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If there's one word or concept that you would say is at the very centre of the Christian life, you'd say it's the idea of faith.

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In fact, sometimes we describe the whole of Christianity as simply "the faith".

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And yet for something that's so central and so foundational, it's surprising how often

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people are confused or have misunderstandings about the nature and meaning of faith.

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In this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast, we're going to seek to dispel that

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confusion and sharpen our understanding of faith and its place at the foundation of the Christian life.

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Well, hello again.

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Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast.

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Tony Payne here.

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Great to be with you again.

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And on today's episode, I'm really glad to welcome to the microphone my immediate predecessor, I guess you could say, in this podcast.

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Is that right, Pete?

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That's right.

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Nice to be on this side of the microphone, Tony, and yeah, nice to be back on the CCL podcast.

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And let me say on behalf of all of listeners, thank you so much for minding the chair—well, more than minding

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it; for very ablely driving the bus for the 15 months or so in between Chase and me, being Director of the CCL.

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But now it's your turn to be grilled.

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That's right.

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Yeah.

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And most people will know who you are, but you should just remind us: what's your role here at Moore College, Pete?

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So I've been on the faculty at Moore College for the last 11 years or so, and I am in the New Testament Department, teaching New Testament and Greek.

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Right.

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Tremendous.

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But it's for a particular reason that I've asked you to come in and have a chat,

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because you recently had the privilege of delivering the Annual Moore College Lectures.

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And for those listeners who might not be familiar with those, they're annual, they're a feature.

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They've been going for some years: maybe 30, 40 years?

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'77 was the first one.

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'77. FF Bruce in 1977.

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That's correct.

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That's right.

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I remember that now.

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And they're an opportunity for either a visiting speaker or one of the faculty

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to address a topic of real theological import at a fairly significant level.

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Like, those lectures you gave, you spent a long time preparing those.

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I think.

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I did.

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But the topic you addressed was really important, and it's why I've asked you to come on and talk

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on the podcast, because your topic was faith and in particular, a biblical theology of faith.

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And we'll come, as our conversation goes along, as to why this is such an important topic for us as Christians and for our Christian lives.

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But can I start by asking you what does that mean to say "a biblical theology"?

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Why don't just say, "My topic is faith"?

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Yeah.

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Why say "a biblical theology of faith"?

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Yeah.

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What does that mean?

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So biblical theology is a way of considering how a theme, for example, might develop across the Bible.

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And it's a recognition that the Bible is all God's word.

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It's a unity.

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But there is development.

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And there are aspects that might be begun to be revealed in Genesis, and then in the prophets, we might find

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out more about it, and then we get into the New Testament, we have that kind of full and final revelation.

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You can do a biblical theology of all sorts of themes.

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And what it does is it just helps you to think about what each different part of the Bible says about the theme and how it unfolds across Scripture.

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There are other ways of analysing topics: so you could just kind of do a word

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search and just see what every part of the Bible says about a particular topic.

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But by tracing the unfolding nature of the revelation, you sort of see how the Bible itself presents a topic.

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And it's a helpful way to look at a theme.

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I guess 'cause it's how the Bible itself is organised, right?

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Correct.

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It doesn't come as a sort of textbook with a set of chapters on different topics.

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Correct, correct.

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It's an unfolding story centred on Christ.

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I did notice—one of the striking things about your presentation, you mentioned Genesis.

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Yeah.

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You started there.

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Yeah.

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Strangely enough.

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And in particular, with a verse in Genesis 15.

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It's a famous biblical verse about faith, and I didn't really quite realise, I don't

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think, just how central it was in the Bible story until you traced its influence.

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Tell us about that verse and why you kind of almost started there.

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Yeah, so the story of Abraham really starts with chapter 12: the famous promise

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that God makes to Abraham—that he will be blessed, God will make his name great.

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And the Abraham narrative continues.

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There's kind of problems in his life.

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He's not particularly always behaving in the best way, particularly towards Sarah.

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But it gets to chapter 15 and God's promised that he'd make him a great nation, and yet he doesn't have a child.

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And so, he's wrestling with this before God and says, "I don't have an heir, and so a member of my household,

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one of my slaves, will be my heir." And God takes him outside, makes him look at the heaven and number the stars.

