This faith will fight anything that gets between it and Christ. The distinguishing mark of saving faith is not perfection. It is not that I never sin sexually. The mark of faith is that I fight. I fight not with fists or knives or guns or bombs, but with the truth of Christ. I fight anything that diminishes the fullness of the lordship of Jesus in my life. I fight anything that threatens to replace Jesus as the supreme treasure of my life.
John Piper, quoted CT (also in When I Don't Desire God)
5 comments:
Do you agree that the distinguishing mark of saving faith is that it fights? That doesn't somehow sound right to me but maybe you know the larger context of the original piece and what he might have meant by it and how he would defend it.
The larger context is how Christians who feel they have failed badly (in this case through sexual sin) can give up, just feel defeated, unworthy and lose their grand dreams for a life lived for God. Piper's point is that saving faith gets up and fights, defeats the failure through the sufficiency of the cross, and goes on to live wholeheartedly for God once more. So it is not that fighting is the only dominant characteristic of saving faith, but the one we need to remember in failure.
It still feels uncomfotably unbiblical to me - who defines what constitutes fighting? I might seem to Mr Piper to have given up entirely but he won't know what's going on in my heart. And what about the Christian suffering from clinical depression who knows they have sinned yet their medical condition makes fighting almost impossible for them - are they still saved? To tell them that a mark (he actually calls it "the distinguishing mark of saving faith") of a faith that truly saves is to be able to fight after sin seems to me to be a counsel of despair.
It may be worth you checking the fuller context of his remarks. His aim is to stop people who have lapsed into defeat and despair from remaining there; for the kind of Christian who feels they have let God down bigtime and as a result lapse into a sense of failure. hsi argument is that such a place of inaction is exactly where the devil wants one to be, feeling worthless and useless; but instead we should get up and fight our way back, understanding that the cross is sufficient to cover all and every sin.
May I humbly suggest that you have taken the tiny quote I reproduced as the entire thesis of the article, without realising that he is aiming at one spiritual issue only?
Perhaps I should add: in fact, as one of those Christians acutely aware of failure and sins and ready to believe the worst about oneself, maybe I should add that such a thought has been immensely helpful. To think I have the right, following some sin or other, to carry on the fight, and not be relegated to some ante-room for drop-outs, has been hugely liberating and reassured me that I can come back to the cross and start again. Just my experience.
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