I say that, both in the case of the paralytic (assuming he didn't have faith until he stood up and walked) and Augustine's friend, that God brought them to faith by gently bending their will to trust and ratify a choice that others had tried to make for them?

But I want now to circle back to the way we conceive of the creeds. In a different church this morning, we sang, "My faith has found a resting place, not in device or creed, I trust the ever living One, his wounds for me shall plead, I need no other argument, I need no other plea, it is enough that Jesus died, and that he died for me."

The words rang true to me, that the faith by which we are saved, which the Holy Spirit himself gives us and grows in us, is first a heart attitude of turning toward God, and that belief in the points of the creed follow from that, because the creed summarizes God's Word given in Scripture. It reminded me further of a quote by R.T. Beckwith, which I have copied down in my journal twice in the last few weeks:

"Grace is not a quasi-physical substance but is the personal favor and goodness of God to man. Faith is not mere intellectual belief but is trust, and trust in God involves belief of what he says. Since God speaks to us in Scripture about our salvation, to trust him is both to believe that our sins are already atoned for through the cross of Christ, and to rely on him to accept us, preserve us, perfect us and glorify us for that reason." (J.I. Packer and R.T. Beckwith, The 39 Articles: Their Place and Use Today, pp.91-92)

The words of Beckwith have been ruminating in me since I read another essay he wrote in 1965 (in All in Each Place: Towards Reunion in England) on the problem of doctrinal standards in a proposed union between the Church of England, the Methodist Church, and other free churches. He argued that the Anglicans ought not force subscription to their own doctrinal standards without careful nuance and guarantees of conscience protection, because the independent churches had memories of persecution over aspects of doctrine that were only probably and not certainly proved from Scripture. And yet the Church of England itself needed reform, because it had stopped enforcing a good faith subscription to its own standards by even its own ministers, who developed a variety of private interpretations to stretch the standards whichever way they chose. 

In the end, Beckwith proposed a common subscription to the ecumenical creeds from church history in a way that carefully protected conscience and made clear that they were binding only because they accurately summarized the Word of God, and he further proposed selecting the best of the unique parts of the 39 Articles as an Anglican contribution to the good of the united church from their heritage. 

The book I quoted on the Articles, published in 1983, was a further development of Beckwith and Packer's overall project to teach a lean and life-giving heritage of doctrine for today, now that the proposed scheme of union had fallen through. The quote above was specifically from an appendix where Beckwith put forward some supplemental articles that should be added to the 39, to address issues that had arisen since the Articles were written in the 1500s. Both Packer and Beckwith are dead now, but their project lives on in unexpected ways, since Packer co-edited the catechism for the Anglican Church in North America (To Be A Christian), and since their writings are fertilizer for this blog post. 

The words of the song rang within me because I sang them in a choir twenty years ago led by Jim Schmidt, a man I truly trusted who is now with the Lord.

I am reminded again of a comment that the preacher I mentioned at the beginning of this post made during catechesis -- that the point should be not so much fencing in our doctrine as drawing people toward Christ at the center. I think this aligns with the song, too, and our catechism class as a whole was using Packer's catechism. But Beckwith's framing was particularly helpful to me, because it gets us through the problem of those who insincerely recite the creed with the congregation and think they are fine even though they persist in unrepentance. (See Deuteronomy 29:18-19, and Psalm 50:16) The very words they recited will condemn them at the last day, if they don't turn. That is why it is the job of every church member, not only to recite the creeds, not only to pray for faith and repentance for themselves and their neighbors, but also to pursue holiness and to pursue other members when they are wandering. (Hebrews 12:14-17)

And so, like Augustine (though I don't share his baptismal theology), I am led by a convergence of events and words, some I agree with and others I disagree with, both in following and in reaction, toward a place of deeper faith. 

Maybe as intended. 