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Then he says, "So shall your offspring be." So there's a promise that God makes.

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And then we're told, verse 6, "Abraham believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness." That's significant for a number of reasons.

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It's significant in the narrative of Abraham already, in that Abraham has actually done some what we might call "good works", if you like.

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He obeyed God when God called him to leave his homeland: he just went.

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And yet it is this point at which the narrator says, "God credited to him as

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righteousness." It was just the simple act of believing a promise from God.

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So it's significant in the Abraham narrative, but it's also significant, particularly for Paul later when he discusses justification by

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faith—this idea that God declares us to be right with him, not on the basis of what we have done, but on the basis of our faith in Christ.

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And Paul's doctrine of justification finds its foundation in this interaction between God and Abraham.

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So it's a very significant verse, I think, in Genesis and it's very significant verse for the whole Bible.

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So when it says that "he believed God"—we'll talk a bit more about what does it mean to believe God and what faith is in a second.

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But the result was that it was credited to him or countered to him as righteousness.

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What does that really mean—to be credited?

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Does God say, "Okay, I'll reckon that you're righteous, even though you're not." 'Cause he's not an altogether attractive character.

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Sometimes Abraham, he does some terrible things to Sarah, making her go into the household of Abimelech and all this kind of stuff.

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What does it mean that "God counted it to him as righteousness"?

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So that word "counted" is used in a few different ways in Scripture.

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Sometimes you count something that actually is.

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I might count Tony as an Australian, which he is.

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But for example, Rachel and Leah, at one point, say that their father counts them

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as foreigners—kind of regards them as foreigners, as something that they're not.

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Is God counting Abraham's faith as something that it really is—righteousness?

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Or is he counting it as something that it's not?

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But actually in Scripture, there is another way that this language of counting is used, particularly in the context of forgiveness

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and guilt and counting someone as guilty, or counting someone as forgiven, and that is on the basis of God's declaration.

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So there's a sense in which God is sovereignly responding to Abraham's faith and declaring him righteous—not because

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he is a faithful person, not even because his faith is righteousness, but God is sovereignly declaring him righteous.

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And we think, "Well, how can God do that? Is that just God being random?" And that's where our biblical theology comes

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in, because, again, in Romans, Paul reflects how it is on the basis of Christ that this declaration finds its fulfillment.

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So it's not just a kind of random declaration by God; it is a declaration

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that anticipates the work of Christ and the believer's response to that work.

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So that by having faith or by believing, you genuinely are declared righteous.

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It's not just you're not righteous, but God pretends you are.

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Correct.

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It's that he declares you to be righteous—

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Correct.

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—on the basis of your trust in his promise.

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Correct.

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Uh huh.

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Yeah.

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So we need to find out more about the trust and the promise, then.

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Yeah.

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'Cause I'm assuming that faith means trust by saying that.

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But what does faith mean actually?

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'Cause it's a word that's—certainly in our culture and even in our Christian culture—we use it all the time to mean a bunch of different things.

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It's a bit of a floppy kind of word.

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Yeah.

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What do you take it to mean?

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So I think faith in Scripture can have a few different dimensions.

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So it can be trust, as you said, and that's the sort of more personal dimension of trusting a—you can trust a person, or you can trust God.

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But it can also have the sense of assent: we might say, "believing that".

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So that's believing truth about God.

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So those two ideas are in, for example, John's Gospel, where John can talk about

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believing that Jesus is the Christ, but he can also talk about believing in Jesus.

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So trust and assent.

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But there's also the idea that faith is knowledge.

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So I think faith has these three aspects of knowledge, assent and trust, and particular

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instances, one will be highlighted, and in other instances, one or more will be highlighted.

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So I wouldn't want to reduce it just to trust, because I think trust is very important.

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But I think there are these other aspects that are related, but not quite the same as trust.

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How does the knowledge part of faith fit in?

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'Cause that's very interesting to me.

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I'm certainly used to thinking of faith as being an assent: "I do believe that something is true" and a more personal

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"I'm going to act on that and really place my trust in that—that it is true—or in the person who's saying it's true".

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What do you mean by saying that faith is very similar to knowledge, or it's a kind of knowledge?

