Well, beloved, will you please turn with me this afternoon in your Bibles to Acts chapter 16, Acts chapter 16. We're going to read together verses 15 through 34, 15 through 34 of Acts chapter 16. Our focus is going to be on verse 31, but also in conjunction with Article 22 in the Belgic Confession. Acts 16, we're actually going to begin at verse 16 as well. As we are going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and us, crying out, these men are servants of the Most High God who proclaim to you the way of salvation. And this she kept doing for many days. Paul, having become greatly annoyed, turned and said to the Spirit, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And it came out of her that hour. But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers. And when they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, these men are Jews, and they are disturbing our city. They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice. The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates tore the garments off them and gave orders to beat them with rods. When they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely. Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stonks. About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone's bonds were unfashioned. When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul cried with a loud voice, do not harm yourself, for we are all here. And the jailer called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas. And he brought them out and said, sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household. And they spoke the word of the Lord to him, and all who were in his house. And he took them that same hour of the night and washed their wounds, and he was baptized at once, he and all his family. And he brought them up into his house and set food before them. And he rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God. This is the reading of the Word of our God. We'll do so in conjunction with Bells of Confession, Article 22. You can find that on page 175 in the Forms and Prayers book in front of you. And I will read this for us, Article 22, titled, The Righteousness of Faith. We believe that for us to acquire the true knowledge of this great mystery, the Holy Spirit kindles in our hearts a true faith that embraces Jesus Christ with all his merits and makes him its own, and no longer looks for anything apart from him. For it must necessarily follow that either all that is required for our salvation is not in Christ, or if all is in him, then he who has Christ by faith has his salvation entirely. Therefore to say that Christ is not enough, but that something else is needed as well, is a most enormous blasphemy against God. For it then would follow that Jesus Christ is only half a Savior. And therefore we justly say with Paul that we are justified by faith alone, or by faith apart from works. However, we do not mean, properly speaking, that it is faith itself that justifies us. For faith is only the instrument by which we embrace Christ, our righteousness. But Jesus Christ is our righteousness, crediting to us all his merits and all the holy works he has done for us and in our place. And faith is the instrument that keeps us in communion with him and with all his benefits. When those benefits are made ours, they are more than enough to absolve us of our sins. This is our confession. Well, beloved, what the Belgic Confession focuses our hearts on this afternoon is faith. And as we take up this topic, we can't help but notice the idea of faith gets used in all sorts of different ways in the culture in which we live. We hear the admonition to have a little faith used in all sorts of different contexts. When the Lions are in a slump, we're told to have a little faith. Now, I have no idea how the Lions are doing. I had to Google what sports teams were local teams, so maybe they're not in a slump. Apparently, they're not. But when they are in a slump, we're told to have a little faith. When you're faced with a seemingly impossible challenge, you're encouraged to have a little faith. It'll all work out. What these ideas of faith do, though, is they focus our attention on faith itself, because such faith doesn't really have an object. The simple act of having some vague idea of faith in faith itself seems to be enough. Or faith is used to describe different religions. That's another way that it's used. There are different faiths as if they are all on equal standing ground with each other. But when it comes to Christianity, we have a very specific definition of faith. Particularly this evening, we are thinking about saving faith. If we take a step back, we can see how we get here in the flow of the Belgic. It's just talked about what Christ has accomplished. He died on the cross, and in doing so, he bore the punishment that he didn't deserve. He paid for sin by enduring the wrath of God. But the thing is, is that all of this is outside of us. Just because it happened doesn't mean that it becomes ours. The promise of something doesn't mean that we have the reality of it yet. Take engagement, for instance. And engagement comes with the promise of being married. But it doesn't come with the reality of being married right away. All the benefits, all of the blessings of being married are not ours yet. They are promised, but not yet received. It's not until the wedding that those blessings become ours. It's through marriage that they become ours. Or we can think of medicine. I