The doctrine of lordship salvation teaches that submitting to Christ as Lord goes hand-in-hand with trusting in Christ as Savior. Lordship salvation is the opposite of what is sometimes called easy-believism or the teaching that salvation comes through an acknowledgement of a certain set of facts.
John MacArthur, whose book The Gospel According to Jesus lays out the case for lordship salvation, summarizes the teaching this way: “The gospel call to faith presupposes that sinners must repent of their sin and yield to Christ’s authority.” In other words, a sinner who refuses to repent is not saved, for he cannot cling to his sin and the Savior at the same time. And a sinner who rejects Christ’s authority in his life does not have saving faith, for true faith encompasses a surrender to God. Thus, the gospel requires more than making an intellectual decision or mouthing a prayer; the gospel message is a call to discipleship. The sheep will follow their Shepherd in submissive obedience.
Advocates of lordship salvation point to Jesus’ repeated warnings to the religious hypocrites of His day as proof that simply agreeing to spiritual facts does not save a person. There must be a heart change. Jesus emphasized the high cost of discipleship: “Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27), and “Those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples” (verse 33). In the same passage, Jesus speaks of counting the cost; elsewhere, He stresses total commitment: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62).
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that eternal life is a narrow path found by “only a few” (Matthew 7:14); in contrast, easy-believism seeks to broaden the path so that anyone who has a profession of faith can enter. Jesus says that “every good tree bears good fruit” (verse 17); in contrast, easy-believism says that a tree can still be good and bear nothing but bad fruit. Jesus says that many who say “Lord, Lord” will not enter the kingdom (verses 21–23); in contrast, easy-believism teaches that saying “Lord, Lord” is good enough.
Lordship salvation teaches that a true profession of faith will be backed up by evidence of faith. If a person is truly following the Lord, then he or she will obey the Lord’s instructions. A person who is living in willful, unrepentant sin has obviously not chosen to follow Christ, because Christ calls us out of sin and into righteousness. Indeed, the Bible clearly teaches that faith in Christ will result in a changed life (2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 5:22–23; James 2:14–26).
Lordship salvation is not a salvation-by-works doctrine. Advocates of lordship salvation are careful to say that salvation is by grace alone, that believers are saved before their faith ever produces any good works, and that Christians can and do sin. However, true salvation will inevitably lead to a changed life. The saved will be dedicated to their Savior. A true Christian will not feel comfortable living in unconfessed, unforsaken sin.
Here are nine teachings that set lordship salvation apart from easy-believism:
1) Repentance is not a simple synonym for faith. Scripture teaches that sinners must exercise faith in conjunction with repentance (Acts 2:38; 17:30; 20:21; 2 Peter 3:9). Repentance is a change of mind from embrace of sin and rejection of Christ to a rejection of sin and an embrace of Christ (Acts 3:19; Luke 24:47), and even this is a gift of God (2 Timothy 2:25). Genuine repentance, which comes when a person submits to the lordship of Christ, cannot help but result in a change of behavior (Luke 3:8; Acts 26:18–20).
2) A Christian is a new creation and cannot just “stop believing” and lose salvation. Faith itself is a gift of God (Ephesians 2:1–5, 8), and real faith endures forever (Philippians 1:6). Salvation is all God’s work, not man’s. Those who believe in Christ as Lord are saved apart from any effort of their own (Titus 3:5).
3) The object of faith is Christ Himself, not a promise, a prayer, or a creed (John 3:16). Faith must involve a personal commitment to Christ (2 Corinthians 5:15). It is more than being convinced of the truth of the gospel; it is a forsaking of this world and a following of the Master. The Lord Jesus said, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27).
4) True faith always produces a changed life (2 Corinthians 5:17). The inner person is transformed by the Holy Spirit (Galatians 2:20), and the Christian has a new nature (Romans 6:6). Those with genuine faith—those who are submitted to the lordship of Christ—follow Jesus (John 10:27), love their brothers (1 John 3:14), obey God’s commandments (1 John 2:3; John 15:14), do the will of God (Matthew 12:50), abide in God’s Word (John 8:31), keep God’s Word (John 17:6), do good works (Ephesians 2:10), and continue in the faith (Colossians 1:21–23; Hebrews 3:14). Salvation is not adding Jesus to the pantheon of one’s idols; it is a wholesale destruction of the idols with Jesus reigning supreme.