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I think it's a kind of knowledge.

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If I was to ask you, "Do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead?", I'm very confident you would say "Yes."

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Yes, I would.

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If I said to you, "Do you know that Jesus rose from the dead?", that may make you pause and think, "Do I know that Jesus rose

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from the dead, or do I only believe that Jesus rose from the dead?" And I think that's where we unhelpfully separate the two.

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But for instance, Paul can say both.

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Paul can say that he believes that Jesus rose from the dead, and he says that in multiple places, obviously.

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But he can also say that he knows that Jesus rose from the dead, and he says that in Romans 6: knowing that Jesus rose from the dead.

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Mm-hmm.

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And certainly in the prophets—well, throughout the Bible, really—you have the language of "knowing that".

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Rahab might say that, "I know that Yahweh, the Lord, is the true God." And you might say, "Well, that's

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not the same as knowing that the chair that I'm sitting on is blue." It's a different type of knowledge.

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It's a faith knowledge.

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But it is still coached in the terms of knowledge.

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When we say faith is a type of knowledge, we're not saying that all knowledge is

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faith, but we're saying that faith itself is a Spirit-given conviction of the truth.

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And that's where it overlaps a little bit with the idea of faith as assent.

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But we know that Jesus rose from the dead.

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We believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

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Those two statements are essentially the same.

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And that kind of conflicts, in some ways, with how our culture often talks about faith as the kind of belief you have when you can't possibly know it.

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Correct.

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Which is, which is not the kind of faith you're meeting in Scripture, right?

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Correct.

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Correct.

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It's why we tend to think of faith and knowledge as quite separate.

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Yep.

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Faith being kind of knowledge that you just take on trust and has no evidence or—

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Correct.

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Yeah.

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—it's uncertain in some way or right.

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Even a light kind of knowledge, if we do think it's that—it's something, yeah, different in knowledge.

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Yeah.

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Whereas in the Bible, a trust, or an assent and a trust in the word of God brings us knowledge of God.

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Like, it is a knowledge.

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I see what you're saying.

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That's really useful.

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Yeah.

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How does that relate to the idea then that it's possible to believe that, but not necessarily believe in?

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Or can these things be separated?

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Is it possible to have one without the other?

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How do they relate to each other, these different aspects?

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So James talks about the demons believing that there is one God.

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And you see that in the Gospels: you see the demons recognising Jesus: "You're the holy one of God." But their faith, it's not a saving faith.

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It's very defective.

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We've just mentioned Rahab.

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Interestingly, Rahab believes that the Lord is the true God, and so that leads her to act in the way that she welcomes and protects the spies.

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But she also says that all of her fellow countrymen are trembling, because they know what God did in Egypt.

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And so, there's a sense in which they also believe some kind of truth about God, but it's not leading to an appropriate response in their life.

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So there's an overlap, but it's defective in these examples.

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Whether it's demons or whether it's the people of Jericho, it's not actually leading onto something concrete in their lives.

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And so would you say that the kind of faith that the Bible calls for, that God calls for, or that is the kind of response to

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him and to his word, is a combination of all three of those things, and needs to be a combination of all three of those things?

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Yeah, I think so.

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I think so.

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Even though we might say that, in some places, one aspect is more emphasised.

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But I think they go together.

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You can't believe in God unless you know truths about him.

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You can't believe in God unless you believe that he is real.

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So they do go together.

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Particularly in John's Gospel, the three aspects, they just kind of weave in and out.

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And you'll—Jesus will call for people to believe that he was sent by the Father, and then immediately John said, "And many believed in him".

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And so, he'll switch between the two.

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But we're meant to see them as interconnected.

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Yeah.

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So when we put our trust or put our faith in God or in Christ, or in his word, is there any difference between those kinds of things?

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So in terms of the faith that the Bible calls for as a response to God and his revelation and his salvation,

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to what extent are we trusting in—I think I know the answer to this, but it'd be good to tease it out.

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To what extent is it good to trust in God—that is, trust in God the Father, or trust in Jesus?

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Is that where our faith is primarily directed?

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Or is it a trust in the promise?

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Is that the—how do those things relate to each other?