think it was John Calvin who compared it to medicine. As long as it sits on the shelf, its healing benefits remain outside of us and useless to us. So, too, when it comes to the promise of the gospel, it remains outside of us until it becomes ours. And what the Belgic focuses our hearts on this afternoon or this evening is how that bridge is crossed. It's about how we receive the promised salvation that Christ has accomplished, about how it is that it becomes ours personally. What we're going to see is that it comes only through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. And so this is what we're going to look at together this afternoon. We've got a couple of points to keep us on track. We're going to see that faith is an instrument, that faith is a gift, and that faith has a shape. Faith is an instrument, it has a gift, and it is a gift, and it has a shape. First though, we gotta see that it is an instrument. Now instruments are tools that we use to accomplish things. If I wanna build a shed, I need tools, I need instruments to do so. So I'm gonna need to get a ladder, I'm gonna need to get a hammer, a drill, I'll need a saw and a tape measure and a square and a whole bunch of other things. Without these instruments, I won't be building a shed. We have this in all of life, all over life. There are objects or people that help us accomplish things in life. If I'm gonna write a sermon, then I need to have a laptop. Most of us need cars to get to work. We need houses to stay warm in the winter and to stay cool in the summer. We can even think of people who have been instrumental in our lives. They have influenced us and shaped us so profoundly that we wouldn't be who we are today without them. instruments than are people or objects that are necessary for something else to happen. And this is how God has chosen to give us salvation. He has chosen to use faith as the instrument in our form for the Lord's Supper. This is captured for us in a beautiful way when it says that faith is the hand of our souls. It's how we receive, how we lay hold of the grace that is given to us in the Lord's Supper. Likewise, faith is how we lay hold of Christ and all of his benefits. Belgic puts it like this, it says, we do not mean, properly speaking, that it is faith itself that justifies us, for faith is only the instrument by which we embrace Christ our righteousness. What all this means is that faith is necessary. Without faith, there is no salvation. It stays outside of us and apart from us. We see this dramatically in the life of the Philippian jailer in Acts chapter 16. The tumultuous events of this night, the earthquake, the opening of the cell doors, the implied threat of failure to keep the prisoners of Rome secure, bring this man to a place of desperation. And so he asks the most important question anybody could ever ask. He says, what must I do to be saved? You see, he's been hearing Paul and Silas singing all night long. He's heard them praising God, even though they were bound in prison. He most likely heard how they had rescued the slave girl. That's what we read in the first section of Acts 16 today, how Paul and Silas were used by God to cast out the demon of a possessed slave girl. Now we might pause here for just a moment and reflect on how these men were a witness to the faith that they had, how they were reflecting the glory of Christ like we talked about this morning. This jailer can tell that there is something different about these men. They are not overwhelmed being in a Roman prison which, humanly speaking, is exactly where you should be overwhelmed. It was not a pleasant place to be. And yet here they are singing and praising God. They revealed the winsomeness and the power of the gospel. They were revealing the immovable hope that they could have even in a Roman prison. They had a calm and even a joy despite the situation that they were in. They had something the jailer did not have and he could tell. And we might ask, what sort of witness do we give? If we have this same faith as Paul and Silas do, how are we living that faith out? Does the joy of the Lord pour out of us? This doesn't mean that we need to go around singing everywhere, though it could. But it does mean that faith in Christ leads to a distinctive difference in how we go about life and how we face difficulty and hardship. There's a winsomeness to the life of faith because we have resources that are found in Christ that are not found anywhere else. You see, Christianity is not something that just gets added on to our lives. Our faith is something that is fundamental to our lives out of which everything else flows out of. And the jailer sees this in Paul and Silas, and he knows that he does not have it. And so out of his desperation, he asked, what must I do to be saved? How do I get what you have? And Paul points to that one thing, the one instrument, the only hand that receives, and it is faith. He says, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. It's the only way. It's not through hard work. It is not through accomplishing all sorts of amazing things. It's not through living a perfectly holy life. It is not through serving at the food bank. It is not through conquering nations or anything like that. It is through faith, says Paul. He says, believe. The Belgic says that faith is that which embraces Jesus Christ with all of his merits. and makes him its own and no longer looks for anything apart from him. And so faith embraces Christ. It's about his