as we submit ourselves to the Word of God, the authority of God's Word, the teaching of God's Word this fall, we're paying special attention to what God does in us and what God does for us as he brings us to saving faith in Christ. There's an old love song, I'm sure some of you know it, you may remember it. Love is a many-splendored thing. And as we look more closely and take the time to delve more deeply than we may be accustomed into experiencing the wonder and the joy of God's amazing saving grace, it's my hope that we'll all come out of this singing together salvation. is a many-splendored thing because there are many different things that God brings into play in our lives as he unfolds and as he applies the benefits of salvation to us. Seeing salvation in 3D HD full living color rather than 2D black and white with wavy lines. It will fuel your worship for Jesus. It will help you in the battle against sin. It will work within you to reorient and to reshape your affections. And the overarching lens through which we are looking at the wonderful riches of God's mercy poured out upon us in Christ is what is known as the golden chain of salvation in Romans chapter 8 verses 29 and 30. In these two verses, Paul tells us that those whom God foreknows God predestines to salvation so that they can be made like Jesus. And those whom God predestines, God calls. Those whom God calls, God also justifies. And those whom God justifies, God also glorifies. We spent a little bit of time over the last couple Lord's Days unfolding what it means to be called by God. And we've looked into what God does for us and what God does in us as he calls us to saving faith. in Christ. We've seen that God calls us according to his purpose in order to bring glory to himself as he makes us more and more like Jesus, changing us from one degree of glory into another. Last time we looked at Jesus, conversation with Nicodemus in John chapter three to give us a better understanding of the fact that we need a new birth. We need to be born again spiritually or born from above before we can respond to God's effectual call in our lives. Jesus tells Nicodemus that just as he had no control whatsoever over his physical birth, so too he has no control over his spiritual birth. The wind blows where it will, he says. The spirit does what he wishes. In order for us to enter God's kingdom, we need to be purified from the pollution of sin. We need to be born of the Spirit of God. And before any of us can enter into God's kingdom, we need that spiritual purification. We need that heart transplant. The old must pass away and the new must come. Being born again is the work of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the sole source, the sole agent of this new birth. We saw that that which comes out of natural man can only produce that which is natural to man, that which is sinful. And that which comes forth from God produces only that which is characteristic of God, that which is sinless and eternal. Then God must do all this work in our lives in order for us to be able to turn to Him and to make the necessary response of faith and repentance. And it is this response of faith and repentance that we worship the Lord for in His Word today and to shape our thinking about faith and repentance. I want to invite you, please, to open your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 2. We're going to be looking at verses 1 through 9. It's on page 976 if you want to use one of the Bibles in the seat rack in front of you. Let's give our attention to Ephesians chapter 2, the living word of God. And you are dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages, he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace, you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. not a result of works, so that no one may boast. This is God's holy, living word for us today. Now we see as we begin to travel through these verses together that being born again really is inseparable from its effects. It is impossible for anyone to believe in Christ unless they're born from above. But at the same time, it is impossible for anyone to be born from above and for them not to believe and respond to God's call with faith and repentance. In John 6, 44, Jesus says, no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." But that statement comes right on the heels of Jesus' equally true promise in John 6, verse 37. All that the Father gives me will come to me. So we see that regeneration and faith are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other. In regeneration, which is just shorthand for being born again, God gives us a new heart and a new mind. This new heart and new mind will act according to their nature. This new heart and new mind will respond to God with faith and repentance. Being born again is an act of God, an act of God alone. Faith and repentance are the necessary responses that we must make when God works to give us the new heart and the new mind. It's not God who needs to believe in Christ for salvation, and certainly God has nothing to repent of. It is we who are sinners who must believe in Christ and must turn away from our sin. We're only able to believe by the grace of God, but faith is something that must be exercised by each individual when God calls. In faith, we must receive and rest upon Christ and Christ alone for salvation. God alone regenerates, we alone believe. We believe in Christ alone for salvation. In saving us, God does not deal with us like machines or robots. We're not puppets on a string. God deals with us as persons, as individuals. God deals with our whole person and works within every fiber, every facet of our being as he draws us