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Yeah, absolutely interconnected, and that's something that I tried to tease out in the lectures so that,

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particularly in the history in the Old Testament, Genesis through to 2 Kings, the emphasis there is on

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Israel being called to trust the promises of God and frequently their failure to trust those promises.

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So that's really held out as the object of the faith.

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But again, can you really separate God from his word?

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And so, to fail to trust God's word is to fail to trust him.

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But when you turn to the prophets and the Psalms, the emphasis—again, we're not

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sort of saying exclusively—but the emphasis is more on that personal dimension.

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So the psalmist will often reflect on his kind of own personal trust in God, and the prophets call on God's people to trust in God and not in idols.

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So they're both there in Scripture.

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Different parts of Scripture might highlight one over the other.

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But again, like we were just sort of saying about knowledge, assent and trust, they're connected.

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Trusting in God is to trust in the God who speaks, and so it is to trust in his word.

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Digital technology like smartphones has revolutionised the way we navigate daily life and the way our whole society functions.

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We have supercomputers in our hands that can answer almost any question instantly, and perform many tasks that make life easier.

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Such technology has its downsides, like the explosion of accessibility to pornography and the prevalence of online bullying.

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Even so, our stance as Christians is often something like, "Let's use this technology

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wisely, but not abuse it", as if the technology is simply a neutral instrument.

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But the good things of our world, like technology or money, can become much more than this.

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They can become master teachers that dominate and disciple us.

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In the next Centre for Christian Living biblical ethics workshop, we want to do

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more than share helpful tips on godly smartphone use, although such tips are useful.

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We want to zoom out and consider how technology disciples us—how it profoundly reorders our

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attitudes, operating beliefs and behaviours, not just personally, but on a society-wide level.

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Put your phones on silent and join the conversation on Monday 27th of October 2025 at 7:30 pm.

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You can register and find out more on the Centre for Christian Living website: ccl.moore.edu.au.

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That's ccl.moore.edu.au.

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And now let's get back to our program.

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So as Christians, one of the main things we think about when it comes to faith or trusting God is that this is the means by which we're saved.

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We're saved by grace through faith.

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It's our trust in God, almost as heirs of the faith of Abraham, we trust in God and in

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what Jesus has done, and that brings us righteousness and justification and salvation.

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Can you tease out for us what the connection is there?

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How does my trusting in Jesus, or trusting in the promise—what do I trust in and how does that lead me to be saved?

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Because it seems like this is a crucial issue in the New Testament, and often in Christian lives and in

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churches and in talking with our friends, is how faith relates to our relationship with God and our salvation.

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Yeah.

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I mean, the important thing to say is it's not our faith in and of itself that saves

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us, and sometimes we get this sort of view of faith as a virtue in and of itself.

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And you get that idea in George Michael's song: "You gotta have faith" or The Prince of Egypt —you know, it's

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just about believing, as if this is purely just a virtue that God regards as a good thing and then rewards us.

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Like, like a disposition or a—

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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—a capability that we've developed.

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Yeah.

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We've got it.

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We have it.

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And so, that's why people sort of say, "I wish I had your faith."

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I wish I had your faith.

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That idea.

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Whereas, really, by saying that, it's like, "I wish I could trust God's word." You know?

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Like, it's sort of saying something about God.

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So God's word comes to us.

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God's promises come to us all the way through the Old Testament.

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It's God's promises, and it is people trusting in God's promises or trusting in the God who makes the promises.

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That is how they're saved.

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And it's striking—I explored this in the lectures—how it is that which is the reason that people don't enter

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the Promised Land—the generation that falls in the desert—is because they didn't believe God's promises.

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Even Moses and Aaron are told that it's because they didn't believe God.

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So what's the difference with the New Testament?

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And this is where we explore the idea of continuity all the way through the Bible.

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It is faith: salvation is by faith.

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In the New Testament, it's quite interesting, Paul in Galatians 3 can use the language of "faith has come" and you kind of think, but faith—

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Didn't they have faith in the past?

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Exactly.

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Yeah.

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But it's almost with the coming of Christ, there is something so new and significant

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that Paul can say, "It's faith in Christ has come." And it's the faith in its fullness.

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And it is Christ, and it is the fact that we are saved because Jesus died and rose again.

