“For it is by grace you have been saved through faith—and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).
“What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? . . . As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead” (James 2:14,26).
“If you love Me, you will obey My commands” (John 14:15).
One of the great debates in the Christian world is how works fit into the living out of our faith. Are we required to accept our belief only by faith, do we come to God through works/deeds, or is it a combination of the two?
There are those who insist that works are necessary to bring us into fellowship with God. These works are a demonstration of our love for Christ, and we must love Christ. Such people interpret “if you love Me” as, “If you (really) love me, you will do this (prove it) for me.” Without these works, we fall short of His expectations and of His salvation. They site James’ comment in 2:26—faith without works is dead.
There are others who insist that salvation is purely a gift of God through grace. Such people insist that claiming we have to receive this salvation by faith is to imply that our salvation is, to a small degree, also dependent upon us, and that is contrary to what Scripture teaches. Such people insist that saving faith is also a gift from God, imparted to us at the same time He saves us. Such people maintain that salvation has absolutely nothing to do with works.
Finally, there are those who maintain that faith and works go together. The works do not lead to salvation, but these works are an outgrowth of the salvation experience. “Since we are saved, we work” is what such people believe.
So Who’s Right?
In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he addresses the idea that works have to go hand-in-hand to gain salvation. The people to whom he is writing have gone from accepting Christ by faith and now turned to also following the Mosaic Law. These people seem to understand that true Christian faith is acceptance of Christ as Savior while also embracing the laws and rituals of the Old Testament. Paul’s response is to refer to this teaching as “bewitching” and “foolishness:” “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? Have you suffered so much for nothing—if it really was for nothing? Does God give you His Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?” (Galatians 3:1-5).
Paul’s effort is to show the error in assuming that works are a part of the salvation experience—that we must also work to attain God’s grace. Such an idea runs counter to the very idea of grace by faith, and relegates the crucifixion of Christ to just another brick in the wall of salvation that each of us must build.
The danger in placing such a prominence in works or deeds is that we begin to calculate how much God becomes indebted to us as we do our works. We begin to have a sense of obliging God to us—a sense that God owes us because of what we have done or are doing.
And that’s just wrong. God is not nor has He ever been obligated to anyone or anything other than Himself. The idea that “God is faithful” is that He is faithful to Himself, that He is consistent and that He can be trusted to fulfill all His promises. But nowhere does the Bible indicate or imply that we can obligate God to us. So the idea of working to earn our salvation, or even a part of our salvation, is a grave error in understanding of Scripture and God’s will.
The idea that we are endowed with saving faith by a sovereign God is not that alien to what the Bible teaches. My Calvinist/predestination friends have a lot of Scripture that supports their position. I have no problem with those who come to that conclusion, although I must admit that I am not a practitioner of said theology. Still, there is much to be said that the giving of saving faith to us by sovereign God removes the idea that salvation is only from God, by faith and “not of works, lest any many should boast” (Ephesians 2:9).
That said, once a person is saved, once the spirit is re-kindled by the sovereignty, power and grace of God, then we are alive in Him, and it then becomes incumbent upon us who are saved to put into practice that which our Savior taught us. We need Christ in order to do the things He calls us to do—“I am the Vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in Me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from Me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5) (underline my own).
James is right in that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26b). To walk blithely through life claiming to be a child of God through faith in Christ without also following His teachings is also contrary to biblical teaching. The idea that salvation is nothing more than “fire insurance” and has no real bearing on how we live out our salvation is no more valid than the idea that God expects me to earn His love and salvation by the things I do. Looking at the context of James’s words, he quite clearly is teaching that a valid faith is one that is producing deeds/works in keeping with that faith.
Saving faith finds its work in the living out of the Golden Rule, of loving one another as Christ loved us. It is in loving God with all our heart, mind, soul and being and loving our neighbor as ourselves. When Jesus tells us if we love Him we will obey His commands, He is not saying that our obedience is there to prove we love Him. Rather, our obedience is a natural outgrowth of that love and commitment to Him. We want to be like Him and we do that by putting our faith to work in our daily lives.
The works we do are in obedience to Christ. When Jesus said apart from Him we can do nothing, He meant that in a literal sense. (And, yes, I do know the difference between literal and figurative.) Paul, writing to the Corinthians, talks about the building we do on the foundation of Christ’s saving work. “If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of the work” (1 Corinthians 3:11-13). What Paul is saying is that, as Christians, we do things for Christ all the time.
There are times we figure out what God wants us to do, and we go ahead and do it. We plan, we do, and then we expect God to put His stamp of approval on what we have done for Him. The problem is that God does not want us to do things for Him; He wants to work through us. It is when we discern the will of God and then place ourselves at His disposal that we find ourselves building on the foundation with gold, silver and costly stones. The times we do things our way and expect God’s stamp is when we build with wood, hay and straw. On the Day of Judgment, when the fire burns away the wood, hay and straw . . . well, Paul concludes his analogy with, “If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames” (1 Corinthians 3:14-15).
In other words, there will be some who are diligently “doing God’s work” that will find themselves with a building that has gone up in smoke, leaving nothing more than a foundation (cf. 3:11). The person who has placed him- or herself at God’s disposal to work through us, he or she will find a lovely home made of refined gold and silver, secure in a fine stone building.
Conclusion
The idea of faith and works is that they go hand-in-hand. Without the faith, there is no true work. Without the works, there can be no growing, defining faith. Works do not save us, nor do they form a part of our salvation. Instead, the works we do are a result of our faith, the outgrowth of that which we believe about and in Jesus Christ.
© 2018 Glynn Beaty