Faith Needs Works
We tend to run straight toward asking God to provide via a miraculous divine intervention, but we often forget that we are God’s representatives on Earth. We are His deus ex machina. We are called to be an unexpected power to save others from a potentially hopeless situation. Think about this: if God just did everything by His divine intervention, what reason would we have to be on Earth?
Now, before you assume anything, make sure to stick around, because I promise that I’m not writing things that are unbiblical when I say this, even though it sounds controversial.
We all know that we are saved by grace through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ who was fully God and fully man, lived a perfect life on Earth, and sacrificed himself on the cross so that we could be free of sin. The Bible is pretty clear on that. And let me be clear: works cannot save you. But what I’m getting at is how our faith should manifest itself in the everyday lives we have.
We often talk about Christians showing good fruit, and how Christians who aren’t showing the good fruit of the Spirit need to check their lives and relationship with Christ because something’s gone wrong in their faith, and that’s very much the truth, but having good works is just as important as being patient, kind, gentle, having self control, etc. See, after we’ve accepted the gift of salvation given to us, we don’t get to just relax in our little bubble of Christians where we practice patience and goodness and peace. We have an obligation to God to do as He calls us to do.
James challenges his readers to change the way they thought about their faith. James 2: 14-17 says, “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothes and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,’ but you don’t give them what the body needs, what good is it? In the same way faith, if it doesn’t have works, is dead by itself.”
Based on verses 15-16, I presume that the people James wrote to had the same problem a lot of us have today: they liked to pray about everything, but never do anything about it. Think about it. How many of us pray about the homeless person we see walking down the street every day, but never stop to give him food? How many of us hear from a neighbor who’s struggling to pay their bills but don’t think about loaning or giving him some of our spare cash until he can find a new job?
I think some of this faulty faith we have stems from our belief that God will step in and take care of things deus ex machina style. We tend to run straight toward asking God to provide via a miraculous divine intervention, but we often forget that we are God’s representatives on Earth. We are His deus ex machina. We are called to be an unexpected power to save others from a potentially hopeless situation. Think about this: if God just did everything by His divine intervention, what reason would we have to be on Earth?
That’s why we are called to have faith with works. It’s really easy to say you believe in God and you believe that he will take care of you, but I think we can all agree it’s a lot harder to act that out. It’s difficult when you see someone unable to afford the groceries they need, and you feel God telling you to step in and pay for them, but you know that you don’t have any money to spare for the month. That’s why we have phrases like “put your money where your mouth is,” and “actions speak louder than words.”
The good news is twofold. The first part is that God comes through when we exercise our faith. Remember Abraham? I hope so because James certainly did in James 2: 20-23, “Foolish man! Are you willing to learn that faith without works is useless? Wasn’t Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? You see that faith was active together with his works, and by works, faith was perfected. So the Scripture was fulfilled that says, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness, and he was called God’s friend.”
In Genesis 22, after Abraham proves he is willing to sacrifice his only son for God, God promises that the descendants of Abraham will be numerous and a blessing to the world, and man oh man did he come through with that promise. And, in fact, one of Abraham’s descendants became the greatest blessing the world has ever seen: Jesus.
The second part of the good news about faith is that it works like a muscle: the more we exercise it, the stronger it gets. Exercising your faith is like the trust we have in all things, but I’ll adapt the age-old chair example. You can’t know a chair will hold you up until you sit on it, but once you do, you’re quicker to believe it will hold you each subsequent time you sit down.
When we give away our last bit of money to help someone in need and see that God takes care of our needs afterwards, we become quicker to do something similar the next time, and quicker again the next because we have experienced God following through on His promises.
That’s what works is, and that’s why it’s important. Since we’re called to be God’s representatives on Earth, it’s so very important that we exercise our faith via works because that’s how the faithless see God. It helps set us apart so that we can show who God is, how He works, and that He truly does take care of those who believe in Him. When we don’t exercise our faith through works, all we’re doing is spouting hot air.
