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In our culture, we have a simple way to identify that someone is married. Typically, it is shown by the wearing of a single, solid band on the ring finger of the left hand. However, it is not the ring but the relationship that makes them married. You can wear a ring and not be married, and a married person doesn’t become unmarried if he or she removes the ring. But, it is commonly understood that a married person wants to have some way of making it known to others that he or she is in a committed, covenant relationship with another person, whether it is by a ring or any other indication.
In our culture, we have a simple way to identify that someone is married. Typically, it is shown by the wearing of a single, solid band on the ring finger of the left hand. However, it is not the ring but the relationship that makes them married. You can wear a ring and not be married, and a married person doesn’t become unmarried if he or she removes the ring. But, it is commonly understood that a married person wants to have some way of making it known to others that he or she is in a committed, covenant relationship with another person, whether it is by a ring or any other indication.
How do we know that a person has faith in Jesus Christ? Is
it because they wear a cross on their necklace? Is it because they are a member
of a church, or have been baptized? Certainly a Christian may wear Christian
jewelry, but so can a non-Christian. A Christian may be, and should be, both
baptized and a member of the church. But unfortunately, there are many
non-Christians who have been baptized and become members of churches. Someone
said to me recently, “Just because I go to McDonalds, that doesn’t make me a
hamburger.” Similarly, just because a person goes to church, or even joins a
church, doesn’t mean that he or she is a Christian, and it does not make a
person a Christian; nor does baptism. If a person is not a follower of Jesus,
being baptized doesn’t make him or her a Christian, it just makes them wet! But, we do understand that when a
person is a follower of Christ, he or she seeks some demonstrable way to make
his or her faith known to others. We call this confessing or professing the
faith. Now, it is true, there are some who make professions of faith who do not
genuinely follow Christ. But, all who are followers of Christ will make some
public expression of their faith in Him.
In the text we have read today, we run up against a bit of
an oddity. We find a group of people who are called rulers (meaning that they are part of the ruling council of the
Jews), and we might be somewhat surprised by what we read about these rulers
here in the text. After the previous context, which indicated that Jesus had
been wholesale rejected by a vast majority of the people of His day, we find
here that many of these rulers believed in Him. That sounds like a
pleasant surprise, doesn’t it? The next word however indicates that there is a
malfunction with their belief in Him.
What’s the next word? “BUT.” That word indicates a contrast. They believed in
Him, BUT. When you see something like that in the text, it is a red alert. It
means that the thing has turned in a different direction. They believed in Him,
BUT “they were not confessing Him.” They were not making any attempt to
publicly and openly identify themselves as a follower of Jesus. They have an unconfessing faith, and this is a
problem.
So, what we need to do here is examine why an unconfessing
faith is a problem, look at what causes this problem, and how to fix it.
I. The problem of an unconfessing faith.
I am very proud of my wedding ring. It is the only piece of
jewelry I have ever worn. Well, there was that brief bit in college when I wore
an earring, but let’s not talk about that. My wedding ring announces to the
world that I am happily married to a wonderful woman. But my wedding ring is
also an irreplaceable family heirloom. It belonged to my grandfather. For that
very sentimental reason, I have chosen to not wear my ring when I travel
overseas. If it were to be lost or stolen (which is not uncommon), it would
simply be irreplaceable. In fact, on one mission trip, Donia and I awkwardly
learned that this ring doesn’t have the same sort of meaning in some other
cultures anyway. Therefore, I no longer wear it when I go overseas, and Donia
is perfectly fine with that. But, what if I told her on our wedding day, “I
have absolutely no intention of ever wearing a wedding ring.” She might suspect
that there was a disconnect in my commitment to her. That’s a problem, isn’t
it? It is also a problem when someone claims to believe in Christ, but is
unwilling to make an open confession of faith.
