The Golden Chain of Saving Faith - Romans 10:14-15

Introduction

Last week we considered true saving faith according to Paul. We considered it’s realities, it’s recipients, and it’s riches.

Having seen and savored those realities, Paul will now turn our attention to the mechanics of saving faith. In other words, how saving faith gets off the pages of Scripture and into the hearts and lives of real people.

Paul weaves together a complex argument here so we will work through it word by word and line by line so that we can unwrap Paul’s intent here.

Keep in mind, in the near context, Paul is dealing with the unbelief of Israel. He’s seeking to demonstrate specifically to Jews that God’s covenant of grace is open and available to them by faith, and has been since Moses. Paul is leaning hard into the Old Testament to prove to them that everything that is happening to Israel is part of God’s providential plan to save His remnant, which will be the focus of chapter 11.

He’s dealt with his lament over their unbelief, his demonstration of their unbelief, he’s used their own sacred texts to prove to them that the way of faith is only way to righteousness, and that because it is the way of faith, it is open to all people, Jews and Greeks. One must simply understand the truth about Christ, assent to that truth inwardly and willingly, trust in Christ and lean on Him with an empty hand and a full heart, confess Christ as Lord, and call upon His name, and they will be saved.

The logical question, and one that was raised by a few of you last week, is this: how does all this come together for a person to actually be saved?

Paul tells us here.

It has pleased God in His providence to designate means by which He accomplishes His ends. If the end is salvation, what are the means by which it is accomplished?

The Proximate Golden Chain

Paul gives a literarily beautiful piece of poetic prose that demonstrates the proximate part of golden chain of salvation, the human portion of the ordo salutis. You will recall that by proximate I mean those parts of our salvation that are caused by actions that humans take. As you will see over the course of the next few moments, each of the contingent steps that Paul presents are accomplished wholly by human beings.

Paul here is primarily concerned with the human means by which God has ordained to bring salvation to His elect.

First we will consider what Paul says here, and then we will consider how this dovetails with God’s sovereign providence to bring salvation to the elect.

Paul presents five contingencies here, five dependent clauses that demonstrate to us the means of salvation. In other words, a chain reaction of 5 actions to be taken by humans who would be saved and who would see others be saved.

Paul presents this chain reaction in reverse order. In other words, he begins with the end: salvation. Then he works his way back to calling, believing, hearing, preaching, and sending.

We are going to consider these contingencies in chronological order, rather than in literary order.

Sending

Preaching

Hearing

Believing

Calling

Salvation

Sending

The first step in salvation is that a someone must be sent to preach the good news. Biblically speaking we can quantify sending on the macro, redemptive historical level, and we can also quantify it in the local context of our own day, as well as in different eras throughout the history of the church.

Simply put, if someone is to be saved, the process must begin every time with a messenger or a preacher, the one who bears the good news to God’s elect.

We can survey redemptive history and find that the very first messenger to bear the good news of the gospel to God’s elect is God Himself.

Genesis 3:14–15 LSB

And Yahweh God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than any of the cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life; And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.”

Interestingly enough, this declaration of good news is not made directly to it’s recipients, but rather to the serpent.

Early on in the story of God’s salvation, God Himself is regularly the messenger of good news.

We see God serving as the messenger of good news to Noah in Genesis 6:17-18

Genesis 6:17–18 LSB

“As for Me, behold I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life, from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall breathe its last. “But I will establish My covenant with you; and you shall enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you.

And again with Abraham:

Genesis 12:1–3 LSB

And Yahweh said to Abram, “Go forth from your land, And from your kin And from your father’s house, To the land which I will show you; And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”

This pattern continues through the lives of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.

However, in Exodus, God ceases sending Himself as the messenger of good news, and begins commissioning and sending prophets to bear the good news in His name.

We this pattern established with Moses:

Exodus 3:6–10 LSB

He said also, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. And Yahweh said, “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sufferings. “So I have come down to deliver them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite. “So now, behold, the cry of the sons of Israel has come to Me; and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians are oppressing them. “So now, come and I will send you to Pharaoh, and so you shall bring My people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt.”

Moses is the first in a long line of prophets, those who are sent by God to declare the good news that God intends to deliver a people for Himself out of the hands of their hard taskmasters.

