Faith Without Works: Where Free Grace Breaks Down

I called this an in-house debate. It costs more than I said.

In March I wrote that the divide between “Lordship” and “Free Grace” was an in-house disagreement. I have spent the months since in James, and the text will not let me say that anymore.

This post is why.

If you want the two positions laid out fairly, with the best men on both sides given their due, that earlier post is still up and I stand behind everything in it except its conclusion.

Where It Broke for Me

A men’s Bible study on Matthew 13. The Parable of the Sower and the Seed.

Christ tells it, then does something He almost never does: He decodes it, bit by bit, so the disciples cannot misread it.

Only one other parable gets that same treatment, and it sits in the same chapter: the wheat and the tares, where the field holds sons of the kingdom and sons of the evil one together, indistinguishable until the harvest at the end of the age (Matthew 13:24–30, decoded in 13:36–43).

He puts it to them directly: “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?” (Mark 4:13).

The seed sown along the path hears the word and does not understand it, and the evil one snatches away what was sown in his heart (Matthew 13:19).

The seed sown on rocky ground hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, “yet he has no root”; when tribulation comes, he falls away (Matthew 13:20–21).

The seed sown among thorns hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke it, “and it proves unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22).

Only the fourth seed sown on good soil hears, understands, and bears fruit (Matthew 13:23).

Four hearers. Three failures. One person produces.

My read was straightforward: no root, no fruit, no life.

My Free Grace brothers concede the path, then read the rocky ground and the thorns as saved men with a poor harvest.

But I have known a rocky-ground hearer. He received the word with visible joy; the springing up was palpable. He is today a self-proclaimed cross-dressing atheist. How do I reconcile that?

Free Grace may call that man saved. I cannot. And Scripture will not let me say he lost what he had: “no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28). John leaves a door open: “They went out from us, but they were not of us” (1 John 2:19).

The question was never whether he could lose salvation.

It is whether he ever had it in the first place.

He did not lose life. It never had root.

Why Four Soils and Not Two

Take what follows as my own reading rather than settled ground.

If the point were simply saved and lost, it would seem that a two-soil parable would suffice: believer and non-believer. I think Christ is also addressing self-deception.

The path seed is dead on arrival. It never had a chance.

The rocky ground seed dies shortly after a genuine-looking sprouting.

The thorny ground never produces at all, though it can blend in for years. This is the wheat and the tares in one man: he stays in his seat, indistinguishable from the rest, and hears the verdict at the end.

Finally, the seed sown on good soil hears, understands, and brings forth fruit.

One soil produces life. Three do not, and they are sorted by how long the illusion holds.

The seeds on the path never germinate at all; the birds eat them immediately.

The rocky ground is the man who blazes and vanishes, and John already told us what we watched: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us” (1 John 2:19). The departure did not create the verdict. It revealed one.

Deconstruction is the latest fashionable word for this, as though the man were dismantling something real. John's account is simpler. There was never anything to take apart.

Finally, there’s the thorny ground verdict: “On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord’... And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you’” (Matthew 7:22–23).

Not “you lost Me.” “I never knew you.”

Now, look at what Christ says the good soil produces: “he indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty” (Matthew 13:23). Three yields, and every one of them a harvest.

He does not add “…but in another case nothing.”

That option is not in the text. Christ describes four hearers and gives the fruitless man no place among the saved. Free Grace insists that man exists.

One of them is describing something the other cannot find.

The Exchange, Verse by Verse

James 2:14 — “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?”
Free Grace: He writes to brothers. Save means rescue from temporal consequences, not hell.
Lordship: The definite article in ἡ πίστις (hē pistis) points back to the faith the man just claimed, which is why the ESV renders it “that faith.” James examines a profession, not a possession.

Free Grace often leans on the word “brother.” James writes to “brothers,” so every man in view must be a believer, and “save” then must mean something other than salvation.

But every pastor addresses his congregation that way; it is a form of address, not a verdict on every soul present. Christ called the Twelve friends and little children, and Judas heard every word of it. Of that same man He said, “one of you is a devil” (John 6:70).