Let’s consider a few key passages of Scripture on this
matter. Not surprisingly, we find perhaps the strongest words on this subject
coming from the Lord Jesus Himself. In Luke 12, we find Jesus surrounded by so
many thousands of people that the Bible says that they were literally “stepping
on one another.” But in the midst of that great multitude, Jesus spoke
privately to His disciples about the necessity of publicly identifying with
Him. As long as one is immersed in a crowd with relative anonymity, it is easy
to blend in with His true followers. But Jesus told His disciples, “I say to
you, everyone who confesses Me before
men, the Son of Man will confess him also before the angels of God; but he who denies Me before men will be denied
before the angels of God” (12:8-9). So, get that … if you confess Him before men, if you will openly say that you belong to
Him on earth, He will openly say that you belong to Him in heaven. That’s a
wonderful promise of our security in Christ. But He also said that if you deny
Him before men, if you deny that you belong to Him on earth, He will deny in
heaven that you ever belonged to Him. That is an alarming promise, just as true
as the other one.
In the magnificent first chapter of Romans we find Paul
making this bold declaration: “I am eager
to preach gospel to you also who are in Rome . For I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for
salvation to everyone who believes” (1:15-16). Like Paul, one who is not
ashamed of the Gospel is eager to
make it known. Don’t be dismayed or deterred by his word “preach” there. He’s
not saying you all have to prepare a sermon and stand in a pulpit this week.
What we translate as “preach the gospel” is one Greek word, euaggelisasthai (from which we get the
word evangelism). It means “proclaim
the good news.” Paul is not ashamed to be known as a Gospel-man, because this
is the Gospel that has saved him, and this is the Gospel that alone is able to
save anyone! The Gospel is nothing to ashamed of, but instead we should be
eager to be openly identified with this good news of Jesus Christ.
Then coming to Romans 10:9-10, we have this declaration
which aptly sums up all that we are trying to say here about believing and confessing.
“If you confess with your mouth Jesus
as Lord, and believe in your heart
that God raised Him from the dead, you
will be saved; for with the heart
a person believes, resulting in
righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.”
Those two things cannot be separated. We have no righteousness apart from
salvation, and we have no salvation apart from the imputation of Christ’s
righteousness upon us. You can’t have one or the other; they go together always
and inseparably. So, if you believe in your heart, you will confess with your
mouth, otherwise, the Word of God says, you are
not and cannot be saved!
That’s a big problem. Some of us will want to sympathize
with these Jewish rulers who are described as believing but not confessing. It
is always comforting to find someone in the Bible to whom we can relate, and
maybe someone reads John 12:42 and says, “Yes! These are my people! They
believe, they just like to keep quiet about it. They aren’t confessing.” That
is nothing to boast of. That is a problem! Is it possible that someone could be
saved by an unconfessing faith? Look, I’m not God, so I don’t get to decide,
apart from what God has declared in His Word. And what God has declared in His Word that believing and confessing have to go
together in order to have salvation and righteousness, and Jesus Himself said
that He will confess in heaven the one who confesses Him on earth, and deny in
heaven the one who denies Him on earth. Don’t point to these guys and say,
“Well, what about them? They believed but they didn’t confess.” They are not
put forth as a positive example! They are put forth as a warning to us! They
are not examples of true, saving faith. They are, rather, examples of
“inadequate, irresolute, even spurious faith.”[1] Can
a person be saved by an unconfessing faith? This text does not answer that
question for us. But based on other texts that are very clear, why on earth
would you want to take that chance? If you believe, confess it! If you do not confess, then do you really believe? Do not be ashamed of the Gospel. Do not
be ashamed or afraid to make it known that you believe in Jesus and belong to
Him by faith.
Now, having identified this as a serious problem, we need to
consider why the problem is so prevalent. Why are there so many, both here in
our text, and all around us in the world, who have some measure of faith, but
are unwilling to confess their faith in Jesus?
II. The cause of an unconfessing faith
As many of you know, I came to know the Lord during youth
camp at Fort Caswell Fort Caswell Caswell County
There are many imperatives in Scripture that define our
appropriate and fitting response to the Lord. Two of them that occur over and
over again are fear and love. We know what these things are.
They are natural affections. We all came into the world knowing how to fear and
how to love. But God calls us to fear Him above all other fears, and to love
Him beyond all earthly loves. Our affections are misplaced when we love
anything more than we love God and when we fear anything more than we fear Him.