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In the language of Romans 3, God put him forward as a propitiation of one who bore God's wrath by his blood.

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But then he says, "to be received by faith".

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So it is the work of Christ that secures our salvation.

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But the way that we benefit from that is we receive it by faith.

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And so, by receiving it by faith, we're acknowledging that we are not doing anything.

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We're not contributing to our salvation.

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God has done it all in Christ.

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But we receive that gift of salvation.

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And there's a sense in which Abraham entrusting God's promises was anticipating that and looking forward to it.

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We, this side of the cross and resurrection, look back to it.

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And Paul has this really interesting line in Romans 3:25, where it says that Christ dying and then salvation by

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faith shows God's righteousness so that "God might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus".

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In other words, it is Christ's death that means that this is not just some sort of game.

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It's not God play acting or pretending and just randomly picking faith, as you said, as the disposition or virtue.

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It is because of Christ's death and resurrection.

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And faith is the way that we ourselves are connected to that and benefit from it.

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Is faith then almost the same as receiving something?

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Yeah.

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Receiving.

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Or receiving something.

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Yeah, it is.

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It's receiving the gift of God's grace.

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Even faith itself, it's not something we do in the same way that a work is.

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It's a receptive idea.

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Can faith grow, then?

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What does it mean to say that faith grows?

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If it's not a disposition, and I agree: there's an interesting tradition—theological

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tradition—that describes faith as one of the theological virtues, along with love and hope.

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And I'm not entirely sure that's correct—that it's best to see it as a virtue.

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But can it grow?

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I think we need to distinguish faith at the point of salvation, which is just its very existence.

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We receive Christ and that we are saved.

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But after we're saved, the Christian life is meant to be a life of growth.

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And Matthew's Gospel is really interesting, because, in Matthew, we have Jesus rebuking the disciples for having little faith.

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They still have faith, but they panic.

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You know, when Peter's walking on the water or they're in the storm, or he tells them in the Sermon on the

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Mount not to be anxious, "you of little faith." So there's a sense in which they have an understanding of God.

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They have an understanding of Jesus.

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But they're not necessarily acting it out consistently.

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They have little faith.

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But he also commends in Matthew's Gospel the Centurion and the Canaanite woman for having great faith.

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So obviously little faith is still faith, but great faith is better.

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It's better!

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It's better.

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But interestingly, Jesus says, you know, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, go throw yourself into

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the sea." And that's the kind of metaphor drawn from the Old Testament about the power of God: God is the one who can destroy the mountain.

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So the point is that if you have faith, even the smallest amount of faith, it connects you to the power of God.

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So in a sense, it's good to have great faith.

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But the point is, is having faith connects you to God.

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Now, even that little illustration, though—Jesus saying faith is small as a mustard seed—perhaps even in that

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illustration is the implication that we want faith to grow, because a mustard seed seed is meant to grow.

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And mustard seeds are pretty small.

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They're pretty small, but they grow into—you know, Matthew 13 talks about them

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growing into one of the biggest trees in the garden or plants in the garden.

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That makes sense to me—that faith can be a kind of thing that, in one sense, you either

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trusting, with knowledge, assent and trust, in the word and person of Christ, or not.

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Yeah.

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You either have it or you don't have it.

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You either—you're either trusting him or you're not.

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Yep.

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But, and that being the case, that's what secures our salvation.

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Correct.

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'Cause in that trust, we receive that gift.

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But then in the circumstances of life, especially when that trust is tested, as many as

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sermon as kind of tried to put it: "as the storms and winds of life are blowing on you"—

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Yeah.

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—"have you got faith like the disciples or not?" In one sense, as faith is tested,

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it grows in its power and its trust and how tightly it clings to the promise—

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Yep.

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Absolutely.

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—in the face of forces that might seek to prise us from it.

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Yeah, that's really useful, Peter.

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Thanks.

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Another connection that you drew out really helpfully in the lectures—we've talked

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about faith and its connection to our salvation, but how does faith connect with love?

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Because we're kind of talking as if faith is the big thing in the Christian life.

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You've got to have faith.

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Faith is what it is that brings us salvation.

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But I thought love was supposed to be the big thing in the Christian life.

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Isn't that the first, greatest commandment?