Finally, just to get you thinking a little bit, let’s go back to the chair. See, a lot of us are really quick to say we believe the chair will hold us. And we’re free to do that as much as we want. But the fact of the matter is, you don’t really believe the chair will hold you up if you refuse to sit on it. In the same way, we must question our faith: If you say that you have faith in God until you’re blue in the face but refuse to step out and exercise your faith, do you really have faith in God? And since we are saved by grace through faith in Christ, the question then becomes: are you truly saved?
Finally, if you want a song reference for what I’m getting at, check out these two down below! These guys are great artists and they tell a wonderful message.
Unique Positioning
When one part of the body of Christ has to do the job of two parts, it makes the whole body less effective. That means we’re reaching fewer people when parts of the body aren’t evangelizing in their mission field. So step up. Pick up your briefcase, or grab your screwdriver and go to work, using what you have in your unique position to adhere to the calling of Christ.
It’s likely that you are very aware that you are a unique human being, an individual. We’re all members of the human race, but for each person, there is something that sets you apart from the other 9 billion members. Even identical twins have differences that serve to identify them as unique.
Similarly, though all Christians are part of the body of Christ, and we are all called to fulfill the great commission to make disciples of all nations, we’re not all called to do that in the same way. Even those who are called to the same positions within the church (pastors, worship leaders, teachers) there are differences that make you unique in your fulfillment of Matthew 28:19.
God did this on purpose. 1 Corinthians 12:14-20 says, “So the body is not one part but many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I’m not a hand, I don’t belong to the body,’ in spite of this it still belongs to the body. And if the ear should say, ‘Because I’m not an eye, I don’t belong to the body,’ in spite of this it still belongs to the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But now God has placed each one of the parts in one body just as He wanted. And if they were all the same part, where would the body be? Now there are many parts, yet one body.”
Cleverly, God designed the human body very specifically. Every part of it is unique. Every part is necessary. And every part has to do its job to keep the body functioning at 100 percent. Even though you have two eyes, the inch or two that separates one from the other is enough that they each see the world from a slightly different perspective, even to the point that your right eye can see things your left can’t, and vice versa.
Here’s where I get to the point. There are two parts of being unique in your function as a Christian: your function, which is your job as a pastor, worship leader, teacher, etc., and your positioning, which is where you are at any given moment. Together, these two parts serve to identify your unique fulfillment of the calling to make disciples.
So, let’s break it down. The first step is to determine your function, or your spiritual gift, as it were. Each Christian has one or more spiritual gifts they are given by God through the Spirit to advance the kingdom, and they often point to how you serve in the church. Some are gifted knowledge and wisdom, so they teach; some are gifted the ability to manage, so they lead; some are gifted especially strong empathy, so they encourage. 1 Peter 4:10 says, “Based on the gift one has received, use it to serve others, as good managers of the varied grace of God.”
The second part is, arguably, the hardest part to live out because I think we often get the calling to serve wrong. I think we’ve come to this belief that only pastors or teachers can spread the gospel, that only missionaries can go out to the mission field and show Christ to others, that you have to be one or the other to evangelize.
But I think what we fail to realize sometimes is that you are where you are because that’s where God wants you. He doesn’t want an engineer to go to seminary school and learn to be a pastor so he can make disciples. He doesn’t want a scientist to leave her research field and run off to a foreign country to spread the Gospel. He wants you to show Christ to others right where you are.
Joel 3:10 says, “Beat your plows into swords and your pruning knives into spears. Let even the weakling say, ‘I am a warrior.’” See, in this verse, God doesn’t tell the gardener to go join the military. He doesn’t say to the shepherd, “Learn to shoot a bow and throw a spear.” He tells each one, “I have given you what you need for where you are. Shape it into a weapon to fight the good fight.”
In other words, you are uniquely positioned right where you are to advance the kingdom of God, so stay there, because that’s your mission field. You are necessary to the body of Christ right where you are in your everyday life. That’s why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:21-22, “So the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ Or again, the head can’t say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’" But even more, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are necessary.”