to himself. Back to verse eight from Ephesians 2, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God. Well, what is this faith? What is this faith through which we are saved? John Murray, in his book, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, says faith is a whole-souled movement of self-commitment to Christ for salvation from sin and its consequences. That may sound a little dense, a little heady to put your hands around this morning, but what that is saying is that in faith we turn to Christ with all of ourself, our whole self, all that we are, recognizing and believing and claiming that who Jesus is and what Jesus has done. It is the only satisfactory, it is the only sufficient way for us to deal with the sin that stains and corrupts every part of our lives all day long. All across the globe, God is entreating. God is inviting. God is commending. God is commanding and sounding forth the message of his mercy and grace. Acts 17, 30 and 31 tells us that God commands people, all people everywhere, to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. And of this, he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. Jesus is that man. Jesus is the one that verse speaks of. Jesus is the only sufficient savior for sin because he provides the only satisfactory sacrifice for sin. And God demonstrates his acceptance of that sacrifice by raising Jesus from the dead. in commanding people everywhere to repent and be saved, God does not simply offer the possibility of salvation. No, God offers a real Savior, a Savior who provides a full and a perfect salvation. So we see Jesus is the object of this faith. Jesus, the object of our faith. Saving faith is not a faith that we have been saved or not a faith that we might be saved. No, saving faith is a faith that trusts that Christ and Christ alone can save us. Strictly speaking, it's not faith that saves, but faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ saves us by grace through faith. And by faith, we who are lost sinners entrust ourselves to the person and to the work of Christ. there's a constellation of three things that come into play and function together in genuine saving faith. Faith must have a clearly defined content, it must come with conviction, and it must lead to commitment. So content, Conviction, commitment, that's like the three legs of a three-legged stool. A fully functioning, saving faith requires content, conviction, and commitment. Let's take that apart for just a minute and see how that works. So faith starts with content or with knowledge. Faith starts with a knowledge. It's not a series of vague notions or ill-defined sentiments. Biblical faith is a faith that has clearly defined definite content. Faith without content is not true faith. R.C. Sproul says, I cannot have God in my heart if he's not in my head. As I said before, the object of our faith is Jesus Christ. So we have to know who Christ is. We have to know what Christ has done. We have to know what Christ is able to do. Otherwise, our faith is just some kind of blind conjecture. But content knowledge, that's not enough. By itself, knowledge accomplishes nothing. There needs to be conviction. We need to believe that this knowledge that we have is true. It's possible to know completely. to know accurately the complete content of Christian doctrine, to approve it, to support it, to defend it, even to teach it for decades, as was the case with John Wesley before he was converted. It's possible to teach all of it and be lost. I lived that way myself for many years. I was convinced in my head, giving full intellectual assent to the validity of the Bible and the truth of Christianity. But such intellectual assent, it had no impact, no effect on my personal life at all. I did not really love Christ. I did not trust him personally. I had no concept whatsoever of what it meant to have Christ on the throne of my life and to have Jesus calling the shots, or what it meant to live a life of submitted obedience to the Lord. Such knowledge was just brain food for me. But genuine saving faith includes a component of conviction that takes things beyond the head to the heart. Conviction convinces me that Christ is exactly and Christ is only what I need to deal with my desperate condition and my hopelessness, the hopelessness that my sin and my misery puts me in. Christ is the only solution that perfectly fits my sin, my guilt, my misery. It is conviction then that leads to the third and final component of genuine life-changing saving faith and that is commitment or trust. Commitment takes us all the way home to God. It takes us beyond abstract knowledge and agreement. Commitment takes us beyond simply agreeing with or being personally moved by the gospel. True faith is knowledge that passes its way into conviction, and conviction passes its way into confidence. Saving faith cannot, does not, will not stop short of commitment to Christ. True saving faith always looks away from self and finds its interest, finds that Christ is completely satisfactory for everything. Saving faith requires getting rid of all self-reliance, all trust in any human resources or good works for salvation. It relies and rests on Christ alone for salvation. Commitment occurs when we stop thinking we belong to ourselves and we become true disciples of Jesus by realizing that we belong to him. We belong to the Lord. Commitment is Thomas on the week after the resurrection falling to his knees and saying, my Lord and my God. I wanna illustrate how these three things work together and Trevor's gonna assist in this moment. Come on up, Trevor. And would you bring that purpley thing that's in the front there? That thing, yeah, bring