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And isn't that what Jesus, et cetera, et cetera?

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So where does love fit into this?

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Yeah.

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So I think a helpful way to think about it is that faith and love are inseparable, but we must distinguish them.

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So Calvin, in a slightly different context, uses the illustration of the sun, and he says the sun gives off light and it gives off heat.

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And in a sense, the light and the heat are inseparable, but you can distinguish them.

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You don't try to see by the heat or warm yourself by the light.

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And it's the same with faith and love.

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Genuine faith will bring with it love.

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And we'll maybe touch on, particularly with James talking about defective faith.

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But love and faith are still different things.

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And it is faith and faith alone that connects us to Christ.

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It is faith and faith alone that receives the gift.

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And love follows from faith.

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It's inseparable from it, in that sense.

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And if it doesn't follow, then there are questions about the reality of that faith.

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But just because they're both important, just because they come together, doesn't mean that we can't distinguish them.

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And if we don't distinguish them and we collapse them into each other, then I think we get confusion about how we're saved.

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Hmm.

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It strikes me in Galatians 5 how he talks about faith being active or working in or through love.

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Yeah.

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Faith being almost like a primary principle that connects us with God and opens our

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eyes, and brings a new knowledge and a new understanding that will drive a new love.

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And in that sense, although love, in some of the teaching of Scripture, and I'm thinking of 1 Corinthians 13 and

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other places, there's a kind of supremacy of love as the kind of great lasting change and attribute in our lives and

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the great attribute of God, that there's almost a primacy and an importance—or supremacy of love, but not a primacy.

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The primacy is, well, the first thing is faith.

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Yep.

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It's faith that kicks everything off.

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Yep.

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Not love.

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Correct.

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Correct.

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Yep.

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Pete, this is really useful in clarifying for us what faith really is—how faith really works in the Christian life, what it does or

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what it receives, how it's the means by which we grasp onto the promises of God and salvation, how it gives birth to love and so on.

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But faith has been a controversial topic, and one of the things I appreciated in your lectures that on the way through, you kept

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touching on different alternative understandings of faith, different kind of attacks on the idea of faith, especially salvation by faith.

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If you're going to pick one that you think is important or relevant for us to know about and

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to be aware about an alternative view of understanding faith, what would that be, do you think?

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I mean, there are different ones.

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We could talk about how some people collapse faith and love together and don't sufficiently distinguish them.

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There's an author who's published a number of books named Matthew Bates.

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He wants to say that faith—rather than thinking of it trust or assent, he wants to put it in terms of allegiance.

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So if Jesus is King and Jesus is Lord, what's the appropriate way to respond to a king or a lord?

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Well, it is to show your loyalty—to show your allegiance.

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And Matthew Bates will look at the Greek word  that we've translated as "faith" and say, "Actually, it should be translated as allegiance everywhere."

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Now, that word can have the sense of allegiance.

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Absolutely.

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But by translating it that way pretty much throughout the New Testament, the idea of allegiance puts the emphasis back on us and what we do.

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So your point earlier about faith being receiving and almost having a passive—it's a passive thing, with

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the emphasis on the acting of God and Christ: allegiance sort of makes it much more about what I do.

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Mm-hmm.

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And I think what Matthew Bates has done is, again, confused faith with what it leads to.

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And we'd want to say, "Yes, I show allegiance to Christ. I'm loyal to Christ." But that's downstream of my faith.

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And if you bring it upstream to the point of salvation, it all gets a bit confusing and it all seems like it depends on what I do.

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And so I think ultimately, it undercuts our assurance.

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It's a little bit like confusing faith and repentance.

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It's very similar in the sense that they go together: they're inseparable.

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If I'm trusting that Jesus is the king and ruler of the universe, and I'm realising in that moment what my life

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is like, and that doesn't lead to me repenting before him and submitting to him as the King of the universe—in

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that sense, showing allegiance to him, well, my faith is probably faulty or inadequate in all sorts of ways.

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But that's not to say that it's the same thing.

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Correct, correct.

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Yep, no, absolutely.

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And it just puts the emphasis very unhelpfully on me and on my activity.