Christ, as the true and better prophet, is observed at multiple points throughout the gospels as having been sent by His Father. In fact, this theme is one of the pillars of the theology of the book of John, as we observe time and again the sending relationship between God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ. This is expressed in the most famous and most beloved passage in all of Scripture, John 3:16. There, what did God do with His Son? He sent Him.

The office of prophet is renewed and extended later in the New Testament in the office of apostle.

We can observe Christ Himself sending the disciples as messengers of the gospel in Matthew 28:16-20

Matthew 28:16–20 LSB

But the eleven disciples proceeded to Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had designated. And when they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some doubted. And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

We are able to observe yet another phenomenon in the book of Acts: the sending church.

Acts 13:1–3 LSB

Now there were at Antioch, in the church that was there, prophets and teachers: Barnabas, and Simeon who was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. And while they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then, when they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.

We can summarize the witness of Scripture like this: if the good news of salvation is to come to anyone, a messenger of that good news must be sent. Whether that is God sending Himself, God sending a prophet, Christ sending the apostles, or a church sending missionaries, we affirm that the starting point for salvation is sending.

It’s important then for churches in our day, following the model of the church in Antioch, to be committed to sending messengers of the good news into the world for the purpose of bringing men and women to salvation.

Immediately we think of sending missionaries overseas to minister to unreached people groups, but I contend that such an application is evasive. Churches are to send their own members into the world, whether that’s the workplace, the school, the home, or the public arena, as messengers of the good news of gospel.

The commitment of West Hills Church centers around the intent to know, grow, and go. What does that mean? Simply that we would know Christ, that we would grow in Him, and that we would go for Him. To go for Christ, to be sent by your church for the mission of gospel proclamation is not just to be sent overseas. We have an urgent need in our own nation and in our own community, a need for gospel workers to go to whatever arena the Lord has placed them in, and to stand tall and firm and proclaim with boldness that whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

So we have a very real, very pressing mandate out of this passage. We’ll get into more as we go through these verses today, but as a church we are called to send and be sent as messengers of the gospel. So when we’re together on Sunday morning, are we encouraging one another to proclaim the gospel in their world come Monday? That’s what it means to be a sending church. That’s what it means to function like Antioch in Los Angeles in the 21st century. Not to send missionaries halfway around the world, but to send one another halfway around the block.

This is the idea of sending. But happens once someone is sent? The next link in the chain for Paul is preaching.

Preaching

This word here translated preach and preacher is the the Greek word kerysso. It’s a common and important word in the New Testament. It carries the idea of an authoritative declaration. To preach is to declare with authority.

The preaching mandate is inextricably connected with sending. Every time we see a messenger sent in both the Old and New Testaments, we them being sent to preach, sent to proclaim a message of good news.

We can return to every example that we gave of sending in the Old Testament, and see that the sending is accompanied with preaching every single time. When God speaks to Eve, to Noah, to Abraham, and to Moses, He is not debating with them or conversing with them or engaging in a round table discussion. He is proclaiming, as a herald, the good news of hope and deliverance and life and blessing.

When Moses stands up in Deuteronomy to proclaim the covenant to Israel, he is doing so primarily as a preacher, as a proclaimer. There’s no discussion, there’s no back and forth, there’s no “charitable exchange of ideas.” Moses simply proclaims the gospel to Israel in the framework of the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.

Likewise, the prophets do not sit in a circle with the people of God and share their thoughts. Rather, they stand before the people of God and declare “Thus saith the Lord!”

Jesus follows in and fulfills this pattern when he preached the most famous sermon in world history, the Sermon on the Mount. There’s no discussion, there’s no exchange of ideas, Jesus simply tells the disciples and the crowds the bald faced truth of works and grace, of law and gospel.

The apostles follow in this pattern throughout the book of Acts, as wee encounter multiple sermons from Peter, from Paul, a legendary sermon from Stephen, and what appears to be a sermon from Philip preached to a crowd of one.

The pattern of sent preachers declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ is woven throughout the Scriptures, and this is a pattern that the people of God are to follow even to this day.

Those who would proclaim the gospel today must stand firm on the authority of God’s Word and declare with power and conviction “Thus saith the Lord.”