5) God’s “divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life” (2 Peter 1:3; cf. Romans 8:32). Salvation, then, is not just a ticket to heaven. It is the means by which we are sanctified (practically) in this life and by which we grow in grace.
6) Scripture teaches that Jesus is Lord of all. Christ demands unconditional surrender to His will (Romans 6:17–18; 10:9–10). Those who live in rebellion to God’s will do not have eternal life, for “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble” (James 4:6).
7) Those who truly believe in Christ will love Him (1 Peter 1:8–9; Romans 8:28–30; 1 Corinthians 16:22). And those we love we long to please (John 14:15, 23).
8) Scripture teaches that behavior is an important test of faith. Obedience is evidence that one’s faith is genuine (1 John 2:3). If a person remains unwilling to obey Christ, he provides evidence that his “faith” is in name only (1 John 2:4). A person may claim Jesus as Savior and pretend to obey for a while, but, if there is no heart change, his true nature will eventually manifest itself. This was the case for Judas Iscariot.
9) Genuine believers may stumble and fall, but they will persevere in the faith (1 Corinthians 1:8). This was the case for Simon Peter. A “believer” who completely turns away from the Lord, never to return, plainly shows that he was never born again to begin with (1 John 2:19). This was the case for Judas Iscariot (see John 6:70).
A person who has been delivered from sin by faith in Christ should not desire to remain in a life of sin (Romans 6:2). Of course, spiritual growth can occur quickly or slowly, depending on the person and his circumstances. And the changes may not be evident to everyone at first. Ultimately, God knows who are His sheep, and He will mature each of us according to His perfect time table.
Is it possible to be a Christian and live in lifelong carnality, enjoying the pleasures of sin, and never seeking to glorify the Lord who bought him? Can a sinner spurn the lordship of Christ yet lay claim to Him as Savior? Can someone pray a “sinner’s prayer” and go about his life as if nothing had happened and still call himself a “Christian”? Lordship salvation says “no.” Let us not give unrepentant sinners false hope; rather, let us declare the whole counsel of God: “You must be born again” (John 3:7).
The Lordship Controversy occurred in the last two decades of the twentieth century. It was a debate largely between dispensational theologians regarding the nature of salvation and the place of repentance in the life of true believers. On one side of the Lordship Controversy was a company of “Free Grace” theologians who denied that repentance and obedience are necessary in the Christian life. On the other side of the controversy was a group of Calvinistic theologians who taught that although salvation is based only on God’s sovereign grace, God requires the evangelical response of repentance and faith in our reception of the gospel. The latter emphasized the importance of the lordship of Christ in reaction to the denial of the need for repentance and the fruit of obedience in the teaching of the proponents of the Free Grace movement. By undermining the place of repentance and good works in the life of a believer, proponents of the Free Grace movement essentially advanced an antinomian view of justification. Although there was enough uniformity on each side of the debate to label these two different positions, there were also nuances in the way in which individual figures articulated the dynamics of both the Free Grace and the Lordship Salvation approach to the doctrine of salvation.
Explanation
During the final two decades of the twentieth century, certain dispensational theologians began to propagate the idea that one could be in a state of salvation and lack entirely the fruit of repentance from sin and obedience to Christ. Their particular form of soteriology came to be known as free grace–a title coined by Zane Hodges. Some of the other more well-known adherents of the Free Grace movement were Louis Sperry Chafer, Miles Stanford, and Norman Geisler. Hodges became a particularly well-known proponent of the Free Grace theology because of his 1981 book The Gospel under Siege. In his May 1991 Tabletalk article “Understanding the Lordship Controversy,” J.I. Packer wrote:
If . . . you had told me that I would live to see literate evangelicals, some with doctorates and a seminary teaching record, arguing for the reality of an eternal salvation, divinely guaranteed, that may have in it no repentance, no discipleship, no behavioral change, no practical acknowledgment of Christ as Lord of one’s life, and no perseverance in faith, I would have told you that you were out of your mind. Stark, staring bonkers, is the British phrase I would probably have used. But now the thing has happened. In The Gospel Under Siege (1981) and Absolutely Free! (1989), Zane Hodges, for one, maintains all these positions as essential to the Christian message, arguing that without them the Gospel gets lost in legalism. Wow.