righteousness, about his obedience, about his good works through his holy living. Faith embraces Christ in all of his benefits. So first we see that faith is the instrument that God has chosen to give us his salvation and therefore is absolutely necessary. We've got to understand something about this faith, about what's going on in the background of this faith. There's a whole lot that's going on underneath what we see here in this Roman jail. And secondly, that faith is a gift. Now a gift is something that we receive that we do not earn. It's all about giving someone something out of the goodness of our hearts, out of an appreciation for who they are, maybe for an appreciation for something that they have done. but a gift is not deserved. We do not owe anybody a gift at the end of the day. And neither is salvation earned. We certainly don't deserve it. We certainly can't earn it. We are incapable of obtaining it on our own. And Paul makes this clear in Romans 3 when he tells us that none is righteous, no not one, no one understands, no one seeks for God, all have turned aside, together they have become worthless, no one does good, not even one. That's pretty absolute, isn't it? There aren't a class of people or a category of people who are more worthy than others. We all stand equal before the throne of God. We all fall short of the glory of God. This means that no amount of good works is enough, nor are they pure enough. So thoroughly does sin pervade our lives that there is nothing that is not tainted with it. It's sort of like getting grease on your hands. A couple weeks ago, I had to grease a set of bearings on a trailer. And of course, when you do that, you get grease all over your hands, which means that you get it over everything else that you touch. And I'm pretty sure that I not only ruined a good pair of shorts, but I also left a trail of grease around the entire garage. And that's what sin does in our lives. It stains everything that we do and everything that we touch. No one does good. No, not one. And that's why we can't earn our salvation. We cannot fulfill the demands of God's law. And so too with faith. It is not earned because it cannot be earned. It cannot be conjured up in us. We cannot force it into existence in our own hearts. Further yet, we don't even know that we need it until our eyes are open. We are blind to the reality of our sin. We are blind to the reality of our unbelief and our rebellion against God. This is why the Belgic talks about the great mystery of the gospel. It's a mystery to those who do not understand why it is needed. And what this means is that we need help to see and understand. We need outside help. If help cannot come from inside of me, then we need it to come from outside of us, don't we? Loved ones, we have a God who, in his gracious love, does exactly that. It's God who opens our eyes to see what we cannot see. It's God who redeems us, who makes us new so that we can do what we could not do before. It's God who plants that gift of faith in our dead souls so that we can believe what before we refused to believe. Belzer puts it this way, the Holy Spirit kindles in our hearts a true faith. And so we can think of faith like a fire. Fire doesn't spontaneously begin. There's always some source, there's always some spark of some sort. I think there's an old campfire song that talks about how it only takes a spark to get a fire going. Well, it's the Spirit of God who lights the fire of faith in your heart and in mine. Paul puts it into perspective for us in another of his letters in Ephesians 2. He says, for it is by grace that you have been saved through faith. And this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast. Faith is a gift of incredible grace. That's the point here. It is all by grace. The fact that the very thing we need to lay hold of the salvation that is found only in Christ is a gift declares to us that it's only by grace. Faith by its very nature points us away from ourselves and it points us to the gift giver. It points us to our God who overcomes the stubborn rebellion of our hearts, who punches through the blindness of our hearts to show us the way. All this is going on in the background of Paul's interaction with the Philippian jailer. Paul knows that unless the Spirit works first in this jailer's heart, that he won't believe. But notice how this does not stop him from telling the jailer that he must believe. He plants the seed. And then he leaves it to the Spirit to make it live. He still tells him that he must believe. It is a command. It's an imperative. And this reminds us that though we cannot produce faith in other people, though we cannot earn it or anything like that, loved ones, we are called to exercise the faith that we have been given. We are called to actively believe, to actively lay hold of Christ and all of his benefits. Now this is important for us because sometimes we can be too passive. We sort of take up an attitude of I can't do it so I just need to leave it to the Spirit and he will do what he is going to do. And so we don't say those words to that neighbor of ours. We don't talk to that coworker of ours about the gospel. If God is going to save them, then God's going to save them, and we'll see what happens. It's not what Paul tells the jailer here. No, he says believe. He commands him to believe. He calls him to exercise whatever faith the Spirit may have planted in his heart, knowing that the ability to believe is only possible by grace. And so faith is, loved