The Revelation of Faith

By Pastor William R. Cunningham
August 6, 2006

Philippians 2:12-13 (NKJV) -- {12} Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; {13} for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.

Introduction

The scripture given above reveals a truth about salvation that I believe many people miss.  I did not realize it and understand it in my heart until many years after being saved.  Actually, it was more of a discovery as we will discuss later.  What is this truth?  Well that is what we are going to talk about.

Faith is something that is talked about in the Christian and church communities a lot.  I say Christian and church because they are not the same things.  However, I will leave a discussion of that for another time.  What I’d like to focus on now is the concept of faith from a purely Christian perspective.  Now a purely Christian perspective does not imply mysticism or magic.  I just mean that we are going to look at it from the perspective of Christian doctrine and not from the perspective of religious teachings or even common usage.

Many are told that faith is to believe God for something and there are countless people who are demanding things of God as if it were His duty to obey their command and give them what they want.  People are told that if they did such and such a thing then God would do this thing.  Too often God is presented as a genie or magician that we can rub the right way or expect to do tricks for us in order to give us what we want like spoiled children.

Many times people follow such doctrines because they are fearful that it might be true.  They don’t know enough about the Christian faith or even faith itself to recognize that those teachings are false and actually take them further away from truth instead of closer to Him.

Let’s talk about faith in this lesson and I hope that you will come away with a much better understanding of it.  I recommend that your read “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis as chapters 11 and 12 are the inspirations for this lesson.

What is Faith

The word faith means basically belief.  In regards to Christianity it means to accept as true the claims of Christianity.  Now this is interesting because we must ask ourselves, “How does one get to accept the claims of Christianity?”  How does one come to believe the Christian claims and therefore the Christian faith?  Well we must consider that belief is based on fact or evidence.  There is no reason why anyone should believe what their minds tells him is not probable.  It is unreasonable to expect someone to believe something if her mind tells her something else.  So faith in a raw sense is based on examination and analysis of the evidence.  Faith is indeed founded upon fact.

This is very important because Christians are not or should not be blindly following claims presented to them.  Christians are Christians because they genuinely believe the claims of the Christian faith.

Challenges of Faith

However, there is more to faith than merely believing.  I mean this in terms of practical life and practicing the Christian way.  There are always those moments when you wish certain Christian virtues were nonexistent.  There are always going to be those times when you wish that being bad was OK or justified.  The issue here is mood swings.  Our faith is constantly challenged by mood swings, i.e., emotions and the like.

Faith is not merely a mental ascent.  One does not come to believe in Christ and that is all there is to it.  Faith has to be fed so that we could stay on the right path.  People drift away from the Christian way because they do not feed their faith.  What do I mean by feeding our faith?  I simply mean that we have to participate in activities where we are constantly reminded of what we believe and perhaps even why.  This is why church attendance, Bible readings, daily prayers, and fellowships are so important.  They keep the Christian way in front of you consistently.

You are less likely to drift away if something is constantly reminding you or indicating where you are in your faith.  Imagine that you are driving down a road with no markings.  There were no yellow center markings and no individual lane markings.  You could easily drift to the left or to the right because you have nothing to indicate where you are.  However, if there were line markings then you could notice almost immediately when you are drifting off course.  We need to hear things like, “do not steal, do not lie, and love thy neighbor as thyself” else we will drift from those Christian ideas.

So these mood swings that cause us to drift are a major threat to our faith and few people are aware of that.  People drift from the Christian way over a period of time and rarely do they drift due to some re-evaluation of the evidence.  Life experiences cause them to slowly drift off course until their faith is effectively dead.

Let me explain how these mood swings are challenges to our faith.  First consider the following scripture.

James 2:14-20 (NKJV) -- {14} What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? {15} If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, {16} and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? {17} Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. {18} But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. {19} You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble! {20} But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead?

True faith consists of accompanying actions or works.  This is why we cannot say that we have faith in Christ and do not do what He says.  Now consider this example.  Suppose there is a young lady named, Sally who has a friend named, Bob who she knows cannot keep a secret.  He will tell everyone anything she says even if he promises to keep the secret.  She knows this about him and she trusts that he will not keep a secret.  However, one evening while they are alone and they have experienced a great night out on the town and the mood changes Sally finds herself thinking, “Perhaps this time he’ll keep my secret.”  Sally tells Bob the secret and he of course tells everyone else her secret.  She believed that this many would do what he did, but at the same time her mood changed and challenged that faith causing her to act outside of faith.

