Exploring Christ's Salvation and Church Vitality

FERGUSON: He saves us from both and more. He saves us from sin and death and hell, as one of the hymns teaches us. Saves us from Satan. What He accomplished in His death and resurrection is multiplex, really, because our situation and sin has got various layers and dimensions to it. So it's a very helpful thing, I think, for us as Christians to realize just how much power there is in the work of Jesus Christ. [00:03:35]

FERGUSON: Well, it depends where you are in the world, I think, Nathan. I think one of the problems we obviously face in the West is that we have too much and that we…I think very much we have our vision often clouded in the West by what we seem to have managed to accomplish without prayer, although we say that we believe in prayer. I think one of the things I've noticed in my own lifetime, serving the Lord in the United States is whenever I've been given a worship bulletin, when I've been visiting a church, I've always looked to see how this church tells me what it really is, and often, therefore, I've looked to see how does this church tell me that as a church it really prays. [00:05:06]

FERGUSON: I think the important thing always is, and this is been the counsel of I think the great masters of the spiritual life, you know, one of them put it this way, "Make sure for every look you take at yourself and you need, take ten looks at Christ," because at the end of the day we don't find the grounds of our salvation or our assurance in ourselves or in our own experience but in Jesus Christ. [00:09:09]

FERGUSON: Well, the…I would…you know, I could appeal to what, for example, the Reformers said, which would've been the preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments. I think a mark of a true church, you know, an easy way to identify a true church is, I think, is often by first of all what happens in the pulpit. Is the Word of God being faithfully expounded there? And the second thing would be, so what is that doing to the congregation? Is it producing the fruit of the Spirit in the congregation? [00:10:49]

FERGUSON: You know, I think this is a situation in which circumstances alter cases. There are some churches that don't seem to be in any locality, and I think increasingly in the twentieth century more and more churches were built, almost deliberately built that way. And I think with foresight, certainly with hindsight, I think it would have been plain that that was a disastrous methodology, because it dislocated the Christian community from the community around about it. [00:23:16]

FERGUSON: Well, first and foremost, find a church where God's Word will be ministered and where there are people who will nourish you…who welcome you and nourish you. And usually the fact that if there is a solid ministry of the Word, if they welcome you it usually is a good sign that that's somewhere that you will find Christians who will nurture and nourish you. The second thing I think I would say is, do try to build in the regular discipline of reading the Scriptures and praying. [00:38:13]

FERGUSON: In that context, it probably does mean worshiping in the power of the Holy Spirit. Now, it would take a long time to explain fully what that means. But Jesus is looking forward to the fulfillment of His work. He's speaking to the woman at the well in John chapter 4 and He says, "The time is coming when you will no longer worship on this mountain nor will you worship on the mountain of God," and He's saying that the internationalization of the people of God that takes place on the day of Pentecost means that place becomes irrelevant in worshiping God. [00:41:57]

FERGUSON: So, maybe I can try to answer that question by saying, "How would you go about answering the question?" And the way you would go about it would be by reading the Gospels and seeing what was it about Jesus that drew this person to Him. That actually would be a wonderful study, it would be for some people a revolutionary study, because I have this suspicion that many people read the Gospels trying to find themselves there, and this would help reverse that tendency to help them to see all of the focus on the Gospels is not on the people Jesus met, but who Jesus was to the people He met. [00:58:30]

FERGUSON: Well, you know if you're saved because salvation begins to appear in your life. You desire new and different things. The law of God that you regarded as an enemy and an irritation becomes a friend, and you want to keep it. You want to please Christ rather than let Him down. You know all of these, they're very simple things. You begin to love the people who love the Lord Jesus, and these are the kind of things that 1 John speaks about. [01:01:45]

FERGUSON: I think the simple answer is that you have repented enough of your sin when you want Christ more than you want the sin, because the whole purpose of repentance is turning away from our sin to Christ. So that is a more important thing than how deeply miserable do I feel. God is not in the business of simply wanting His children to feel deeply miserable, but if necessary, He wants them to feel miserable enough to turn to Him and to trust in Him. [00:12:02]

FERGUSON: And the answer is, yes, we can learn humility from Herman Bavinck, for a couple of reasons. One is that one of his great sayings is that, you know, if you're going to think about God, you need to realize that you're dealing here with mystery, and mystery recognized produces humility. And the other thing he actually says is that humility is the cardinal virtue of the theologian. Why is that? Because what we are doing as theologians is talking about God, and we are not God. [00:35:17]

FERGUSON: So, I think, always think along corporate and not just individual lines. In, you know, in the church I served in Scotland we used a number of evangelistic style Bible studies that actually were surrounded by meals in which members of the congregation served so that it wasn't just Bible, it was Bible plus the people in whom you could see that the Bible had come to life by their disposition towards you as a non-Christian and by their relationship with one another. [00:28:59]