Sola fide

Now, the question is, what does that necessarily look like? I mean, um, are...

You know, anybody who specifically denies the sufficiency of God's, of sola gratia and sola fide together, knowingly doing so, well, yeah, I...

There's a person who's trusting in their own righteousness.

Um, but are there people that don't even know what the issues are? And I, I have to hope that there are a lot of people that don't know what the issues are, and they do have a faith in Christ, and when we push them, when we inquire of them, when we try to teach them, um, you encounter confusion, you encounter tradition.

Um, and so I, I want to be very, very careful when I say that sola fide is, is absolutely necessary, but I also need to be careful in defining that in such a fashion that I'm not making theological perfection, um, an addition to sola fide.

I mean, I, I think sometimes we do go there in the sense of requiring somebody to have, you know, a master's degree in church history to get all the forms of faith, and assensus and fiducia, and, you know, we've got all of our Latin phrases that we can throw out there.

Um, sometimes I, I do encounter people who draw the circle so tightly that they have to stand on one foot to stay inside it.

So I'm here sharing with you one of my most vulnerable moments, but I've come to realize that God has given us a gift that is much greater, much bigger than a house, and that is the gift of faith.

And so I stand here today like Luther stood and say, "By faith alone.

Nothing else will do.

Nothing else will do." And when everything ends, and the day will come when this house, too, will go, but I pray that the valuable lesson of faith will forever stay.

And I would even say e- in Evangelicalism, that's hard for a lot of people.

Um, I was talking to a friend of mine today, and we were saying, "I think in Evangelicalism, justification by faith alone is extremely clear." And people get that, and they're like, "Yep, yep, yep, yep." But then you start talking about good works/sanctification, and that is not- [laughs]

Mm

... that doesn't come to you by the power of the Spirit.

So it's like that second one can trip you up.

Right.

The first one you're good with, justified by faith alone.

But your sanctification, if not properly managed, can then affect your justification.

when you, when you hear from modern Roman Catholics, they will, they will, they will, um, who are, you know, committed to the Pope and to the Second Vatican Council, they will play games with what the word faith means.

They'll try to load good works into it so that they can kind of technically affirm Sola Fide, but it's faith formed by love, which is good medieval Catholic doctrine.

But they kind of dance around the issue.

They don't make the distinctions very well because they want to obscure it for a Protestant audience that's hungry for the, the order and stability of kind of a, a, an international cr- you know, crusading society of, of, uh, conservatives.

Was he...

Was he a proponent of things like Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, was he a proponent of...

What was his view of baptism, even? Do you know those things?

He definitely would have been faith alone, he said as much.

Both matter.

So I want you to see that following the paragraph 21 to 26, with all of that rich, deep theology of redi- uh, redemption, propitiation, justification, and then seeing justification by faith alone, that this subsequent paragraph gives us three implications.

So if you're saying, "All right, the, the solas." Clay was showing me beforehand his Bible.

I said, "What you got in that Bible?" And it said, "Solus Christus," on the side.

And I said, "Well, look, I can do you one better.

I got all five solas here on this Bible." Somebody gave me this as a gift.

What difference does it make? Sola fide, faith alone.

Well, this paragraph gives us three implications.

Let's go with fide.

Sola fide.

Faith alone.

Fide from which we get the word fidelity or infidelity or infidel.

It just means, it's Latin for faith.

Sola fide, faith alone.

That the Christian is saved by their faith in Jesus, their trust in Jesus, not their work.

God's not looking at you this morning saying, "Well, I did see that, and now your salvation is sort of hanging in the balance." No, it's your faith in Christ.

I haven't walked with very many people through that whole process, so I don't know if I'm the best to ask.

But when I do encounter folks that aren't Catholic, that have, you know, kind of Protestant sensibilities and want to try to come to understand why it could make sense to be a Catholic, I guess I like to begin by really putting some pressure on Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide, because those are really the pillars of Protestant theology that divide Protestants from Catholics.

I like to ask people, okay, let's talk about Sola Scriptura.

What's your favorite verse to support Sola Scriptura? And usually 2 Timothy 3.16 comes up.

So what you would say then is, the first thing you do is you would

blow up the paradigm of sola scriptura.

And then sola fide.

And then sola fide.