And that is what we find going on here in the hearts of those in our text.
Notice that verse 42 says that they were not confessing
Jesus “because of the Pharisees.” These were their peers, their fellow
“rulers.” What was it about the Pharisees that caused these men to not confess
Jesus? Well, they knew the hatred that the majority of the rulers had for
Jesus, and they’d seen that expressed toward others who confessed faith in
Jesus. In John 9, when a man whom Jesus had healed of congenital blindness
confessed that Jesus had made him well, the Pharisees put that man out of the
synagogue – they excommunicated him – and they threatened to do the same to his
whole family. Seeing how they had treated that man, these rulers who had come
to some measure of belief in Christ had to know that they were not exempt from
the same treatment. And this slammed their mouths shut and kept them from
testifying to their faith in Jesus.
They had misplaced affections. Verse 43 says that they were
silenced by fear. “They were not
confessing Him, for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue.” To be
barred from the synagogue was a BIG DEAL for any Jew, and still would be today.
But for these guys, it meant a loss of their position, their stature, their
security, and their reputation. And these things were very important to them.
Jesus had said to His disciples, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk
around in long robes, and love respectful greetings in the marketplaces, and
chief seats in the synagogues, and places of honor at banquets” (Lk 20:46).
They liked all of that stuff. They
were afraid to lose it. Their fear of losing these things was greater than
their fear of the Lord. Proverbs 29:25 says, “The fear of man brings a snare,
but he who trusts in the Lord will be exalted.” Because of the fear of their
fellow religious leaders, these men were ensnared – they were trapped in an
unconfessing faith. The great irony is that they thought they were exalted. But as the Proverb says,
the Lord will exalt the one who trusts in Him. They could not experience that
truer and greater exaltation because they were ensnared by the fear of losing
their false position of pseudo-exaltation in their society. It was a misplaced
fear.
They also had a misplaced love. Notice that they “were not
confessing Him … for they loved the
approval of men rather than the approval of God.” Now, this is not a great
choice of words in the translation. The thing they loved was not the approval of men. The Greek word is doxa. How should we translate this?
Think of how it used in other passages. Here’s a good example: when the angels
appeared to the shepherds to announce Christ’s birth, the doxa of the Lord shone around them, and they said “doxa to God in the highest.” What’s the
word? It’s not “approval!” We don’t sing any Christmas songs that say,
“Approval to God in the highest,” do we? No. The word is glory! They loved the glory that they received from their peers more than the glory that belongs to
God. Now, that same Greek word for “glory” was just used a few verses before in
verse 41. It says that Isaiah saw His glory (that is, He saw the glory of the
Lord Jesus), and what did He do with it? He spoke of Him. This illustrates the
folly of these men. The greatest prophet of Israel ’s was unashamed to speak of
His glory, and he did so thoroughly and beautifully! Who do these guys think
they are that they would shrink from proclaiming the glory of Jesus, if they
had really, truly believed in Him? They did not love His glory. They loved
their own glory, the glory that they would lose in the eyes of others if they were
to love His glory instead.
There is a single word that summarizes all of our misplaced
affections when it comes to the Lord: idolatry.
When we love anything more than we love the Lord Jesus, be it our possessions,
our positions, our reputations or even our religious traditions, whatever it
is, it is an idol in our lives. When we fear anything more than we fear God we
have fallen into the snare of idolatry, for we have elevated the power of that
thing to a higher place than we allow for the power of God in our lives. Cherishing
any glory other than the glory of God is nothing but idolatry! And that is what
lies at the root of all unconfessing belief: the idolatry that masks itself as
a desire for personal security, prosperity, approval, and so many other
cleverly-disguised things. Idols are only good for one thing – toppling. And
that brings us to the cure for unconfessing belief.
III. The cure for an unconfessing belief.
There was a commercial many years ago for a laundry
detergent that showed a guy getting grass stains all over his clothes. The ad
called these “protein stains,” and it said that “protein gets out protein.”
This detergent claimed to have “the protein power to cut clean through” those
protein stains. So, if you need to deal with a protein stain, you need a
stronger protein to deal with it. The same is true of our misplaced affections.
