What is faith? What is grace? We hear these words a lot in Christianity. Sometimes they are used correctly, but often, they are used a little bit wrongly. If you had asked me to define those words as a teenager, I would have told you faith meant believing. I would still say that today, though now I would flesh it out more. As for grace, I think the best I could have come up with was the acronym: God's Righteousness At Christ's Expense. I had a good working knowledge of the Bible. I loved the Lord. I had been saved since I was five years old. I deeply grasped and could well explain salvation. But beyond that, I really didn't know what grace was.
The word faith is often used to just mean religion. A set of beliefs. That is a legitimate definition of the word, but certainly not the entirety of all that faith encompasses. Grace is often very misused. Some people use it to mean that God has to excuse their poor choices. Obviously, this isn't biblical, since the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 6:1-2a, What shall we say? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid! As believers, we have a new nature, and shouldn't "want" to sin. We still do sometimes, but it doesn't give us the pleasure it gives unbelievers. We have the Holy Spirit to help us want to do what is right. We have these two natures at war inside of us, and it will be a daily battle until we get to Heaven. I sometimes get discouraged with this. But we shouldn't! There is great encouragement for us as we live out our Christian lives.
Faith and Grace go hand in hand, and we can't understand one without the other. God longs to give grace--forgiveness, redemption, comfort, strength to endure, power in our lives. The means by which we grab hold of that grace is through faith. I've said this before, but faith is like a fork. A fork doesn't nourish your body, but it is the means by which you grab hold onto what does nourish you. In the same way, faith doesn't save you, but it is the means by which you grab hold of the salvation Christ made possible. When you put your faith in the finished work of Christ, He gives you that grace--salvation, forgiveness, eternal life, and a whole new relationship with God. This is how it works for becoming a Christian, and it is also how it works in our daily lives. We are not only saved by faith, but we live by faith. The just shall live by faith. (Romans 1:17, Galatians 3:11, Hebrews 10:38--if it's stated that many different places in the Bible, we'd better pay attention!). The result of that faith is God's grace on our lives.
Lets look at it this way. You believe in God. You believe the Bible is true. You have staked your eternal destiny on the claims of Christianity. That is saving faith. But it's also only the beginning. In your daily life, you can still wake up every morning without really giving God a lot of thought or consideration. Things happen throughout your day, and you draw no connection between what is happening in your life and what God is doing in the eternal realm. You make choices by your own understanding. Not bad choices. Just your own, without seeking God out. You read the Bible as a guidebook of truth, but you don't seek it desperately for answers to your life's circumstances. You don't really hear the Holy Spirit's inner promptings. As long as you avoid sin, you're okay. That is a very one-dimensional way to live. It doesn't look like the life of faith that should characterize a believer.
Every aspect of our lives should be lived by faith. When you do what you truly believe God has led you to do, He honors that. In fact, Paul wrote in Romans 14:23 ...for whatsoever is not of faith is sin. This means that if you do something that is out of line with what you believe God wants you to do--even if it isn't sinful in and of itself--becomes a sin for you. A biblical example of this was Jonah. He was commanded by God to go speak to the people of Nineveh. He completely disobeyed God's direction, and got on a ship going the other way! Is it a sin to get on a ship headed away from Nineveh? No, of course not! But it was a sin for Jonah, because he was acting against what God had specifically told him to do. There is so much more to life than just avoiding things the Bible calls sin. It's about that faith, doing what He has led you to do every day.
A man I greatly respect is Andrew Farley. He is a pastor in Lubbock, Texas, and the author of the book Twisted Scripture. I highly recommend this book. However, there is one aspect of it that I disagree with. He takes the position that if you have a choice to make, just make the best decision you can, and whatever you choose becomes God's will for you, and He meets you on the other side of that decision. Maybe I'm just putting a finer point on it than Andrew Farley does, but I would like to think of God going through the decision with you, not simply meeting you on the other side. Psalm 32:8 says, I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you. Part of making good decisions is making them in faith with what you believe God would have you do. Learning to hear God's voice is more valuable than learning to make good decisions (though you should learn both as you mature). If you make an error, God is bigger than that and can work it for His will, but that isn't an excuse to avoid seeking and obeying Him to begin with. In the Bible, many of God's people made choices of faith, and when they were wrong, God gently redirected them--like when the Apostle Paul tried to go to Asia, but the Holy Spirit sent him to Europe instead (Acts 16). Paul was acting in faith when he attempted to go to Asia, but he was slightly off in how God was leading. God honored his faithful heart, and redirected him to where he was supposed to go. On the other hand, we have Jonah, already mentioned, who acted in disobedience, and had to be disciplined before he got to do God's will (see the book of Jonah in the Old Testament).
One of the best passages in scripture about faith is Hebrews 11. The very first verse defines faith: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It is an abiding conviction that something is true, without seeing it. This passage goes on to list people in the Old Testament who had faith, and how they pleased God. By name, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, and Samuel are mentioned. By implication of events that happened, Joshua, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego and many other Old Testament believers are referenced. But when you start to look at the lives of these people in detail, you see the mistakes many of them made. Noah got drunk. Abraham and Sarah tried to fulfill God's promise in their own strength. Isaac played favorites with his sons. Jacob was a cheat and a polygamist. Joseph appears to have been a showoff and tattletale. Moses committed murder, and fled in fear. Rahab was a prostitute. Samson gave up his calling for a woman of another faith. David committed adultery and murder. We can read all of this in these people's stories in the Old Testament. And yet when we read Hebrews 11, we see that God commends them for their faith in Him. They had faith. They were persuaded that God was true, and that He had something in store for them--both in this life and in eternity--and they lived by that. God, in turn, used them, and extended His grace to them--grace that washed away their sins in this New Testament passage. I especially notice what is said about Moses in verse 27: By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. Moses is credited as having acted in faith when he left Egypt, whereas when you read the account in Exodus, you can see that he was fleeing the consequences of his murder. Inside all of that, Moses believed God, and aligned himself with God's people, and God honored that faith, in spite of Moses' very human mistakes. He did that with all of these people, and He does it with us. Faith in God brings salvation. Faith in God unleashes His grace in our lives daily.
What is God telling you? Act on it today! After all, the just shall live by faith!
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