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I can sort of see, as with so many things that you think, "Oh, that's probably mistaken", you

435
00:28:39,860 --> 00:28:45,980
can see sometimes how it flows out of a wish or a desire to correct something or to correct—

436
00:28:46,190 --> 00:28:46,670
Absolutely.

437
00:28:46,970 --> 00:28:47,240
—emphasis.

438
00:28:47,240 --> 00:28:50,960
So an idea that faith might not involve allegiance.

439
00:28:51,020 --> 00:28:51,260
Yeah.

440
00:28:51,310 --> 00:28:54,530
Or that you have faith in God and then just continue to live how you like.

441
00:28:54,590 --> 00:28:55,400
Yeah, yeah.

442
00:28:55,400 --> 00:29:01,725
So I think Matthew Bates is writing an American context, and wonderfully, Christianity's so widespread in America, but

443
00:29:01,725 --> 00:29:08,715
we know that maybe in a lot of places, it's very nominal, and so perhaps that's what's pushing him to make that emphasis.

444
00:29:09,074 --> 00:29:12,435
But you can't trust in Jesus as King without submitting to him as King.

445
00:29:12,435 --> 00:29:12,850
Correct, correct.

446
00:29:12,855 --> 00:29:14,774
But it's not to say that those two things are the same thing.

447
00:29:14,774 --> 00:29:15,375
Very helpful.

448
00:29:15,975 --> 00:29:22,230
In terms of the Christian life, then, and this is the Centre for Christian Living, so we're interested in the Christian life, what aspect

449
00:29:22,230 --> 00:29:28,409
of your research into faith and the lectures you gave on faith do you think are most relevant to the way we live our Christian lives?

450
00:29:28,889 --> 00:29:36,629
I think two aspects: I think faith being what begins the Christian life, but I'd want to even say more than that.

451
00:29:36,629 --> 00:29:39,210
Paul's language of justification by faith.

452
00:29:39,820 --> 00:29:47,205
Justification is the end time verdict brought into the present, because faith connects us to Christ.

453
00:29:47,505 --> 00:29:48,945
We have been justified.

454
00:29:48,945 --> 00:29:50,925
We have been declared righteous.

455
00:29:51,315 --> 00:29:59,115
And as one writer put it, "It's not that we're out on bail; it's that the trial has happened, that the verdict has been passed, and we are righteous."

456
00:29:59,115 --> 00:30:03,705
And so, the wonderful sense of assurance that that brings us—that we believe in

457
00:30:03,705 --> 00:30:07,905
Jesus, we trust in Jesus, we believe that he's the Christ and we're justified.

458
00:30:08,240 --> 00:30:09,170
We're justified.

459
00:30:09,410 --> 00:30:18,260
And so, Romans 4 is the passage that I spend a lot of time thinking about, and that the language that Paul uses there of God justifying the ungodly.

460
00:30:18,890 --> 00:30:23,420
And that's just a stunning idea: that we are sinful, we are ungodly.

461
00:30:23,870 --> 00:30:25,670
But because Christ died for the ungodly—

462
00:30:26,120 --> 00:30:26,360
Hmm.

463
00:30:26,660 --> 00:30:29,270
—we believe in him, we are declared righteous.

464
00:30:29,810 --> 00:30:35,825
And so, thinking about faith should hopefully make us think about Christ more.

465
00:30:36,245 --> 00:30:41,675
You know, faith in itself is meant to point us away from ourselves and to Christ.

466
00:30:42,035 --> 00:30:46,565
And so the sense of assurance that comes from that was something I find very strong.

467
00:30:46,925 --> 00:30:55,025
I guess secondly, as we've talked about, that faith in Christ, it is meant to lead on to a life of love and a life of good works, and that

468
00:30:55,025 --> 00:31:04,040
if it's not doing that, then there's something wrong, and then we should go back to see if our faith is in Christ and in Christ alone.

469
00:31:04,460 --> 00:31:08,660
Because if it is, it will lead to this life of love and good works.

470
00:31:09,140 --> 00:31:11,840
Which is the point of what the Apostle James says as well, right?

471
00:31:11,900 --> 00:31:12,110
Yeah.

472
00:31:12,140 --> 00:31:14,210
That faith that doesn't lead onto that—

473
00:31:14,300 --> 00:31:14,630
Yeah.