Preaching is the way. Many professing Christians and leaders in the visible church have tried to softshoe, sidestep, and softpedal preaching in our day. They have tried to replace it with polished media productions, discussion-based Bible studies, theological lectures, and all manner of other trivialities. And so often, when preaching is put forth as the method of transmission of Biblical truth, too often the preacher does not speak with authority, as Moses and the prophets and Christ and the apostles did, but rather with fear and trepidation.

I recall a number of years ago when famed false teacher Joel Osteen appeared on Larry King Live and Mr. King asked Osteen what he believed the truth was. He waffled around uncomfortably and then with expertise only an experienced charlatan could muster, created the most eloquent word salad ever prepared on television. We would do well to respond like Dr. Steve Lawson did: Give me some men who know the truth!

Just earlier this week, Andy Stanley, encouraged pastors to give their hearers “permission” to not believe their message. To “make space” for “other faiths.” The truth is this: there is space for other faiths… in hell. The preacher must stand boldly, with authority, before the people and declare that there is no other name under heaven by which men must be saved, and that the time is now: believe in Christ and be saved.

Many Christians today have an affinity for apologetics, or the defense of Christianity. I myself am intrigued by the study of apologetics, and I love to dig deep into the philosophical proofs for God and for the Christian worldview.

But many Christians believe that sinners can be debated into the kingdom of heaven. That cannot be further from Paul’s declaration here. The chain of contingencies is not “how will they hear unless there is a well-reason debate?” No, it’s “How will they hear unless there is a preacher?”

Paul therefore makes preaching the exclusive vehicle by which the saving gospel comes to the ears of men. Yes, all these other things, lectures and discussions and apologetic debates, certainly have their place as supports in the ministry and delivery of the gospel to sinners. But in the end, the only method that God has blessed is bold, authoritative proclamation.

For us, we therefore acknowledge preaching as the most serious and sacred means of gospel proclamation. We must support and promote preaching as God’s means of disseminating the gospel to the nations.

But beyond supporting it and acknowledging it, we also need to participate in it. We affirm that God has given the gifts of pastors and teachers to his church, and we further acknowledge that the office of pastor and teacher includes the gifts of evangelism and preaching. But the Great Commission is for the church, not just for her leadership. So when Jesus commands that all his disciples be reproductive, namely, that they produce more disciples, if they are to be produced according to God’s program as he communicates it here, they must be produced by the means of preaching, or of the authoritative proclamation and declaration of the saving gospel.

This is for everyone, and this means that when you have unsaved coworkers or family members, you want to love them and pray for them and prove the truth of God the gospel to them. But in the end, there comes a point where you take off the hat of the debater, and you take off the hat of the reasoner, and you declare with authority the truth of the law and the truth of the gospel and call them to repentance and faith, like a herald. If we are to make disciples, Paul is clear here: this is the method we must use.

So we see that in order for the gospel to accomplish it’s purpose, there must be a preacher, he must be sent, and once sent, he must preach. What happens next?

Hearing

The next link in the chain is hearing. This base Greek word here can carry several different meanings. Sometime it is simply hearing in the biological sense, your auditory receptors in your ears capture the soundwaves coming from my voice, the bones in your inner ear translate those waves to electrical signals which are sent to brain and processed, all in an instant, signalling to your brain that you heard a noise. Sometimes it’s the concept of listening, which is perhaps more mental or intellectual, and implies a purposeful, intentional direction of your attention to something that is being said, or perhaps some other sound that is being generated. Generally the idea of listening is also associated with understanding. Typically you listen to something with intent to understand. How many times have we had this occur in our lives? A loved one, your mom or dad or husband or wife, says something to you. You hear it, but no mental processing happens. You have no idea what they just said. You heard them, because you’re not deaf. You know they said something to you, but you don’t know what it was or what’s required of you in response. So you say “Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”

There is a third type of hearing that we encounter in the Bible, and this what I would call the hearing of faith. This is what Jesus has in mind when he shares a parable and then closes it by saying “he who has ears, let him hear.” This type of hearing brings together all the definitions we’ve seen so far, and applies them in the context of saving faith that we talked about last week. This hearing of faith is the means of belief and calling, as we will see in our next two links.

For Paul here then, to hear the message of the good news of the gospel as delivered by the sent preacher, is to hear, listen, understand, and receive the message for what it is: the most beautiful, glorious, and all-satisfying message the world has ever known. To hear the gospel is to receive it in all it’s glory, in all it’s transformational beauty, to reach out with spiritual hands and partake of it with spiritual mouths.