The same applies to our faith in the claims of Christianity.  Sometimes our moods can cause us to doubt or ignore the faith that we already have.

Of course there are other challenges to our faith such as false teachings and others trying to present evidence that should point to another answer besides Christianity.  Those are left for another discussion though.

The Great Discovery

We would like to believe that we can bargain with God.  We would like to believe that we can earn God’s approval and thus salvation.  This is probably why many people believe that God life is like an exam from God.  If we do enough good deeds then we will make it into heaven.  Of course we would like for God to ignore the bad things we do and site things such as forgiveness and grace to justify that idea.

However, the interesting here is that all that we have and can do ultimately comes from God.

Psalm 24:1 (NKJV) -- {1} The earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness, The world and those who dwell therein.

There is nothing that we can give God or do for God that doesn’t come from Him anyway.  Our ability to even believe comes from God.  So we have the following points.

1. We cannot bargain with God for salvation
2. We ultimately have nothing to offer God for salvation or anything else.

We find that the more we try to save ourselves that the more we fail.  The more we try to be good the more we fail.  Even if we could get to a state of goodness we would find that we have only succeeded in giving God what already belongs to Him anyway so again we have done nothing.

The great discovery is that we find that we have nothing and can do nothing without God.

John 15:5 (NKJV) -- {5} “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.

Again we come to discover that we have nothing to offer God in any way.  All that we could possibly give Him already belongs to Him.  All that we could possibly do for Him is because of Him anyway.  Here we must leave it to God.  That means that we have to put all of our trust in Christ.  We have to trust that one day Christ will make us sons of God and be like Him.

To trust Christ also means to do what He says to do.  We do these things because we are saved and not in order to get saved or to make it to heaven as a reward.

The Implications of This Discovery

This is something that I have contemplated for many years.  People argue such things as once saved and always saved.  However, I don’t think it is so simple.  Salvation does not appear to be a one moment event, but a process (See 2 Timothy 2:11-13 for example).

This discovery causes you to change your entire outlook on salvation, heaven, and the Christian way.  It’s like your eyes are opened and you can see clearer.  You will find yourself between two groups of Christianity who dispute the roles of works and faith.

The first group says the following.

1. Good actions are all that matters
2. The best good action is charity
3. The best kind of charity is giving money
4. The best thing to give money to is the church
5. So give an abundance and the church will see to it that you get to heaven and are rewarded

The problem with this is that it presupposes that heaven can be bought, which it cannot.  Giving to a church is a good thing, but it is not a ticket into heaven.

The second group says the following.

1. Faith is all that matters
2. It doesn’t matter what you do so go ahead and sin all you want

The problem here is that you cannot have faith (trust) in Christ without following what Christ says.  Obedience follows trust.  For example, you trust your doctor so you do what he says.

The Revelation of Faith

Philippians 2:12-13 (NKJV) -- {12} Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; {13} for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.

The first part of the above scripture looks as though it was all on us.  However, the second part looks like it is all on God.  This is one of the mysteries of faith.  Remember that we are trying to understand something as it relates to God, who is infinite.  In reality we kind of work together.  It is not as if God does His part and we do our part.  It is more complex than that because of the infinite nature of God.  Human words cannot fully explain the true nature of faith and how it operates in our lives in regards to works.

However, we can come to the point in our life where we realize that we have nothing to offer.  We cannot earn salvation.  We cannot bargain with God to become accepted.  We cannot do enough good deeds to be saved.  It is all on God, but yet we play a part in the process.  Truly faith without works is dead and truly we have to work out our own salvation.  However, even in all that we find that it is God working in us anyway.  So we are back where we started, which is with nothing.

We thank God for salvation and we thank God for the gift of Jesus Christ through whom we can be saved.  Stop trying to earn salvation.  However, don’t stop trying to follow the Christian way.  Remember though that good works follow faith not the other way around.  Amen.