ones, a gift of incredible grace. It's a grace that gives birth to faith. It's a gift from our loving God who desires us to believe and to rest in Him and to be restored to Him. But again, we can go a little deeper. There's more we need to understand about saving faith. Thirdly, you need to see its particular shape. And we need to know this shape because there are so many twisted views about what faith actually is. More than that, we have imaginations, which are a wonderful gift from God. But due to the effects of sin and the effects of the fall on our lives and in our imaginations, We create these ideas about what faith should look like that do not reflect what Christ tells us that faith should look like. And so we have to root our hearts again in the God-given shape of faith. And when we do that, we recognize that there are three important parts to true faith. And we find them in another of our confessions in the Heidelberg Catechism. Answer 21 declares that true faith is not only a sure knowledge by which I hold as true all that God has revealed to us in His Word, it is also a wholehearted trust which the Holy Spirit works in me by the gospel. And so we have three parts here. The first part is knowledge. We need to know things. And notice this is exactly what Paul and Silas first share with this Philippian jailer. After telling him that he needs to believe in Jesus, they then tell him about Jesus. Verse 32 says, and they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. They shared knowledge. They shared the word of the Lord. They showed this jailer and his household the wonderful truths of the gospel. They told them about their sin. They told them what was true about them and they told them about God and who he is and what is true about him. He shared knowledge because there is no faith, there is no trust unless there is something or more accurately someone to trust in. Jesus teaches us himself this in John 17. He says, this is eternal life that they know. that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. Now, this goes against one of the most prevailing ideas about faith, which is that it is just some mystical sort of thing that is not connected with intellectual knowledge at all. It's just a feeling. It's just a sense that I have. It's something that sort of just floats around out there. I have my faith, you have your faith. As long as we both have some sort of faith, it doesn't really matter what it looks like. Faith, according to some, is purely a feeling that we have. Now, this isn't to say that we don't experience feelings. Jesus himself wept. But it is to say that to define faith as a feeling is to put the cart before the horse. Feelings should be based on knowledge. They should be our responses to true things, but we need to know those true things first. We need to know about Jesus. Now what's interesting is that this is the part of the Great Commission that seems to be overlooked quite often. Jesus says in Matthew 28, before Jesus leaves earth, he gives the church's mission in Matthew 28. He says, go therefore, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And so many stop just right there. But then we then miss that next phrase, which is that we need to teach them to observe all that I have commanded you. And so Jesus himself calls us to teach people about himself. In fact, we need to do this very thing with our own children, don't we? It's part of the vows that we make in baptism. In the vows made by the parents, we say, do you sincerely promise to do all that you can to teach this child and to have him or her taught this doctrine of salvation? And then we as the church also join in making a vow, and we too vow to this very thing. We vow that we will help care for his or her instruction in the faith. Now to be clear, this doesn't mean that we need to know everything. We don't need an exhaustive knowledge that spans the entire system of theology. Again, the Heidelberg Catechism helps us out here. In question two, after the profound comfort of question one, which summarizes our only comfort in life and death, it asks, how many things must you know to live and die in the joy of this comfort? And the answer is three. First, how great my sin and misery are. Second, how I am to be delivered from my sins and misery. And third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance. And so first, faith requires that we know something. Second, faith is also about affirming what we know. It's not simply knowledge, but it is a sure knowledge. It's accepting it as true. You see, it's completely possible for us to know the Bible exhaustively and yet not accept it as true. There are biblical scholars who would be able to put every single person in this room to shame with their biblical and theological knowledge, but who don't actually believe that it is true. To them, it is just data, just information that captures the history of this belief system called Christianity. At most, it is creative history, and at least it's all just a great myth. But it's not true, at least to them. Knowledge is not enough. We can know something, but we can reject it. We can know about Jesus, but refuse to trust him. We can know about our sin, but refuse to stop or refuse to accept that it is wrong. Paul again gives us a picture of this in Romans 1 when he says, though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them. Or we can think of the demons. James tells us, you believe that God is one, you do well. Even the demons believe and shudder. Loved