Nor is this all. Hodges lashes the historic reformational account of the Gospel, which he labels “Lordship salvation,” as a form of works-righteousness, because it affirms that repentance—turning from sin to serve Jesus as one’s Lord—is as necessary for salvation as faith—turning from self-reliance to trust Jesus as one’s Savior. Such repentance, says Hodges, is a work, and justification is through faith apart from works. To preach and teach in reformational terms is to compromise the grace of the Gospel. It is vital, says Hodges, to see that there is no necessary connection between saving faith and good works at any stage. . . .
[Hodges] might not have attracted much notice had not a distinguished fellow-dispensationalist with a Reformed soteriology, John MacArthur, Jr., attacked his view in The Gospel According to Jesus (1988), a strongly worded book with forewords by Boice and Packer. Absolutely Free! was Hodges’ reply to MacArthur.
The debate centered on both the necessity of repentance and the necessity of good works in relation to personal salvation. The Reformed had always emphasized that Spirit-wrought good works are the necessary evidence that one possesses saving faith in Christ. These good works are not the basis of salvation, which is Christ alone, but if one does not have them at all, one has not really trusted in Jesus alone. The proponents of the Free Grace movement denied this biblical teaching because they believed it made personal assurance of salvation impossible. For instance, Hodges wrote, “A man who must wait for works to verify his faith cannot know until life’s end whether or not his faith was real” (The Gospel under Siege, p. 79). This is a radical departure from the historic Reformed and Protestant understanding of the role of good works in the life of believers. The members of the Westminster Assembly included an entire chapter on the subject of good works. In that chapter, they wrote, “Good works, done in obedience to God’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith: and by them believers manifest their thankfulness, strengthen their assurance, edify their brethren, adorn the profession of the gospel, stop the mouths of the adversaries, and glorify God, whose workmanship they are, created in Christ Jesus thereunto, that, having their fruit unto holiness, they may have the end, eternal life” (Westminster Confession of Faith 16.2). In other words, we do not have to look back on our lives at the point of death in order to see if we truly believe; rather, good works are one evidence, in the present, that we are united to Christ and heirs of eternal life.
In short, the Free Grace movement has rightly been critiqued as a “hyper-grace” movement. John Gerstner once noted that it is essentially an antinomian movement. The Free Grace movement’s presentation of “grace” does not in fact square with the biblical doctrine of grace. The Apostle Paul wrote, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (Titus 2:11–14). Salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, but when God saves us, He continues working in us such that we manifest good works (Eph. 2:8–10).
Quotes
Both sides proclaim that God’s grace is absolutely free, that justification is absolutely central, that faith is absolutely necessary for salvation—and that the other side’s account of what it means to be a Christian is absolutely wrong. Hodges calls MacArthur’s position “a radical rewriting of the Gospel,” “Satanic at its core,” which has “turned the meaning of faith upside down,” destroying the ground of assurance and producing doctrine that the New Testament writers would find unrecognizable. MacArthur calls Hodges’ position a “tragic error” that “destroys the Gospel,” “promises a false peace,” “produces a false evangelism,” and “offers a false hope.” What, we ask, is the point of cleavage that so drastically divides men who seemed to agree on so much? The question is not hard to answer. It has to do with the nature of faith.
J.I. Packer
“Understanding the Lordship Controversy”
Tabletalk magazine (May 1991)
Good works are not necessary for us to earn our justification. They are never the ground basis of our justification. They are necessary in another more restricted sense. They are necessary corollaries to true faith. If a person claims to have faith yet brings no fruit of obedience whatsoever, it is proof positive that the claim to faith is a false claim. True faith inevitably and necessarily bears fruit. The absence of fruit indicates the absence of faith. We are not justified by the fruit of our faith. We are justified by the fruit of Christ’s merit. We receive His merit only by faith. But it is only by true faith that we receive His merit. And all true faith yields true fruit.
R.C. Sproul
“Works or Faith?”
Tabletalk magazine (May 1991)