Update 4/6/2026:

I'm now reading Justin Holcomb's book Know the Creeds and Councils, and found this quote explaining the relevance of the Athanasian Creed, with its disturbing anathemas for those who don't hold to it:

"We have a hard time accepting that eternal damnation is the potential result for any human being. This creed serves to remind us of that fact. Even its damnatory clauses are helpful 'in the reminder they give of the awful responsibility of making the right decision in matters of fundamental belief.' The Christian faith is not only a matter of the heart, an exercise in sentimentality, for 'Christian faith is a matter of the mind as well as the heart and the will, and as thinking persons we must give intellectual expression to our faith.' Still it does not demand blind acceptance to empty propositions. It is concerned with the direction of our souls. To paraphrase Philip Schaff, the point of the creed is not that we are saved by memorizing a set of statements, but that we are saved by trusting in the one who has revealed himself. Trusting in him, as far as he has told us about himself, is what saves, while straying from him is what condemns. The Athanasian Creed points us to the identity of the one who saves." (p.70)

I think the pastor that I quoted at the beginning of this post was trying to, indirectly, urge his listeners toward this trust. Where I am a bit uncomfortable is where he implies that we're saved by the church's faith rather than our own. I would say rather that God saves us, and he uses the church, through its relationships and the teaching of the Word to plant the Word in us in order to nurture our faith, and so we can do the same for others. 

Kevin DeYoung in his book Daily Doctrine (Days 172-173) helpfully distinguishes different meanings of faith: first, "that which is believed" (doctrinal content) vs "the faith by which we believe" (the attitude of faith, which is what saves us). Second, there are four types of faith, with only the fourth one being necessarily saving: historical faith (mental assent to some facts about God), faith of miracles, temporary faith, and justifying faith (a saving grace, wrought in our hearts by the Spirit and the word of God, whereby we are convinced of our sin and misery, assent to the truth of the gospel, and receive and rest on Christ and his righteousness). General faith means accepting God's word and trusting in the Scriptures. Special faith involves trusting in Christ and the promise of salvation, hungering and thirsting after Jesus, coming to him, and receiving him and all his benefits. Finally, at its simplest, faith consists of knowledge, assent, and trust. 

I would say that the Anglican pastor above was guarding against potential fears in the audience that they needed to master doctrinal content before faith could be justifying. And so he first praised their initial movements of trust, even if they were small, and then went back to enfold the idea of faith as the doctrinal content (the creed) in a generalized communal assent and attitude of trust which was modeled by others in the church and could be imitated by the listeners who struggled with doubt. However, the door was opened for evoking proxy-faith and the treasury of merit, which I think are dead ends unless they lead to actual justifying faith on the part of the listeners. Because it was a short sermon, it couldn't unpack everything I've mentioned above. I hope that some of these ideas can help clarify more of the full picture for others and inspire some sense of wonder at the many ways that our God uses to bring us to faith and to nurture that faith in him.

Saved by baptism by faith by God

Does baptism save, or does faith save? Good question. Were the citizens of West Berlin saved during the Berlin Airlift of 1948 by food or by the mechanics who fueled up the airplanes that brought the food? Or by the farmers that grew the food? Or by the United States? Yes.

So does baptism save? Yes. Ordinarily. For those who believe. 

What is salvation? Salvation is the gift of God coming into our lives and uniting us with Christ and making us whole. It comes on the basis of God's love poured out in the death of Christ and in Christ's ongoing intercession for those who belong to him, bringing forgiveness of sins and the life of the coming age. 

Salvation is applied to each person by the working of faith in us by the Holy Spirit. We can see it as a point at the beginning of our journey, as a point at the end of time, and a squiggle in the middle. 

To be honest, many of us don't see the point at the beginning, and yet in the midst of the squiggle, we look back and see that we have picked up the clustered elements of conversion along the way, even if through struggle, imperfection, and hardship -- or rather, that these have been worked in us by the Spirit's empowerment and the help and prayers of others, which spurred us on to force our way into the kingdom. These elements include: 

• faith (Rom. 5:1)
• repentance (Luke 24:47)
• confession of Jesus as Lord (Rom. 10:9-10)
• baptism (Rom. 6:3-5; Gal. 3:27; 1 Pet. 3:21)
• adoption by God into his global and local family (Gal. 4:5)
• receiving the Holy Spirit (Galatians 4:6)
• obedience to Jesus, his good news, and the truth (Acts 5:32; Rom. 16:26; 2 Thes. 1:8; Heb. 5:9)
• perseverance until the end (Mat. 24:13)

So what is baptism? A visible Word of God -- a bodily reminder of the promises of God worked out in the story of Jesus's death, burial, and resurrection, experienced by being dipped in water and having the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit pronounced over you.