This is what we mean, as we discussed last week, when we talk of knowing and assenting to to the truth. That is what hearing means here for Paul.

The goal of sending and the goal of preaching is hearing the good news of the gospel.

This has implications for us as we send and as we proclaim the good news of the gospel. We certainly affirm that only those whose hearts have been regenerated by God will have receptive, hearing ears and hearts when the gospel is presented.

However, we have a responsibility as senders and as proclaimers to present the message in such a way that it can be received and understood, and to use Paul’s language here, heard by those to who the message is being proclaimed. Simply put, the Christian evangelist has a responsibility for clear and concise presentation of the truths of the gospel.

The question for us this morning is this: when we share the gospel with others (notice I’m saying when - all Christians have an imperative to be proclaiming the gospel to their world) are we clear and concise? Do we give people the pure gospel in a way that it faithful to the Scriptures but also easy to grasp? This is of utmost importance if we are to be faithful and effective in our proclamation of the gospel.

There are a couple of practical ways to grow in this.

The first question that we need to answer for ourselves is this: do we know and understand the gospel in such a way that it can be communicated effectively?

A good gospel presentation typically consists of four parts. You need to, at minimum, address the following:

The holiness and perfections of God

The sinfulness of all men

The redemptive work of Jesus Christ

The response of faith

Within these four categories, you are free to go as deep as time allows with whoever you’re sharing with.

At minimum, you should come armed with one or two Scripture references to go with each category, but you could add as many as you want.

I like to go to, coincidentally, the book of Romans because it contains almost everything that you need for an effective gospel presentation.

Romans 1 describes God as the eternal, all powerful, divine, true, perfect, and righteous creator. It tells us that God will pour out His just wrath on all who are ungodly, or who are opposed to Him and His order for the world. Romans 2 tells us that all people will get exactly what they deserved or merited or earned - good people, eternal life and glory, bad people eternal death and destruction. Romans 3 tells us that all people are guilty of the former - ungodliness leading to just and eternal wrath in hell.

At this point in any gospel presentation it’s helpful to pause and ensure the person you’re speaking to understands the weight of this. You have opposed your all-powerful creator and sought to dethrone Him. You have committed cosmic treason against the King of Kings. The fact that you’re alive right now is purely of God’s mercy, for He would be within His right to destroy you immediately. You also need to establish with them that they have two fundamental needs if they are to survive beyond this life. They need someone who can fulfill God’s requirements of truth, perfection, and righteousness, and they also need someone who can absorb the wrath of God to prevent it from falling on them, and they finally need someone who is alive, thereby proving that the punishment of death does not bind them.

In essence, what these first two parts are doing are setting up for the person and work of Jesus Christ. Many evangelists suggest that you spend most of your time here, and I would echo that sentiment.

Folks need to understand just how serious their plight is before God. It’s only when they understand that, that Christ will be supremely beautiful in all his saving offices.

Once they understand that, preaching Christ becomes easy, and once you’ve shared who He is, they’re ready to receive Him.

So at this point, you can drop Christ right in their lap, and you can do that from the end of Romans 3 where Paul declares that truth and righteousness and perfection have come to us through Jesus Christ and given to us by faith. Simply, we must believe in Him if we are to receive righteousness and be saved. The question after that is simple: what must I do to be saved?

Confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead, and you will be saved, for everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

Then all you have to do is ask the question: Will you call upon His name? For salvation is found in no one else. He is your only hope in life and death.

Now this is just one method for sharing the gospel, and this one is for the one-off moments where you only have a few minutes with someone. You might call this a Titanic gospel presentation. The ship is going down and people are dying.

A method I have discovered to be incredibly useful in sharing the gospel with those with whom you have a good relationship, perhaps someone who has shown some interest in spiritual things, is ask them if they’d be interested in getting coffee once a week and reading the Heidelberg Catechism together. The Heidelberger, as it is affectionately called, works great for this because it follows this three-fold trajectory: Misery, deliverance, and gratitude.

To put it in the words of the catechism, Lord’s Day 1, Question 2:

Historic Creeds and Confessions Question 2

Question 2

How many things are necessary for thee to know, that thou, enjoying this comfort, mayest live and die happily?