You do not tell a room full of believers to check whether their faith is dead unless some of them might find out that it is.

James 2:17 — “So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”
Free Grace: Dead means unproductive. A dead branch is still wood.
Lordship: The Greek word is νεκρά (nekra), a corpse; the same word Paul uses in Ephesians 2:1 for men dead in sin. James had milder options, yet chose corpse .

James 2:19 — “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!”
Free Grace: Demons are not the analogy; they never trusted Christ for salvation.
Lordship: Assent without submission is exactly what the demons hold. It is not saving faith in them, and it is not saving faith in man.

James 2:26 — “For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.”
Free Grace: A corpse is still a real body. Dead faith is real faith minus its output.
Lordship: A corpse is not a body doing less. It has stopped being a body at all.

Not the Carnal Christian

One clarification, because this is where the argument often gets deflected.

I am not denying that a true believer can fall hard and stay down for a while. David after Bathsheba. Peter at the fire. The Corinthians, whom Paul called fleshly and infants in Christ while telling them the Spirit dwelt in them (1 Corinthians 3:1, 3:16).

That is not what we are discussing. The question is not whether a transformed life can go dark for a season or take time to grow. It is whether an untransformed life counts as saved at all.

1 John 3:9 does not say that the born-again man never sins. It says he cannot keep on practicing sin, because God’s seed abides in him. A carnal Christian has that seed and grieves it. The man James warns has nothing to grieve.

Different Gospel or Harmless Allowance?

So is this an in-house error, like the disagreement over the timing of the rapture? Or is it something more serious?

MacArthur’s answer is on record at Grace to You: easy-believism makes room for a cheap and meaningless faith, one exercised with no impact on a life of sin, and that is not saving faith.

Sproul’s answer, per Ligonier, is that dismissing the necessity of obedience leads straight to antinomianism. Jude saw it coming: men who “pervert the grace of our God into sensuality” (Jude 4).

James Montgomery Boice called the construction a “defective theology.”

That’s the phrase I keep coming back to, because it names the problem without overstating it.

I am not saying Free Grace men are unsaved; I believe most of them are my brothers, and their instinct to guard grace from works is the right one, and even admirable.

Their error is not about what saves. It is about what salvation yields.

They have built a system in which regeneration may produce nothing, and Scripture knows no such regeneration.

2 Corinthians 5:17 knows a new creation.

Ephesians 2:10 knows workmanship created for good works.

John 15:8 knows a Father glorified when His people bear much fruit.

A new birth that produces nothing is not a smaller version of new birth.

It is a counterfeit wearing its name.

What This Means on Sunday

A doctrine is not judged by its best adherents. It is judged by what it licenses.

This one hands Christian assurance to Christ-less lives. It takes the man James wrote to warn, the man of words and no works, and files him under “carnal Christian” where the warning can never reach him.

Somewhere in your church is a man resting his eternity on a decision that changed nothing.

Free Grace tells him he is safe. James tells him to check for a pulse.

• Take 2 Corinthians 13:5 seriously: examine yourself, whether you are in the faith.

• Do not ask whether you prayed a prayer. Ask whether anything is alive.

• If a brother holds this position, engage the texts, not the man. His error is real; so, often, is his faith.

God did not predestine men to a decision. He predestined them “to be conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29). And Paul says the work is already underway: “we all, with unveiled face... are being transformed” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

We all. Paul left no one out.

A doctrine that permits a man to arrive nowhere is not describing the road God laid.

I said in March that the line between these camps was one I could not draw cleanly. James drew it for me.

Dead things do not need encouragement. They need resurrection.

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A brief personal note before I close. Some of you know my background is in finance: over thirty years as a CPA, COO, and CFO within the investment industry. I have started a second publication called Audited, where each week I check a viral financial claim against the research it cites — retirement rules, Social Security advice, fees, and the like. It is free and entirely separate from this one. “The Inevitable Truth” continues exactly as it is. If that work would serve you or someone you love approaching retirement, it’s at Audited. That is the last you will hear of it here. Thanks for your support.

To His Glory,

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