ones, we need more knowledge. We also need to agree with it. We need to agree with the knowledge about Christ. We need to agree with his diagnosis of our own hearts. We need to agree that there is only one solution, there's only one hope, one source of salvation, and that is Christ alone. What we need, loved ones, is to submit to the truth that God reveals to us. So true saving faith agrees with God and it humbly submits to what he tells us. Not only do we need to know things, and not only must we agree with these things, but we must also personally trust them. Or more accurately, we need to trust Him who is revealed in the Bible. Notice how Paul and Silas put it to the Philippian jailer. They say believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, not believe about the Lord Jesus Christ, but believe in Him. Christ is the object of our faith, and what faith requires of us is a trust in him. And this is why the Belgic says that true faith embraces Jesus Christ with all of his merits and makes him its own and no longer looks for anything apart from him. And with this trust, loved ones, we come to the heart of faith. When we speak about faith, we are speaking about embracing Christ with a wholehearted and a total trust. This trust involves giving our all to Jesus, our surrendering ourselves to him. It's recognizing that there is nothing or no one who is more valuable in life than this living and active relationship with this Savior. Because that is what this trust is all about. Trust only exists within a relationship. We can't help think about the parable that Jesus gives us where a man finds a treasure in a field and he sells all that he has so that he can buy that field and lay hold of that treasure. We might think of a young man who is deeply in love with a young woman. And so things that he used to find all this joy and pleasure in, things that he used to spend all his time doing, suddenly don't, he's not doing them so much anymore. He's always off at her house. Because he's infatuated, he's in love. This is what faith does. It trusts our entire self, our past, our present, and our future into loving care of God. What trust does, loved ones, it redirects our hearts away from ourselves and away from anything else that may seek to lay claim to our hearts and it focuses on Christ himself and Christ alone. Faith trusts, as the Belgic teaches, that Jesus Christ is our righteousness, crediting to us all his merits and all the holy works he has done for us and in our place. Faith trusts that what Christ has done on the cross, he has done for me personally. It trusts that his death was for me and his righteousness is now mine and that I am forever united to the Lord Jesus Christ. And because faith trusts in this Savior, it looks nowhere else. And so, loved one, this is what faith is. It is rooted in the truth of God's word. It agrees with the assessment of our problem and with the only solution that is prescribed. And it trusts that solution, that our Savior Jesus Christ is who he says he is and has done what he said he was going to do. And what an incredible gift this is, loved ones. What grace is ours in this faith. What love is expressed to us in this gift of faith. What it does is it roots us in the glorious truth that all that we have, all the help that we so desperately need as helpless sinners, it's all given to us in Jesus Christ. It is all of grace. Not one part of our salvation is earned, not one part is accomplished by us. Even the exercise of this faith, this gift, is rooted in grace. And that's because it's not about how strong your faith is or how strong my faith is. I forget who said it now, but I heard it once explained that it's not about how strong my grip on Jesus is, but it's about how strong his grip is on me. It's about his grip on me. That's pretty beautiful, isn't it? Even when our faith is weak, which it so often is, Christ still holds us fast. And that is grace. And so let us rejoice, loved ones, in the grace of our God. Let us rejoice in the fact that all that we have and all that we are now in Jesus Christ is through that gift of faith. Let us look to Christ, let us look to him alone, humbly confessing that nothing in my hands I bring, simply to that cross I cling. Let's pray. Once again, our Holy Father, we are humbled by the magnitude of your love for us in Jesus Christ. Father, we know what goes on in our own hearts. We know how rebellious our hearts are. We know how tempting sin is to us. We know that we love it. And we are humbled that you are so faithful to us and your love is so great towards us that you work in that gift of faith. You are the one who pulls us out of a life of sin and plants life in our hearts and gives us this faith wherein we can cling to you. Father, what a gift it is. And what a gift it is to know that it is not about the strength that we have on you, but about your strength, the grip that you have on us. We know that our faith is often weak. We know that we often are looking to other things to find our strength and our hope in. And yet you still hold us firmly in your hand. What grace you show us in Jesus Christ. And so Heavenly Father, will you reorient our hearts again and again and again to Christ. Every time our hearts wander from you, will you pull us back by your Spirit so that we would look again to the one and only Savior that we have, the one who has born in us this incredible faith. And may we be a people of strong faith, looking only to Jesus. This we ask in His name alone, amen.