Three; the first, how great my sins and miseries are;b the second, how I may be delivered from all my sins and miseries; the third, how I shall express my gratitude to God for such deliverance.d

So we see here with Paul that in order for a person to be saved, a messenger must be sent, the must preach the message of the good news of the gospel, that message must be heard, understood, and received, and at that point they believe and call upon the Lord. We spent a significant amount of time last week dealing with the concepts of belief and calling upon the name of the Lord.

The Remote Golden Chain

I could stop the lesson right there, and we could move on to discuss Paul’s continued love of the prophet Isaiah.

But I think it’s important to clarify a few things. You have heard me sound the trumpet of God’s absolute sovereign freedom in salvation time and time again throughout this class. Certainly Romans 9 leaves no doubt in our mind that salvation is a work of God’s grace alone, apart from any merit of our own. Yet today, I have expressly put forth that there are a number of salvific realities that are wholly contingent upon the actions of human beings.

So effectively, Paul has first said that salvation is completely a work of God, and he has also said secondly that salvation only comes to those who hear the message, believe it, and call upon the name of the Lord.

How do we reconcile these two realities? Is Paul contradicting himself? The answer is no. The two realities can be reconciled, through an understanding of the whole ordo salutis, the entire golden chain of salvation.

In order to demonstrate this, I would like to locate the golden chain of Romans 10 within the golden chain of Romans 8, and show how the two work together. I believe the best way to demonstrate this is visually, so if you would, grab that second handout and we will consider how the active work of God and the active work of people come together to work out salvation.

Conclusion

I hope to have demonstrated with some clarity the necessity of sending, preaching, hearing, believing, and calling in the order and causes of salvation.

As we close I want to press in on you the sacred seriousness of this very first step - the sending of the gospel preacher. For us today, all of us I trust as believers in Christ, we have a responsibility both to send and to go, as a church and individually. This step is crucial and necessary if we are to see people get saved. We have a holy responsibility to bear the good news of the gospel to our world. We are being sent even today to our husbands, to our wives, to our children, to our coworkers, to our classmates, to our community, to our civil leaders as proclaimers of the good news that Christ saves. We are being sent to call all people to believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved.

Each of you this morning are being sent. The question remains for you to answer, not just with your mouth, but with your life: will you proclaim the good news to a lost and dying world? Will you take up the charge of Christ the King and be His witness in your world? There is no greater calling in this life. There is no more pressing mission.

We regularly acknowledge the darkness of our nation and our community. Do we let the darkness creep ever closer to our doorsteps or do we gird our loins, put on the full armor of God, take up the torch of the gospel and shine Christ’s light into that darkness?

I urge you today, find one person who needs Christ. Find one person who needs the gospel. Find one person who is in desperate need of hope. Preach Christ to them. This very week.

Your efforts will not be in vain. This is why Paul quotes Isaiah 52:7-12

Isaiah 52:7–12 LSB

How lovely on the mountains Are the feet of him who proclaims good news, Who announces peace And proclaims good news of good things, Who announces salvation, And says to Zion, “Your God reigns!” The voice of Your watchmen! They lift up their voices; They shout joyfully together; For they will see with their own eyes When Yahweh returns to Zion. Break forth, shout joyfully together, You waste places of Jerusalem; For Yahweh has comforted His people; He has redeemed Jerusalem. Yahweh has bared His holy arm In the sight of all the nations, That all the ends of the earth may see The salvation of our God. Depart, depart, go out from there, Touch nothing unclean; Go out of the midst of her, purify yourselves, You who carry the vessels of Yahweh. But you will not go out in haste, Nor will you go as those who flee; For Yahweh will go before you, And the God of Israel will be your rear guard.

Listen to the words of John Piper. I’ll close with this.

Sermons from John Piper (2000–2014) How Shall People Be Saved? Part 1

First, preachers of the gospel—bringers of God’s good news—are so precious that we see even their soiled and bloody feet as beautiful. Beautiful feet are not soft, manicured, painted, well-tanned feet. Beautiful feet are like the dirty, worn, wrinkled, leathery, scarred feet from many miles of trekking into remote places with good news that could not be heard any other way. So the first point of quoting Isaiah 52:7 is this: bringers of good news are precious people—people of whom the world is not worthy—beautiful for their worn out bodies in the service of king Jesus.

Will you wear yourself out in the service of King Jesus? I pray you will.