But do you see where this brings us? Straight back [p 71] to Christ’s formula! This is precisely what His formula involves, for when a man wills to do God's will, he takes the first step in faith.
Then when a man comes into this attitude toward God's will, he will next inquire where he is to commence in the doing of that will, what the first step is in the will of God.
The Textbook tells us that the first step is to “repent and believe the Gospel.” That this is the first step is self-evident, because the heart must be opened to Him who alone can give the knowledge of spiritual truth before that knowledge is possible, and repentance and faith are the opening of the heart to Him. For repentance is a coming into that attitude of heart toward God in which the whole life is laid bare before Him exactly as it is, thereby opening the way for faith; and believing the Gospel is an entering upon that faith which accepts the Gospel—the Good News—of Christ’s finished work of atonement for sin through His shed blood on the cross, and reckons pardon for sin and new life in Christ to be now ours according to the Word of God. For faith, you remember, is both an attitude and an act; an attitude of surrender to God, and an act of receiving what God has for us; and this is precisely what it means to repent and believe the Gospel.
This means that the man of genuine scientific spirit will begin his pursuit of spiritual truth by sincere “repentance toward God” and “faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” for salvation through His shed blood, which, according to the Textbook, are the first steps in willing to do the will of God, followed by a moment-by-moment dependence on Christ, Who is now [p 72] his life, to reveal truth to him as he continues, by faith, in the attitude of an open heart. This is the only possible way of ever knowing that truth which alone can make us free.
It is true that it is quite the fashion these days for every unbeliever, agnostic, modernist, and unitarian to quote those words of Christ “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” in justification of the claim that something which he is pleased to call truth has given him what he fancies is freedom. But Scripture could not be more grossly perverted than by such a wresting of its plain meaning. The whole statement reads: Then said Jesus unto those Jews that believed on Him, if ye continue in My Word, then are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
Only the spiritually blind can fail to see the meaning of such a statement. It plainly means that the first step toward freedom is faith in Christ, the genuineness of which is evidenced by continuance in His Word; and that it is only in this attitude of faith that it is possible to know the truth that makes us free.
The truth is, therefore, that to be free one must believe on Christ. This does not mean to give intellectual assent to this or that fact about Him, but utterly to commit the life to Him, sin and all, past, present, and future. For the Gospel tells us not so much what to believe as Whom to believe, and Paul tells us what faith in Christ means when he exclaims: “I know Whom I have believed,” and then further unfolds what this involves by adding, “and am persuaded [p 73] that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day.“
Faith is not simply giving mental assent to facts, it is primarily surrendering to a Person. This is what it means to believe on Christ, and anything short of this will neither give us knowledge of the truth nor make us free.
Then following this attitude toward Christ, the believer evidences his faith by continuing in His Word, by which he comes into experiential knowledge of its truth and its meaning.
Then coming to know the truth by experiencing it through faith, he is where the Son of God Himself becomes his freedom. And there is no other freedom. It is in the experience of Himself, not in an intellectual assent to facts about Him, that He makes us free by becoming the way to God for us, the truth about God to us, and the life of God in us.