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A Refuge for the Audacious
By John Gavazzoni
You've heard such expressions as, "the final refuge of scoundrels." In this article I'll be dealing with the final refuge of evangelical self-righteousness. It struck me anew that in evangelicalism, there is a refuge for the audacious; a refuge for the audacious claim that the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of God's salvific work in, by, and through His Son, rests upon man's yea or nay. Clearly the claim has been made, and continues to be made, that effectively, it will turn out that God has wasted the shed blood of Christ for the vast majority of mankind. The headline will read: Mankind Pours Cold Water on God's Passion. Subtitle: God Stonewalled by Man. The first sentence will read: "God has been exposed as a bumbling incompetent, left with little to show from His enormous investment."
The audaciousness of this claim struck me anew while reading an article, that on one hand, extolled (in a sense) the sufficiency of Christ's reconciling death, and life-giving resurrection, when the article ended by insisting upon "placing YOUR faith in Christ." All that comes from human initiation has in it an element of corruption, so that if WE should place OUR faith in Christ, we would corrupt Christ. In whomever saving faith is at work, it is the result of GOD placing the faith OF Christ in that whomever. The placement of saving faith is the act of God, totally of His initiation. What saves... what brings the soul to safety, health and wholeness... is God's placement of Christ in us, inclusive of Christ's faith. Of course, if one has Christ, one has Christ's faith.
To be righteous means to be right with God, and at the heart of righteousness is the RIGHTeous response of the Son to the Father. Christ's faith in us... and/or conversely, we being in Christ, His faith accrues to us... means that by Christ's indwelling, at the core of our being, we are rightly responding to "the love God has for us." God reckons THAT faith as righteousness. Christ's faith is God's gift to us in the gift of His Son to us. Given as a gift, it becomes ours, which is why scripture sometimes speaks of "your faith." We are alive with the conviction, confidence, assurance, and trust that, after all has been said and done, God will do right by us. The healthy soul lives by Jesus' confidence in the Father, and even this springs not from any independent decision of Jesus part. It is the Father's love that is the source and energy of the Son's faith.
Let's get mystical: The Father is in Christ, and it's His (the Father's) faith that the Son participates in. It's inherent in the truth that "the Father has life in Himself, and gives the Son to have life in Himself." (It's "gives" in the Greek, not "gave," by the way, so there is an ongoing, continual dependence of the Son upon the Father.)
Jesus said, "have the faith of God," because that's the faith He has. I would love for the reader to understand how God abounds in faith. Within the Godhead (better, "Godness" - JMT), that faith is shared within Their shared Deity, but the Father is the Fountainhead of that faith. Being in Christ, and with Christ in us, we enjoy that same dynamic of fellowship within the heart of Deity.
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