If you receive baptism by faith, then it -- like prayer, the Lord's supper, and the Word -- will strengthen your faith so that you continue and grow up into salvation (1 Peter 2:2). The efficient cause of salvation is God and his gift. The means of reception is faith. The instrumental means that the Holy Spirit ordinarily uses to bring about faith and strengthen faith so that we endure to the end and so are finally saved includes baptism.

Now arise some problems:

1. Not all who are baptized are saved (because they don't combine it with faith).
2. Some who are saved aren't baptized (because God brings about faith in whoever he wants, even in some who have no opportunity to be baptized). 
3. Some have misunderstood, and said that baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation.
4. Others have misunderstood, and thought that since they were baptized, then they are saved even if they don't personally know Jesus or follow him. 

But on the other hand, there are some who say they believe, and yet have never been baptized because they're too shy to get up in front of people. This requires serious teaching and personal friendship to help their budding attender's faith turn into a martyr's faith. 

Lest you think I fell off the deep end, read the following Q&A from the 1693 London Baptist Catechism, which is basically the Westminster Longer Catechism with a credobaptist reform:

#90 What doth God require of us that we may escape his wrath and curse, due to us for sin?

To escape the wrath and curse of God due to us for sin, God requireth of us faith in Jesus Christ, repentance unto life, with the diligent use of all the outward means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption. 

#93 What are the outward means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption?

The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption are his ordinances, especially the word, baptism, the Lord’s supper, and prayer; all which means are made effectual to the elect for salvation. 

#96 How do baptism and the Lord's supper become effectual means of salvation?

Baptism and the Lord's supper become effectual means of salvation, not for any virtue in them, or in him that doth administer them, but only by the blessing of Christ, and the working of the Spirit in those that by faith receive them.

#97 What is baptism?

Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament instituted by Jesus Christ, to be unto the party baptized a sign of his fellowship with him, in his death, burial, and resurrection; of his being ingrafted into him; of remission of sins; and of his giving up himself unto God through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in newness of life. 

#98 To whom is baptism to be administered?

Baptism is to be administered to all those who actually profess repentance towards God, faith in and obedience to our Lord Jesus Christ, and to none other.

#99 Are the infants of such as are professing believers to be baptized?

The infants of such as are professing believers are not to be baptized, because there is neither command or example in the holy scriptures, or certain consequence from them to baptize such.

#100 How is Baptism rightly administered?

Baptism is rightly administered by immersion, or dipping the whole body of the party in water, into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, according to Christ’s institution, and the practice of the apostles, and not by sprinkling or pouring of water, or dipping some part of the body, after the tradition of men.

#101 What is the duty of such who are rightly baptized?

It is the duty of such who are rightly baptized to give up themselves to some particular and orderly church of Jesus Christ, that they may walk in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.

faith is the wick

Are we saved by faith alone?

Salvation, that is, a life eternally transformed by relationship with the Holy Trinity, is like the burning of a candle.

Faith is the wick, hope is the wax, love is the flame. 

The candle burns by the wick alone. Faith is the faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ, which we join by loyally trusting in him and depending on him. (Faith as both trust and loyalty, and the faith of Jesus Christ in his Father and his faithfulness to us as the ground of our own faith response is a big topic in NT studies right now.) Our relationship with God was reconciled by his death on our behalf, and our access to continuing benefits come through this continuing relationship of trust.

The candle burns by wax alone. Hope is the strength that comes from our identity as the community who are somehow seated at God's right hand in the enthroned Messiah, waiting for him to come reclaim his world and, meanwhile, to bring us daily sustenance by his Spirit.

The candle burns by the flame alone. Love is the transformation of potential energy into heat and light, by doing good for others' benefit because we have received God's love, giving vision to other eyes and lighting other candles, and fulfilling the purpose for which we were made. 

Are we saved by faith alone?

Now, if this question is really asking, "Can I know for sure in the moment that I raise my hand in an evangelistic meeting that I am going to heaven?", our answer will be different. Because here we are asking not about the burning but about the lighting of the candle. But the lighting includes the burning, and all three elements (wick, wax, and flame) are involved, even if in nascent form. And if the lighting is done by God, then we don't know for sure if the lighting began when we raised our hand or long before, or even not yet -- but we can know that if we truly turn to him, God promises to save us. 