474
00:31:14,690 --> 00:31:15,890
—it's not in a very good way.

475
00:31:15,890 --> 00:31:17,870
In fact, he'd say it hasn't got a pulse.

476
00:31:17,960 --> 00:31:18,320
It's dead.

477
00:31:18,320 --> 00:31:18,980
It's defective.

478
00:31:18,980 --> 00:31:19,700
Yeah, it's dead.

479
00:31:19,760 --> 00:31:20,330
It's dead.

480
00:31:20,570 --> 00:31:21,200
That's really useful.

481
00:31:21,200 --> 00:31:25,640
Pete, thank you so much, because helping us to understand—faith is so central in the Christian life.

482
00:31:25,640 --> 00:31:26,030
Faith.

483
00:31:26,330 --> 00:31:26,720
Love.

484
00:31:26,720 --> 00:31:27,050
Hope.

485
00:31:27,050 --> 00:31:35,300
These are the three big virtue-like qualities or the three big things that the New Testament, again and again, says are kind of like the sum of what

486
00:31:35,300 --> 00:31:42,455
it means to respond to what God has done in faith, and in the love that comes from that faith, and with the hope of where that will finally lead.

487
00:31:42,455 --> 00:31:44,915
We can come back and talk about love and hope some other time.

488
00:31:44,915 --> 00:31:46,564
They can be your lectures next year or the year after.

489
00:31:46,564 --> 00:31:47,074
Yeah, that's right!

490
00:31:47,314 --> 00:31:51,965
Um, in the meantime, if people want to go back and dig into these lectures, they can be found online.

491
00:31:51,965 --> 00:31:52,834
Is that correct or not?

492
00:31:52,864 --> 00:31:54,334
Yes, they will be online.

493
00:31:54,410 --> 00:31:59,060
Not sure when, but I imagine around the time that this podcast comes out, they'll be online.

494
00:31:59,060 --> 00:32:02,600
So, you know, have a look on the Moore College website and you'll hopefully find them there.

495
00:32:02,630 --> 00:32:05,420
We'll put the details in the show notes for this podcast.

496
00:32:05,510 --> 00:32:11,870
And dear Listener, just to prepare you, these are lectures where you want to get the outline and download the outline that's going to be there.

497
00:32:12,080 --> 00:32:16,255
Get your Bibles out and get ready to think, because Pete put in an enormous amount of work.

498
00:32:16,255 --> 00:32:19,075
It basically took you six months to prepare these five lectures.

499
00:32:19,075 --> 00:32:19,495
That's right.

500
00:32:19,615 --> 00:32:19,735
Yeah.

501
00:32:19,735 --> 00:32:23,035
And they're enormously comprehensive, but there is absolute gold within them.

502
00:32:23,035 --> 00:32:27,295
So go and listen to the Moore College Lectures on "A biblical theology of faith".

503
00:32:27,295 --> 00:32:29,995
And Pete, thanks so much for bringing a little taste of them to us today.

504
00:32:30,085 --> 00:32:30,745
Thanks for having me.

505
00:32:45,865 --> 00:32:50,635
Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast from Moore College.

506
00:32:51,115 --> 00:32:55,715
For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website—that's

507
00:32:55,715 --> 00:33:04,800
ccl.moore.edu.au—where you'll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the

508
00:33:04,800 --> 00:33:11,340
way back to 2017, videos from our live events and articles that we've published through the Centre.

509
00:33:11,610 --> 00:33:15,300
And while you're there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a

510
00:33:15,300 --> 00:33:20,130
tax-deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.

511
00:33:20,730 --> 00:33:28,410
We'd also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources.

512
00:33:29,070 --> 00:33:33,570
And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions.

513
00:33:33,570 --> 00:33:40,330
Please get in touch: you can email us at ccl@moore.edu au.

514
00:33:40,490 --> 00:33:46,230
Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and

515
00:33:46,320 --> 00:33:53,730
editing and producing this podcast; to James West for the music; and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week.

516
00:33:53,820 --> 00:33:54,600
Thank you for listening.

517
00:33:55,080 --> 00:33:56,010
I'm Tony Payne.

518
00:33:56,055 --> 00:33:56,955
'Bye for now.