This is a sermon by Woods, transcribed to read. Lengthy read, but he dismantles the false teaching of Lordship Salvation
Good evening everybody. We had a handout going around, does anybody need that. You can put your hand up and we’ll give you a handout. The handout, as you know, just contains the slides that I’m going to use, which also are posted on our website. But this is our 7th lesson on the doctrine of salvation, otherwise called soteriology and we have been in Roman numeral five in our outline. We’ve been dealing with Roman numeral five which is God’s one condition of salvation. And I hope you picked up the fact that there’s only one condition to be saved, which is to what? Believe. And we went through what believe means and so forth.
Now once you say that people will say well wait a minute, there’s other passages that seem to teach something different. There’s a collection of passages that say a believer must repent. So last time I tried to show you how we harmonize “repent” with the word “believe.” Remember that? Repent means change of mind, which is a synonym for believe. Remember we went through all of that.
And tonight we’re getting into another controversy, what do we do with passages that talk about following Christ as Lord? And if there are passages in the Bible that call us to follow Him as Lord, how does that harmonize with the idea that we simply believe in Christ to be saved and receive a gift. So take a look, if you could, at Matthew 16, verses 24 and 25, this is what Jesus says to Peter, I believe, and the other disciples. “Then Jesus said to His disciples, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. [25] ‘For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.’” And it goes on from there.
Now you say well, wait a minute, I thought you taught us that the Bible said we must believe to be saved, in Christ, and here is a verse that adds a bunch of other things. You must deny yourself, you must take up your cross, you must follow Him, you must be willing to lose your life. And how do we harmonize that with verses like John 3:16 which make it sound as if salvation is as simple as believing in Christ. You see the tension that we’re in here. [John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”]
And really the key to the whole thing is verse 24, “Then Jesus said to His disciples,” in other words, Jesus is talking to people that are already saved, but more on that a little bit later. So sadly there is a doctrine that has become very prominent in Bible believing circles, really since around 1980 or so, and the doctrine is called Lordship salvation. Has anybody heard of this doctrine, Lordship salvation? A couple of you.
Here is Robert Lightner, he’s not a Lordship advocate but he’s defining it, and he says: “Lordship Salvation refers to the belief which says the sinner who wants to be saved must not only trust Christ as his substitute for sin, but must also surrender every area of his life to the complete control of Christ.” When he says “not only trust in Christ” but adds something else, that should raise some red flags because a couple of lessons ago we taught very clearly (based on about 200 passages) that people are saved by faith alone. Lordship salvation says you’re not saved by faith alone; faith is great but it also must be accompanied by something else, a surrender of some kind. Probably the biggest proponent of Lordship salvation today in our world and particularly in our church world is a very popular teacher by the name of John MacArthur and he wrote a book about this called The Gospel According to Jesus, and let me read to you an excerpt from this book.
He says, “Eternal life is indeed a free gift (Romans 6:23). Salvation cannot be earned with good deeds or purchased with money. It has already been bought by Christ, who paid the ransom with His blood.” Now if he had just stopped the sentence there I would say Amen, but notice this conjunction, “But,” see, whenever someone says you’re “saved by faith alone but” then it’s time to get nervous. So he says, “But that does not mean there is no cost,” now there he’s talking about the cost to me and you. “…there is no cost in terms of salvation’s impact on the sinner’s life. This paradox may be difficult but it is nevertheless true: salvation is both free and costly.” Well how can that be? That’s like saying jumbo shrimp, isn’t it? Those are two words that don’t go together. “Eternal life brings immediate death to self.” He quotes Romans 6:6 there, [“’Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.’”]
“Thus in a sense we pay,” whoa, “the ultimate price for salvation when our sinful self is nailed to a cross. It is a total abandonment of self-will, like the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies so that it can bear much fruit. It is an exchange of all that we are for all that Christ is. And it denotes implicit obedience, full surrender to the lordship of Christ. Nothing less can qualify as saving faith.” So it’s not just Christ paid the price and I receive it as a gift but I have to pay some kind of price. You see?
Here is another quote from John MacArthur in his book, Faith Works, he says, ““Jesus is Lord of all, and the faith He demands involves unconditional surrender…He does not bestow eternal life on those whose hearts remain set against Him.”
