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Faith For Salvation The essential aspect of faith for a Christian is without doubt the promise of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God and consubstantial with the Father, promised from the earliest parts of the Old Testament and fulfilled in the environs of Jerusalem some 2000 years ago. This is the essence of what every Christian believes and accepts, and what, in its briefest form, it is to be a Christian. Now, the effect of that on different lives varies substantially, so that we get an almost continuous variation in degree of lived Christianity all the way from “completely committed” to “nominal”. The question then is: why is there such variation? Faith and Trust We all believe in Jesus the Christ as the one who will, without doubt, secure salvation for all who accept him as Lord. But do we? Without doubt? Well, evidently not all. Every one of us, for example, probably knows people who have considerable fear of death. How is that? One cannot believe the foregoing and still fear death – the mode of dying, perhaps, since none of us like to envisage the possibility of a painful death, but how can we fear death itself? In the Christian calendar death is the first day of life – new life, the life we all look forward to with the greatest of all possible anticipation. So how can any real Christian fear death? Two Possible Answers There would seem to be only two logically possible answers to that for those who claim to be Christians: either some people have an almost complete inability to visualise anything approaching the reality of life in heaven with The Trinity and are tied into some earthly concept which they cannot free from this present life; or, despite whatever they claim, and quite possibly believe, they are not actually living lives of faith at all. Given all the books available, the often heroic lives of well known past Christians, and the multitude of sermons preached on the subject every year, it would seem almost impossible to do anything about those in the first category. Indeed, the only solution would seem to be that which applies to those in the second category. Now, one might suspect that those in the second category far outnumber those in the first. In other words, those who claim to be living in faith but are not living in faith at all. The Essence Of Living In Faith So what does it mean to live in faith? A secular dictionary might define faith as an unshakeable conviction in an unseen deity. Fine! But Christians have a much better (albeit only one explicit) definition in the Bible at Hebrews 11.1: Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (NIV). No one knows who actually wrote that, but Paul gives it substantial underpinning in (many places but none more so than) Romans 4. 17 saying that he is the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being what does not exist. (NAB) Consider these scriptures carefully because they define the kind of life we all ought to be leading. It is one thing to apply Heb 11.1 to the hope of salvation – yet that is where it ends, but not where it begins! It begins right here and now because we hope for all kinds of things every day, and if our lives are truly lives of faith we should be relying on the Lord for every one of them. After all, he is, as Paul tells us, the God who… calls into being what does not exist. Relying On God, Not Ourselves Most certainly, God expects us to do what is required of us in any given circumstance, but that does not, and should not prevent us from committing a thing to him first – and then relying on him to work through us and for us in bringing it about, even if there are things we contribute towards its successful outcome. And sometimes this will mean waiting for him to move first. And that does mean waiting. It is not living in faith to ask God to do something and then to do it oneself! Let’s try to make the matter clearer, because there are many different kinds of situations. One type involves us in seemingly doing everything. So one might ask the Lord to keep one safe before, for example, setting off to drive to some destination: we have to do the driving and we have to take all reasonable care in doing it, but we still trust the Lord for a safe arrival, and even freedom from the carelessness or bad driving of others. Another kind of circumstance involves us in doing something but trusting God to secure an outcome which we cannot guarantee. We might think of applying for a new job, or changing the car. We cannot determine a specific outcome to a job interview, nor that a car we buy will be safe and reliable. In these situations, before we do anything else, we should put the matter in the Lord’s hands. This might even mean asking if this course of action is in his will for us (as Paul advises in Romans 12. 2). If we sense that it is, then we commit the whole process to him – and that means accepting the outcome whether or not it is what we desired. This is always an inseparable part of the life of faith. The third kind of situation is where we have no control whatsoever over the outcome. That is the case we are all in where salvation is concerned. We believe in the Lord, in his promises but, as even Paul himself acknowledged, (1Corinthians 9. 27; Philippians 3. 12 – 14) we have not yet attained salvation. But we have faith that we shall. So in life generally, there are many occasions when we face circumstances where we cannot guarantee the outcome. Then we have no choice but to rely on God: healing of an illness beyond the range of medical science is an obvious example. Trust Is A Must For cases such as these we have no choice but to trust God because we can do absolutely nothing to secure the outcome. However, the more general problem for us is to ensure that our faith is true faith i.e. where our faith cannot be divorced from expectancy. If that is where we are concerning our own salvation, it will be that much easier to apply our faith to the general run of difficulties we encounter in life. Then we are not among those who secretly grit their teeth every time they think of death. Rather, because we trust, we really are people of faith.
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