Sure, maybe a pastor can preach to 300 or more people a week in his church, and maybe TobyMac can reach 80,000 people at each of his concerts, but you are just as important. Taking it back to our body metaphor, in a pinch, the right arm can do the work of both arms if it has to, though it will never be able to reach across the body to the same distance the left arm could. (Try it. Reach your right arm across your chest. It just can’t get to where your left arm could.) But it wasn’t designed to. The left arm was designed to do the work of the left arm because only it can reach far enough away from the body. In the same way, a pastor could step out and do what an encourager/helper was designed to do, but he wasn’t designed to.
When one part of the body of Christ has to do the job of two parts, it makes the whole body less effective. That means we’re reaching fewer people when parts of the body aren’t evangelizing in their mission field. So step up. Pick up your briefcase, or grab your screwdriver and go to work, using what you have in your unique position to adhere to the calling of Christ. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 28:19.
Love is Sacrifice
For King and Country’s “The Proof of Your Love” is a quintessential contemporary Christian song detailing Christ’s love and how we’re supposed to follow up on that in a world that desperately needs to experience it because we’ve all been thinking of love all wrong.
For King and Country’s “The Proof of Your Love” is a quintessential contemporary Christian song detailing Christ’s love and how we’re supposed to follow up on that in a world that desperately needs to experience it because we’ve all been thinking of love all wrong.
Take your favorite RomCom or other romance and picture the relationship between the two lovers. What brought them together? What binds them together? Would their relationship last outside the confines of the screen or book?
Now, my experience with romances is fairly limited, but from what I’ve read and watched, I’d say the chances are pretty slim. We have this misconstrued vision of love. This vision has come about through a combination of faulty views on what love is and how relationships work. We’ve been influenced by fiction stories and movies, and also, I think, by our society’s lack of openness about love in our relationships.
Let’s take a look at your classic movie relationship: the lovers often come together via a hardship experienced by one of the two. The other attempts to help them through it, to fix them, and they eventually catch feelings for each other and get together.
When people talk to others about how they “fell in love” with their significant other, the phrase “we just had a connection” is used fairly frequently. And maybe they did, but that’s not how love works. But that somewhat harmless phrase has been perpetuated and misunderstood as it has been conveyed through our societies, and now we have a bunch of people searching for a connection that, frankly, they’re never going to find.
We’ve got this definition of love as a feeling, an emotion, a connection, a noun. It’s the butterflies in your stomach when you see someone attractive or connect with someone on a deeper level, but that’s just not it. Those feelings are nice, valuable, wonderful, but they’re just that: feelings. Love? Well, love is a verb.
So, if love is a verb, an action, and not a noun, a feeling, then how does it work? Well, let’s go to the best example of love there ever was: Christ. He died. He sacrificed his life for us. It wasn’t selfish. It wasn’t for him to boast about his actions. It wasn’t prideful. It was done with a heart that desired the best for us.
It’s oft used, but John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” God the Son sacrificed Himself for us. That’s what love is. It’s sacrifice.
You see, the thing we call love now can’t be love because it’s selfish. It’s “loving” someone because you get nice feelings from them. That’s about what you want. But love is about what others need, desire, want. Love is laying down your life, and I don’t mean dying, for someone else. I mean choosing to serve and take care of the person you love before you take care of yourself. It’s setting aside yourself for the sake of another. John 15:13 says “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
Love doesn’t rely on feelings, either. It’s a choice. Why? Because if we are to love like Christ loved us (John 15:12), our love must be unconditional because Christ’s love is unconditional. He does not love us more or less when we make mistakes. So, too, when those we love make mistakes, we should not love them more or less.
I’ll leave y’all with this pure definition of love from 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 “Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not conceited, does not act improperly, is not selfish, is not provoked, and does not keep a record of wrongs. Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Don’t feel love. Do love.