Of First Importance

“Acceptance of the Lord Jesus Christ, as He is offered to us in the gospel of His redeeming work, is saving faith. Despairing of any salvation to be obtained by our own efforts, we simply trust in Him to save us; we say no longer, as we contemplate the Cross, merely ‘He saved others’ or ‘He saved the world’ or ‘He saved the Church’; but we say, every one of us, by the strange individualizing power of faith, ‘He loved me and gave Himself for me.’

When a man once says that, in his heart and not merely with his lips, then no matter what his guilt may be, no matter how far he is beyond any human pale, not matter how little opportunity he has for making good the evil that he has done, he is a ransomed soul, a child of God forever.”

—J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 154

“We ought never to set present communion with Christ, as so many are doing, in opposition to the gospel; we ought never to say that we are interested in what Christ does for us now, but are not so much interested in what He did long ago.

Do you know what soon happens when men talk that way? They soon lose all contact with the real Christ; their religion would really remain essentially the same if Jesus never lived.

That danger should be avoided by the Christian man with all his might and main. God has given us an anchor for our souls; He has anchored himself to us by the message of the Cross. Let us never cast that anchor off; let us never weaken our connection with the events upon which our faith is based.

Such dependence upon the past will never prevent us from having present communion with Christ. Unlike the communion of the mystics it will be communion not with the imaginings of our own hearts, but with the real Saviour Jesus Christ.

The gospel of redemption through the Cross and resurrection of Christ is not a barrier between us and Christ, but it is the blessed tie by which He has bound us for ever to Him.”

—J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 153-54

“In the gospel there is included all that the heart of man can wish.”

—J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 153

“The atonement wrought by Christ can never be a bare fact. The bare fact is simply the death of a Jew upon a cross in the first century of our era, and that bare fact is entirely without value to anyone; what gives it its value is the explanation of it as a means by which sinful man was brought into the presence of God.

It is impossible for us to obtain the slightest benefit from a mere contemplation of the death of Christ; all the benefit comes from our knowledge of the meaning of that death, or in other words (if the term be used in a high sense) from our ‘theory’ of it.”

—J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 146

“In Christ all things are ours. There is now for us no awful Beyond of mystery and fear. We cannot, indeed, explain the world, but we rejoice now that we cannot explain it. To us it is all unknown, but it contains no mysteries for our Saviour; He is on the throne; He is at the centre; He is ground and explanation of all things; He pervades the remotest bounds; by Him all things consist. The world is full of dread, mysterious powers; they touch us already in a thousand woes. But from all them we are safe.”

—J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 116-17

“The Lord Jesus came into this world not primarily to say something, not even to be something, but to do something; He came not merely to lead men through His example out into a ‘larger life,’ but to give life, through His death and resurrection, to those who were dead in trespasses and sins.”

—J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 113

“Many persons hold up their hands in amazement at our assertion that Jesus was not a Christian, while we in turn regard it as the very height of blasphemy to say that He was a Christian. ‘Christianity,’ to us, is a way of getting rid of sin; and therefore to say that Jesus was a Christian would be to deny His holiness.

‘But,’ it is said, ‘do you mean to tell us that if a man lives a life like the life of Jesus but rejects the doctrine of the redeeming work of Christ in His death and resurrection, he is not a Christian?’ The answer is very simple. Of course if a man lives a life like the life of Jesus, all is well; such a man is indeed not a Christian — he is a being who has never lost his high estate of sonship with God.

But our trouble is that our lives do not seem to be like the life of Jesus. Unlike Jesus, we are sinners, and hence, unlike Him, we become Christians; we are sinners, and hence we accept with thankfulness the redeeming love of the Lord Jesus Christ, who had pity on us and made us right with God, through no merit of our own, by His atoning death.”

—J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 110-11