that right up here with you. All right, I had to find someone strong enough to carry that. So what do we call this thing? A chair, how do you know that that's a chair? It's what you were taught, but what, I mean, what are the characteristics of a chair that you think make you reliably sure that it's a chair? A seat, four legs, and a back. So that's a content. You have knowledge about a chair. Now, Trevor, do you think that chair could hold you up if you sat in it? You do. So you're convicted about that. But how can you prove that you really believe that the chair will hold you? You would sit in it. You would commit. You would commit to sitting. You have the content, conviction, and commitment. There's faith. There's faith in action. Thank you, Trevor. You can go back, take a chair. Now, alongside of this faith, this three-legged stool of faith, there is simultaneously at work within us and concurrent to responding to God's call, there's also repentance. Repentance. Repentance is impossible to disentangle from faith. They're so intertwined with each other. It's like a giant plate of spaghetti. You can't really pull them apart, but we're talking about them as two separate things, but they're concurrent. They're simultaneous with each other. And though the message we read in Ephesians 2 a few moments ago is clear, that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, Martin Luther makes the very helpful observation that although we are saved by faith alone, though we're saved by faith alone, the faith that saves is never alone. The faith that saves is a repentant faith. Saving faith is permeated with repentance, and real repentance is permeated with faith. Faith brings a hatred of sin into our lives, a revulsion over sin, and an abhorrence of sin, along with a desire to be saved from sin. Faith produces in us a yearning to turn away from sin and to turn to God. Faith gives us a grief and a hatred of sin that causes us to weep over our sin, to turn from sin, to turn to God, to pursue a new kind of obedience. And that's when faith comes all the way home. when that's at work in your life, and you turn, as we were talking about with the children, as you turn from going one way, and you turn and go the other way, and go towards God, and you pursue a new kind of obedience. It's not an obedience that's rooted in a cringing kind of a fear, and it's not an obedience that is continually fueled by guilt. It's an obedience that springs from love. It's not an obedience that focuses on the kind of self-discipline and deprivation that we manufacture on our own so that we can try to gut it out. but it is an obedience that is diligently attentive to the power of God's Spirit at work within us who makes such obedience even possible. We said a moment ago that true saving faith causes us to look away from self and self-interest and self-effort in order to embrace Christ as all that we need. And the same can be said about the way that the Holy Spirit brings us to repentance and fans the flame of the gospel obedience in our lives. Repentance results in a change of heart, a change of mind within us, a turning from sin. Repentance causes us to see God in a new way. We never saw God that way before. At the same time, it causes us to see ourselves in a new way and to see our sin in a new way. Repentance causes us to understand righteousness in a new way. Our hearts, our minds, our wills, they're radically renewed. The way that we think, the way that we feel, it's radically reshaped. Old things pass away and give way to new patterns of thinking and speaking and relating. Too often we define faith as making a decision for Christ or inviting Christ into our heart, but these kind of vague and general expressions, they completely overlook the momentous amount of change that accompanies responding to God with faith and repentance. And if we fail to understand and appreciate the radical renewal that God gives us in salvation, then we cheapen. and we diminish why Jesus did what he did on Calvary. If we fail to grasp the deep-seated change of thought and feeling that repentance requires, then we impoverish ourselves by failing to appreciate all that God has for us in Christ. If we fail to take the full weight and the full demands of the gospel of the heart, then we're choosing to live in that kind of black and white 2D wavy line TV picture I mentioned earlier. real faith, and repentance, they are evidenced by a change of heart and mind with respect to our own personal, individual sins. Not just sin in general, not the idea of sin, not someone else's sin, not all the sins of all the people out there, but our own sin, our own specific, particular, peculiar patterns of sinning. You can find out if your repentance is real by taking inventory of how much you hate your own brand of sinning. How grieved are you by your sin? A little white lie? A little piece of juicy gossip? Harsh word to a spouse? How aggressively do you submit to the Holy Spirit as he comes alongside you to wage war, wage war against the sin that so easily entangles you? 1 Thessalonians 1, 9 and 10, it gives us a living illustration of what repentance looks like in action. In 1 Thessalonians 1, 9, and 10, Paul writes to commend his brothers and sisters in the church at Thessalonica and to praise God for the way that faith and repentance is evident and at work among those who make up this church and for the way that that faith and repentance is resulting in making a widely known, widely circulated testimony about this group of believers. Paul writes, for they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to wait for his son from heaven whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come. Now, the