Now, you ask, what about repentance? To be honest, I wasn't thinking of repentance when I thought of this analogy, and would really need another analogy to incorporate it well. But I see repentance in the candle in three ways: a change from coldness to warmth, a change from reliance on other power sources than the wax through the wick, and a change from hiddenness to transparency. (Actually, this last one is more properly termed confession, but it is a part of the change.) And ultimately, there is a change of life direction from self-preservation to empowered self-giving. 

This brings me to a point I have been thinking about a lot recently. Every aspect of salvation that we "perfect" or essentialize is in a way a metonymy or synecdoche. What I mean is that we speak of one part when we mean it to stand for the whole. 

Baptism saves us, not the removal of filth from the body, but a pledge of a good conscience toward God. So baptism is a concertina word, as Jimmy Dunn puts it, including sometimes the sign only, and sometimes both the sign and the thing it signifies, and sometimes being a shorthand for the whole conversion process. 

Repentance is the same. It indicates a change of heart and mind that includes sorrow for sin, a change from unbelief to faith, a change from trusting in other things to trusting in Jesus, and specific actions that we take to repair damage and restore others whom we have wronged. A concertina that expands and contracts from a change of heart to an act to an entire process that includes both.

Faith in a way stands for all the other elements of our response to God when we hear the gospel, and yet is more than just the most prominent part of our response, because it invades and motivates every other action. And because it draws from Christ everything it needs, it truly is like a wick (or like a straw in a milkshake, to change the metaphor). 

Now back to the candle. I think I hear someone saying now, "Your definition of salvation as a life eternally transformed by relationship with the Holy Trinity is mixing justification with sanctification." Well, yeah. Because sanctification (or as I prefer to call it, transformation) is not optional. Justification through the cross (another metonymy) reconciled our relationship with God. It's a different metaphor, but let's call this restored relationship the oxygen in the room. Transformation started at the moment of ignition. Our relationship with God was reconciled in a potential way at the cross, and in an actual way when we started to believe, that is, when the wick was ignited and the flame burst forth, burning the wax stored up in the candle through the wick as it combined with the oxygen in the room.

And the burning continues. 

No analogy is perfect, and this got more and more complex as we kept talking about it. But I would rather parse out these folds of ambiguity and see more and more of the whole picture.

Inspiring this three-fold analogy is a faint echo in my memory of Deacon Braxton at the end of almost every sermon, repeating the prayer of St. Ionnikios of Olympus (762-846)...

Our hope is the Father

Our refuge is the Son

Our shelter is the Holy Spirit

O Holy Trinity, glory to You. 

Joining the priestly kingdom

Notes from a sermon on salvation, from Ephesians 2:1-10, to a small group of first and second generation Burmese-American youth and their parents, March 2, 2025

When I was living in Yangon, Myanmar, I bought a black T-shirt at an evangelistic concert. The shirt, produced by Grace Music School, has the inscription in large gray letters, "Raising the Levite generation". What do you think it means? I think it means that church musicians and those who train and support them are raising up the next generation of worshipers, carrying on the tradition of the Levites who led singing and offered sacrifices in the tabernacle and the temple.

I was reminded of this shirt as I prepared to talk about Ephesians 2:1-10 where Paul magnifies the grace of God displayed in saving his people. There, Paul is essentially reenacting in a New Testament context Psalm 136, as performed by the priests at the dedication of Solomon's temple in 2 Chronicles 5. This psalm tells the story of creation, the exodus, and the conquering of Israel's enemies in Canaan, with the constant refrain, "his love endures forever". The Hebrew word for love here is hesed, which has some semantic overlap with the word for grace in the New Testament, according to Bible scholar Will Kynes. Although the Greek word in the Septuagint version of Psalm 136 is eleos, 'mercy, compassion' rather than charis 'grace', the overall thrust of the passage is the same as Paul's, in recounting and thanking God for his past rescue and ongoing kindness.