Good evening everybody. We had a handout going around, does anybody need that. You can put your hand up and we’ll give you a handout. The handout, as you know, just contains the slides that I’m going to use, which also are posted on our website. But this is our 7th lesson on the doctrine of salvation, otherwise called soteriology and we have been in Roman numeral five in our outline. We’ve been dealing with Roman numeral five which is God’s one condition of salvation. And I hope you picked up the fact that there’s only one condition to be saved, which is to what? Believe. And we went through what believe means and so forth.
Now once you say that people will say well wait a minute, there’s other passages that seem to teach something different. There’s a collection of passages that say a believer must repent. So last time I tried to show you how we harmonize “repent” with the word “believe.” Remember that? Repent means change of mind, which is a synonym for believe. Remember we went through all of that.
And tonight we’re getting into another controversy, what do we do with passages that talk about following Christ as Lord? And if there are passages in the Bible that call us to follow Him as Lord, how does that harmonize with the idea that we simply believe in Christ to be saved and receive a gift. So take a look, if you could, at Matthew 16, verses 24 and 25, this is what Jesus says to Peter, I believe, and the other disciples. “Then Jesus said to His disciples, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. [25] ‘For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.’” And it goes on from there.
Now you say well, wait a minute, I thought you taught us that the Bible said we must believe to be saved, in Christ, and here is a verse that adds a bunch of other things. You must deny yourself, you must take up your cross, you must follow Him, you must be willing to lose your life. And how do we harmonize that with verses like John 3:16 which make it sound as if salvation is as simple as believing in Christ. You see the tension that we’re in here. [John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”]
And really the key to the whole thing is verse 24, “Then Jesus said to His disciples,” in other words, Jesus is talking to people that are already saved, but more on that a little bit later. So sadly there is a doctrine that has become very prominent in Bible believing circles, really since around 1980 or so, and the doctrine is called Lordship salvation. Has anybody heard of this doctrine, Lordship salvation? A couple of you.
Here is Robert Lightner, he’s not a Lordship advocate but he’s defining it, and he says: “Lordship Salvation refers to the belief which says the sinner who wants to be saved must not only trust Christ as his substitute for sin, but must also surrender every area of his life to the complete control of Christ.” When he says “not only trust in Christ” but adds something else, that should raise some red flags because a couple of lessons ago we taught very clearly (based on about 200 passages) that people are saved by faith alone. Lordship salvation says you’re not saved by faith alone; faith is great but it also must be accompanied by something else, a surrender of some kind. Probably the biggest proponent of Lordship salvation today in our world and particularly in our church world is a very popular teacher by the name of John MacArthur and he wrote a book about this called The Gospel According to Jesus, and let me read to you an excerpt from this book.
He says, “Eternal life is indeed a free gift (Romans 6:23). Salvation cannot be earned with good deeds or purchased with money. It has already been bought by Christ, who paid the ransom with His blood.” Now if he had just stopped the sentence there I would say Amen, but notice this conjunction, “But,” see, whenever someone says you’re “saved by faith alone but” then it’s time to get nervous. So he says, “But that does not mean there is no cost,” now there he’s talking about the cost to me and you. “…there is no cost in terms of salvation’s impact on the sinner’s life. This paradox may be difficult but it is nevertheless true: salvation is both free and costly.” Well how can that be? That’s like saying jumbo shrimp, isn’t it? Those are two words that don’t go together. “Eternal life brings immediate death to self.” He quotes Romans 6:6 there, [“’Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.’”]
“Thus in a sense we pay,” whoa, “the ultimate price for salvation when our sinful self is nailed to a cross. It is a total abandonment of self-will, like the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies so that it can bear much fruit. It is an exchange of all that we are for all that Christ is. And it denotes implicit obedience, full surrender to the lordship of Christ. Nothing less can qualify as saving faith.” So it’s not just Christ paid the price and I receive it as a gift but I have to pay some kind of price. You see?
Here is another quote from John MacArthur in his book, Faith Works, he says, ““Jesus is Lord of all, and the faith He demands involves unconditional surrender…He does not bestow eternal life on those whose hearts remain set against Him.”
