Last week I pointed out some passages which indicated that it was possible to be born again with having some kind of cognitive grasp and confession of the Gospel – i.e., that faith is not a necessary condition of being born again. This week, I want to go one step further and point to some passages which indicate that faith is not sufficient for being born again either.
1) In Matthew 7:21, Jesus gives a provocative prophetic description: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” Verses 22 and 23 then further imply that these people knew who Jesus was, and therefore were quite surprised when Jesus did not know who they were!
2) This is also a theme of the passage that I discussed last week from Matthew 25. The sheep cried out “Lord, Lord” but Jesus sent them away. The reason? Their refusal to give economic aid to the vulnerable. These goats seemed to believe that they were sheep until Jesus gave them the bad news.
3) Probably the clearest declaration that faith is not sufficient comes from James: “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?...So faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by works, is dead” (James 2:14, 17). It’s hard to think of how a statement could be more clear that faith is simply not enough. I’ve heard many interpretations of this passage from the traditional born-again crowd who try to say that this passage does not say what it seems to say, and find all of them to be, well, embarrassing and silly.
4) A little known example from Acts 8 also illustrates this point well. Verse 12 describes a group of people who experienced a conversion after they came to believe in the Gospel. But they were not yet born-again: verse 16 continues “for [the Holy Spirit] had not yet fallen on any of them.” Here were some people who came to genuine faith in the Gospel, but they did not yet have the Holy Spirit and so were not yet born again (Rom 8:9).
Next week I will begin drawing my own positive conclusions. But for now it is enough to realize that there is significant textual evidence that faith is not necessary for being born again, nor is it sufficient. That is, faith is just not enough. And obviously, this idea is not my own. I was convinced by what Jesus, Luke (the author of Acts), and James had to say about the topic.