Typologically, the Psalmist's words "He remembered us in our low estate... and freed us from our enemies" are similar to Paul's when he tells the church that although they used to be dead in sins, following the ways of the world, the world's evil spiritual ruler, and their sinful minds and bodily cravings, God mercifully raised them to life with Christ and seated them (spiritually) with Christ in the heavenly realms where he rules with all authority, just as the Israelites were freed from slavery to the Pharaoh and given possession of the land of Canaan.

While the Levites at the dedication of the temple only had a small part of God's story of redemption to recount, we have its fulfillment. Matthew Bates summarizes the apostolic proclamation of the gospel of Jesus the King in the following ten points:

He preexisted as God the son, was sent by the Father, took on human flesh in fulfillment of God's promises to David, died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, was buried, was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, appeared to many witnesses, is enthroned at the right hand of God as the ruling Christ, has sent the Holy Spirit to his people to effect his rule, and will come again as final judge to rule.

In even simpler form, we form the shape of the gospel story when we hold up two fingers on our left hand in a V for victory. Jesus came down, died, was buried, rose again, and ascended to the Father's right hand. Just as the middle finger is longer than the index finger, so Jesus was raised even higher than before, because his saving work magnified his grace and demonstrated his worthiness to rule the cosmos.

So we, with Paul, are priests, singing the song of this story with one voice. As Revelation 1:5-6 says, "To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever!"

One final point, which I have adapted from Bates's work: We are saved by grace, through faith, and this is a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8-9). If we are to really understand the force of Paul's idea of faith, we could often translate it "allegiance", with the idea that when someone in the early church was baptized, they confessed that Jesus is Lord and, by implication, that Caesar is not -- a preparation for martyrdom and evidence of a new citizenship.

I teach a class to help immigrants prepare for the United States citizenship test. My students have to memorize 100 questions and answers about American history and government, and be ready to answer up to ten of them, read a sentence aloud and write down a dictated sentence to show their English ability, and answer a number of personal questions such as whether they have ever been a member of the Communist Party or any terrorist groups. Last and most importantly, they have to swear the oath of allegiance, promising to be loyal to the United States, to give up loyalty to other countries, including all positions of royalty, and to obey the laws of this country.

When I delivered this sermon to the youth of a Burmese church, all the kids and their parents were very familiar with this test, as the parents had taken it in the last few years. For the rest of us, it would do us good to see the Christian life through the eyes of a recent immigrant. We enter salvation, a relationship of saving rescue and ongoing union with the Messiah, by pledging our ultimate allegiance to him and trusting him enough to obey his will.

If you have not yet entered this kingdom, will you choose to pledge your allegiance to King Jesus, by trusting him, turning from your ways to his way, and identifying with him and his people publicly by asking your parents or your pastor for baptism? 

If you are still learning, will you ask for his Spirit to help you understand? 

If you have entered his kingdom, will you ask him what is the next step he wants you to take to continue in him? 

For me this week, that has meant getting rid of Spotify, Kindle, and ChatGPT on my phone, and praying over a list of the youth at the Burmese church, and praying for my accountability group mates and their wives. What might it mean for you?

Further reading:

Bates, Matthew W. 2021. The gospel precisely: surprisingly good news about Jesus Christ the king. A Renew.org resource.

Kynes, Will. 2010. God's grace in the Old Testament: considering the hesed of the Lord. Knowing & Doing (C.S. Lewis Institute), Summer 2010.

Wright, N. T.. New Testament for Everyone Complete Eighteen-Volume Set: 20th Anniversary Edition with Study Guide (The New Testament for Everyone) (p. 3442-3446). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition. 

Scripture passages:

Ephesians 2:1-10 (The New Testament for Everyone by N.T. Wright)

So where do you come into it all? Well, you were dead because of your offences and sins! That was the road you used to travel, keeping in step with this world’s ‘present age’; in step, too, with the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is, even now, at work among people whose whole lives consist of disobeying God. Actually, that’s how all of us used to behave, conditioned by physical desires. We used to do what our flesh and our minds were urging us to do. What was the result? We too were subject to wrath in our natural state, just like everyone else. But when it comes to mercy, God is rich! He had such great love for us that he took us at the very point where we were dead through our offences, and made us alive together with the Messiah (yes, you are saved by sheer grace!). He raised us up with him, and made us sit with him – in the heavenly places, in Messiah Jesus! This was so that in the ages to come he could show just how unbelievably rich his grace is, the kindness he has shown us in Messiah Jesus.