They can only be treated by proper affections. If you have fears, you can cast
them out with a greater fear. If you have inappropriate loves in your life, you
can remove them with a greater love.
These men feared their fellow man more than they feared the
Lord. What they need is a greater fear of the Lord. Jesus said in Luke 12, “My
friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body.” That sounds like odd advice,
doesn’t it? Don’t fear those who can
kill you. But Jesus said you don’t have to be afraid of them, because, as He
said, “after that,” after they kill your body, they “have no more that they can
do.” The worst they can do is kill you. You might say, “Well, what else is
there?” Jesus has an answer. He says, “I will warn you whom to fear: fear the
One who, after He has killed, has authority to cast into hell; yes, I tell you,
fear Him!” (Lk 12:4-5). Are you afraid to confess Him as your Lord because you
fear that it will mean a loss of your reputation, your relationships, your
possessions, your security, perhaps even your lives? You need to replace that
fear with a greater fear – a fear of the One, the only One, who can confess you
before His Father in heaven as His own, or deny You on the day of judgment and,
in the words of Jesus, “cast you into hell.” Even if confessing Him leads to a lifetime
of hardship and suffering, cut short even by a brutal death, what is that compared
to an eternity of perishing in hell? Are our fears in proper order?
They loved the glory that they had in the eyes of men more
than they loved the glory of God. What did they need? A greater love! What is
the greatest commandment? Jesus said it is this: “You shall love the Lord your
God.” You say, “Oh but I do, in addition to my love for many other things.” But
Jesus said that the great commandment is to love the Lord your God “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind” (Lk 10:27). All of your
entire being – heart, soul, strength, and mind – is to be singularly devoted to
loving Him! You might say, “Well if I only love Him, I can’t love anyone else.”
Not true. The fact is that you cannot love anyone or anything else rightly until and unless you are singularly devoted to Him as the first and foremost
love of your life. Jesus said, “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his
own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and
even his own life, he cannot be My disciple”
(Lk 14:26). Did He really just say that? Yes He did. But you say, “No, He
didn’t mean that, because we aren’t supposed to hate anyone, and we are
supposed to love others.” What Jesus is saying is that our love for Him must be
so unrivaled, so unequaled in our affections, that our love for other people or
other things must appear as hatred in
comparison to the priority of loving Him. It means, if given a choice
between Him and any other love – God forbid, the love of parents, the love of
wife and children, and yes, even the love of our own lives – there must be a
clear and distinct preference for Him above all else. There will be hard
decisions to make at times in our lives: decisions that force us to choose
between our own well-being, our friendships and family members, our
achievements and successes, and our devotion to Him. Is your love for Him such
that the choice, difficult though it may be, is an obvious one? A greater love
for Him sets all other lesser loves in right perspective.
And, friends, when our fear of God casts out the fear of
man, and when our love for Christ surpasses our love for all others, including
our own selves, our unconfessing faith becomes a confessing one. It moves from
the level of inadequate, irresolute, and spurious faith, to genuine, saving
faith and trust in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a faithful German pastor who was killed
in a Nazi concentration camp, wrote to address the problem of unconfessing
belief that was plaguing the German church in his day. He called the idea of an
unconfessing faith that was unwilling to embrace the cost of discipleship,
“Cheap Grace.” Listen to his words, which are so relevant to our own day and
time:
“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting
today for costly grace. … Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without
requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without
confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace
without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ,
living and incarnate. Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the
sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of
great price to buy for which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the
kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes
him to stumble. It is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his
nets and follows him. … Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and
it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it
costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true
life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the
sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son. …
Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon His Son too dear a price to
pay for our life.”[2]
Friends, the only way to experience such a costly grace is
to receive it with a bold, confessing faith that is not ashamed to be
identified openly with the One who identified with us in His incarnation and
crucifixion, and who will identify with us when He confesses us before His
Father on the day of judgment, and pleads the blood of His own wounds. He will
confess us, but only if we have confessed Him. May God grant us all a
confessing faith in the Lord Jesus, lest we be denied by Him when all is said
and done.
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