Church discipline

The production of true faith is often spoken of in Scripture as amounting to the whole work of regeneration:“Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God” (1Jo 5:1). And again, “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (Joh 1:12-13). Here, every one who really believes is said to be born of God; and as every true believer is a converted man, it follows that the production of saving faith is equivalent to the work of regeneration.

But then it must be a real scriptural faith, such as is required in the Gospel: not the faith which the Apostle James declares to be dead, but that living faith that is described in Scripture as a well-grounded belief resting on the sure testimony of God. [It must be] a positive belief, not a mere negation or absence of disbelief, nor a doubtful and wavering opinion, but a thorough conviction of mind. [It must be] an intelligent belief, such as is inconsistent with blind ignorance and implies a perception of the meaning of God’s truth, a full and comprehensive belief, embracing all that is essential to be known in regard to the method of salvation. This belief impl[ies] scriptural apprehensions of God in His true character, of Christ in His person as Immanuel, in the fullness of His offices as Mediator, His great design and His finished work, and of ourselves as guilty, depraved, and exposed to a sentence of righteous condemnation. This belief, thus founded on God’s testimony and implying spiritual apprehensions of His truth, is a vital, active, and operative principle, bending the will to a compliance with God’s call, awakening suitable emotions of reverence, fear, complacency, delight, love, and joy, renewing, transforming, purifying the soul, and effecting a complete change on all our practical habits.

The production of this real, living, and sanctifying faith is the great work of the Spirit in conversion, a work which implies or produces a universal change on all the faculties of our nature, so that as soon as this faith is implanted in his soul, the sinner becomes a new man, the truth of God received by faith renewing his understanding, his conscience, his will, his desires, his affections: “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2Co 5:17).

Every believer then, in the Gospel sense of that term, is born again. In other words, no one is a believer who is not regenerated…The production of saving faith is that wherein regeneration properly consists. But then it must be such a faith as the Gospel requires and describes. That faith, although it may have its seat in the understanding, implies a change in our whole moral nature, and especially a renewal of the will. The understanding is, in the order of nature, the leading and governing faculty of the soul, and it is by means of truth cordially believed that the great change is accomplished.

But the truth is either not duly understood or not really believed, where it works no change on the heart and habits of the sinner. He may read, speak, and speculate about it; he may even embrace some fragments of it and hold them tenaciously…but the substantial truth of Christ’s Gospel cannot be really understood and believed by any man who remains unconverted…It is true that many an unregenerate man may suppose that he believes: he may never have questioned the general truth of God’s Word; he may even have ranged himself on the side of the Gospel; and by a public profession or in private conversation, he may have often defended and maintained it. Nay, he may have had many thoughts passing through his mind, many convictions awakened in his conscience that show that he is not altogether ignorant or unimpressed…Yet I apprehend that nothing can be plainer from the Word of God than that these transient impressions may often be experienced by an unconverted man, and that the man who is not regenerated and transformed by his faith has no true faith at all.