Faith On Steroids

Part One: The Place of Works in the Christian life - Week 26

There are at least four perspectives that define biblical faith: that which God gives the believer, enabling him to be saved;[1] the fruit of the Spirit;[2] a spiritual gift;[3] and that which the believer does in response to the expectations of God.[4] James uses “faith” in this last sense in his epistle: “Faith without works is dead.”[5] Martin Luther, who reportedly called the epistle of James “a book of straw,” more importantly declared that, when we exercise our faith, it may also be considered as a work – “yea, it is the chief work.”

Just as fruit cannot produce itself, but is the overflow of a healthy tree, so the fruit of the Christian life, in the form of good works, comes from a healthy life – i.e., one in whom the Holy Spirit dwells. Good works do not make a man pious; pious men do good works.

Know + Be + Do = Living Faith and Living Works

Know – Be + Do = Dead Works

Know – Be – Do = Dead Faith

In the above illustration you see that the Christian life centers on being or becoming. If I said to you, “You have to be holy and do good,” you would rightly respond, “I must first know what it means to be holy and I have to know what doing good looks like.” You have to “know” before you can “be,” and “doing” flows from “being.” If you move from know to do without being converted by the Spirit, you end with “dead works.”[6] If you move from know to be without proceeding on to do, you have “dead faith.”[7] Knowing entails studying Scripture. In the process of knowing God through His Word, you come to saving faith.

The commandments and expectations of God do not make you holy, rather they are your opportunity to learn how to please the lover of your soul. You do not view God’s commands as law; you obey His will because you’ve become His child.

But, when you meet God’s command and don’t want to do it, you come to a crisis, just as our Lord Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane. When Paul talks about presenting your body as “a living sacrifice…to God,”[8] he has in mind (at least in part) these (hopefully) infrequent moments of crisis. You sacrifice something of value in hope of obtaining something of greater value. The strength of your relationship with God, the desire to have biblical evidence that you are saved, and the promise of eternal reward motivate you to obey when you do not want to.

If you meet the will of God and refuse to do it, you forfeit your assurance of salvation; you are saying that you can relate to God on your terms. Such can never be. Good works attest to the validity of your faith. Absent the works – absent the faith.

Because biblical faith is active, never passive, it leads to the kind of works mentioned in Hebrews 11 – works affirming that you are God’s obedient servant. James, when talking about passive faith says that such faith is “dead.” Faith is risk-taking, and the object of your faith identifies your hope. Therefore you must ask, “What are the risks I am taking in the direction of my eternal hope?” These risks fall into two broad categories: those that are subjective – i.e., they flow from what you perceive to be God’s specific will for your life, and those that are objective – i.e., obeying the New Testament commands.

Care must be taken lest you allow your subjective risks to lead you into asceticism. This was a trap the monastic movement easily fell into: a man, demonstrating his eternal hope, took the vow of celibacy and poverty, believing that such acts gained him eternal merit. If you believe that God calls you to such a life, you have no choice but to obey. But when you conclude, absent a calling, that living such a life gains you eternal merit, you err; you gain merit by obeying God, not by asceticism. If you believe there is something special about monasticism, for example, you will become legalistic – adding to the commandments of God.

When the Church embraced the view that it replaced Israel as God’s chosen people, because in the Old Testament righteousness is defined by works, history reveals how it incorporated into its dogma that works-righteousness is the path to salvation.[9] This, of course, was a logical deduction in that, in the Old Testament, God’s people related to Him on the basis of their works. “The Church offered many ways of bridging the gap between God the Holy and man the wrongdoer. The first is the way of self-help.[10] This was the point at which monasticism, as already indicated, afforded the greatest opportunity. As contrasted with life in the world, any form of monasticism appeared more rigorous and worthy of reward.”[11]

Pope Gregory, who lived in the 7th century, said of becoming Pope: “My pastoral responsibilities now compel me to have dealings with worldly men, and after the unclouded beauty of my former peace, it seems that my mind is bespattered with the mire of daily affairs.”[12] Just as the people of Israel were to have no dealings with the world, and the Levitical High Priest especially kept himself pure and unpolluted, so also the Pope and all who wished to attain a holy life remained separate. There was an absolute distinction between the secular and the spiritual.

Luther, in order to find a pristine environment in which he could work his way to heaven, became an Augustinian Monk. To his horror he discovered that he brought the world with him into the monastery, and he could not beat it out of himself. As a learned man, he poured over Scripture and discovered the Pauline epistles and their emphasis on justification by faith.

David, as he was about to turn his kingdom over to his son Solomon warned: “And you, Solomon my son, know the God of your father, and serve him with a whole heart and with a willing mind; for the Lord searches all hearts, and understands every plan and thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will cast you off for ever.”[13] Note the conditional aspect of the relationship. Was there any man, during the days when Israel was a nation, that did not relate to God on the basis of works? You gain assurance that they had a relationship with God because they were “good” kings, or they “wholly followed the Lord their God.” Looking back from the New Testament you see that they were saved by grace through their faith, and that their works were nothing more than an evidence of their salvation, but can you find this in the Old Testament?

During the Old Testament Monarchy, the only way you can determine if one was saved or not is how they lived their lives. “And Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the LORD his God.”[14] How else could Asa determine if he was saved? How can the reader make this determination on the basis of anything other than works? “In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa was diseased in his feet, and his disease became severe; yet even in his disease he did not seek the LORD, but sought help from physicians.”[15] With Asa you get mixed signals: God calls him good, and yet “he did not seek the Lord.” Because the only evaluation you can make must be based on works, the picture is ambiguous.

The early church held in tension salvation by grace and salvation by works, believing passages such as Matthew 6:14-15 and James 2:24 as well as Romans 4:14 and Ephesians 2:8-9. In the 15th and 16th centuries, for pragmatic reasons, Rome emphasized justification by works. We will delve deeper into this phenomenon in next week’s meditation.

Questions for Reflection

1 – If “knowing” must come before “being” and “doing”, what role should protracted time in Scripture play in your life? What role, if any, does correct doctrine play in your “being” and “doing”?

2 – If you are not saved by your works, and you are not, then what role should works play in your life? How critical do you perceive this role to be?

3 – Is asceticism a good or a bad thing? On what basis do you make this determination? Is a life of obedience a form of asceticism?

4 – What role does asceticism play in determining your rewards in heaven? How does your answer affect your understanding of God’s will?

[1] Cf. Ephesians 2:8-9
[2] Cf. Galatians 5:22-23
[3] Cf. 1Corinthians 12:9
[4] Cf. Hebrews 11
[5] Cf. James 2:14-26
[6] Cf. Hebrews 6:1
[7] Cf. James 2:17
[8] Romans 12:1
[9] Cf. Week Nine
[10] Self-help = God helps those who help themselves
[11] Bainton, Roland H. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1956, p. 28
[12] Bede. A History of the English Church and People. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993, p. 95.
[13] 1Chronicles 28:9, RSV
[14] 2Chronicles 14:2, KJV
[15] 2Chronicles 16:12, RSV

This weekly meditation is provided by the Leadership Foundation (www.leadershipfoundation.org) & Walter Hendrichsen.

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