Thessalonians were widely known for their idolatry. They didn't know it was idolatry, but they were widely known for it. And it was the idolatry of the Thessalonians that alienated them from God. And it was the repentance of the Thessalonians that proved the reality of their faith. It was their repentance, their turning away from idols and turning to God that people in other places noticed. When God's people respond to God's call with faith and repentance, other people will sit up and they will take notice. Because the gospel of Jesus Christ is not just a message that we are saved by grace through faith. It is also labeled in scripture a gospel of repentance. Jesus' own words in Luke 24, 46 and 47, he says, thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead and that repentance for the forgiveness of sin should be proclaimed in his name to all nations. On the day of Pentecost, as Peter preaches and men and women cry out, what must we do to be saved? Peter responds by telling them, repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. That is the repeated message of the New Testament. Repentance from dead works and faith toward God is the foundation of our new life in Christ. We sing it, my chains are gone. I've been set free. The bonds that bind us to the dominion of sin are broken. We're dead to sin, alive to Christ. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. Faith is receiving and resting in Christ alone for salvation. Repentance is the response of turning away from sin and turning to God. If the faith that you profess is a faith that allows you to walk in the ways of the present evil world, the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the boastful pride of life. If the faith that you profess allows you to continue to stay in fellowship with works of darkness, then your faith is false. It is a mockery. It is a deception. True faith is not a momentary act. True faith is an abiding attitude of trust. True faith is a continuing confidence that is directed toward the Savior. True faith comes encased in repentance, and repentance results in a continuing remorse over sin. In his great confessional psalm, which Ted began our service with this morning, David puts it like this, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise. As long as we remain confined in these sinful bodies, there must remain a consciousness and conviction of our sin as well as a contrition for our sin. In the first of Martin Luther's famous 95 Theses, Luther writes, our Lord and Master Jesus Christ willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. Repentance begins at the cross. And repentance, of course, continues at the cross of Christ as we daily apply for cleansing, healing, and forgiveness from our sin that only Christ can give us. So brothers and sisters, my friend, may we live in the light of the freedom that God gives us as we come to Him in faith, repenting of our sin and looking to Him, forgiveness. We're gonna pray and then in a moment we're gonna sing one of the great hymns of the faith. And I know many of you love this hymn, Rock of Ages, Clef for me. And as we sing that song, there's a line in there that we can easily just gloss over. We should stop and think about it. The line is, foul, foul I to the fountain fly. Wash me, Savior, or I die. And in 1775, Augustus Toplady published the first stanza of Rock of Ages. He just put the first stanza in print at the beginning, and he preceded them with the following words. Toplady wrote, Yes, if you fall, be humbled. but do not despair. Pray afresh to God who is able to raise you up and set you on your feet again. Look to the blood of the covenant and say to the Lord from the depths of your heart, rock of ages, cleft for me. Let me hide myself in thee. Let the water and the blood from thy wounded side, which flowed, be of sin the double cure. Save from wrath, make me pure. Let's pray together as we think about this. Lord, we do confess to you that we stumble and fall many, many times every single day. Lord, we, by your grace, are unable to get up, to keep going on, to be washed, to be cleansed, to be healed. because of what Christ has done. And so, we know that all this work that we've talked about today, our faith, our ability to respond to you, the repentant attitude that we offer ourselves back to you, the turning from sin, it is all a gift from you, it is all a gift of Christ. And so, thank you for that. I pray for anyone who is in the sound of these words today, either now or at a future time, You would give us a pause, a moment to inspect our heart, to look within, to ask ourselves, The reality of our faith, is it demonstrated by this kind of repentance? Is there a real contrition, a heartbreak over sin? If not, Lord, then today may be the day that we need to step out in faith and say, Lord, I believe. Help me in my unbelief. Help me, Lord, to cling to Christ. Help me to realize that He is my only hope. He is the only satisfactory sacrifice for my sin. Lord, I pray that you would move in on my life, that Christ would take over, that he would take the reins of my heart, that he would become my brother, I would become his brother, that I would become your child through faith in Jesus. Lord, I pray that you would move in the heart of everyone who comes into contact with your word through this word, Lord, to provoke a response of faith and repentance. We pray, God, that we would stand strong together, that we would encourage one another, that we would be enabled to engage more fully, more wholeheartedly in the battle against sin, and that you would continue to reshape our affections, and strengthen our assurance of salvation. In Jesus' name, amen.