How has this all come about? You have been saved by grace, through faith! This doesn’t happen on your own initiative; it’s God’s gift. It isn’t on the basis of works, so no one is able to boast. This is the explanation: God has made us what we are. God has created us in Messiah Jesus for the good works that he prepared, ahead of time, as the road we must travel.

Psalm 136 (NIV 2011)

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever.

Give thanks to the God of gods. His love endures forever.

Give thanks to the Lord of lords: His love endures forever.

to him who alone does great wonders, His love endures forever.

who by his understanding made the heavens, His love endures forever.

who spread out the earth upon the waters, His love endures forever.

who made the great lights— His love endures forever.

the sun to govern the day, His love endures forever.

the moon and stars to govern the night; His love endures forever.

to him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt His love endures forever.

and brought Israel out from among them His love endures forever.

with a mighty hand and outstretched arm; His love endures forever.

to him who divided the Red Sea asunder His love endures forever.

and brought Israel through the midst of it, His love endures forever.

but swept Pharaoh and his army into the Red Sea; His love endures forever.

to him who led his people through the wilderness; His love endures forever.

to him who struck down great kings, His love endures forever.

and killed mighty kings— His love endures forever.

Sihon king of the Amorites His love endures forever.

and Og king of Bashan— His love endures forever.

and gave their land as an inheritance, His love endures forever.

an inheritance to his servant Israel. His love endures forever.

He remembered us in our low estate His love endures forever.

and freed us from our enemies. His love endures forever.

He gives food to every creature. His love endures forever.

Give thanks to the God of heaven. His love endures forever.

2 Chronicles 5:11-14 (NIV 2011)

The priests then withdrew from the Holy Place. All the priests who were there had consecrated themselves, regardless of their divisions. All the Levites who were musicians—Asaph, Heman, Jeduthun and their sons and relatives—stood on the east side of the altar, dressed in fine linen and playing cymbals, harps and lyres. They were accompanied by 120 priests sounding trumpets. The trumpeters and musicians joined in unison to give praise and thanks to the LORD. Accompanied by trumpets, cymbals and other instruments, the singers raised their voices in praise to the LORD and sang: "He is good; his love endures forever." Then the temple of the LORD was filled with the cloud, and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled the temple of God. 

An algebra of faith

There is an algebra of faith that says Jesus plus nothing equals everything, and Jesus plus something equals nothing.

When some New Testament passages say whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, and others say whoever believes will be saved, the algebra says that belief is required and baptism is optional. 

I get where this logic is coming from, and at its best, it points toward the insight that all our obedience and all our disciplines and all our studies are meant to open us up to the work of God in the Messiah Jesus, and that this is all a gift from him, even our joining in the work. 

But if we take it too far, we become like those who say "Master, Master" but don't do what Jesus says. We follow the six steps of salvation, we "get saved", and we believe we are saved, but we do nothing to continue in him. And if we don't continue in him, what expectation do we have of being saved at the last day?

This, I think, is why the Stone-Campbell movement warned us against "faith only" teachings. This is why the Book of Common Prayer says that baptism is "generally necessary" to salvation, as is participation in the eucharist in some gathering of believers called "church". Some people may do without it in dire circumstances, but if you persistently ignore it, who or what are you actually ordering your life around? (Online shopping? Social media? Sports? Your job? Your family? Your fears?) Are you expecting those things to save you? 

When Jesus said unless you give up everything you have, you can't be his disciple, where is that in our statement of faith or our gospel tract or our wordless book? 

Whoever endures to the end will be saved. And yet this endurance is a result of the warnings, comforts, and instructions found in Scripture, interpreted to us by the Spirit, reminded to us by our friends, both by their words and their presence. 

My Nigerian student's wife's elder sister's son took his own life recently, and so, as is the custom in Igbo culture, he and his wife have been coming over to the sister's house every evening and staying until around midnight, for the past two or three weeks, and they plan to continue doing this until she feels stable again. This is the kind of care that Jesus expects of us sometimes. And this is the kind of comfort that the Spirit brings through fellow humans, to help us endure. 

Let's leave aside the algebra of our faith and move on to the relational side.