Faith or Works

How are we saved? We are saved by grace alone, through our faith in Jesus Christ. But what comes out of our faith? Shouldn’t it be works?

If we start with works and try to earn our righteousness, we won’t get there. We cannot earn salvation. However, if we have faith, works should come out of that.

I think most people reading this probably know these things. You’ve probably heard a sermon, read a devotion on it, etc. But do we live that way? Do we live in a way that is trying to work on all the individual things in our lives, to clean them up one by one, to do the good things we are supposed to?

Alternatively, we can focus on growing our faith. On accepting the gift given to us and let the good works come naturally as a result of that.

The youth group at our church recently read in Romans 12 which lists many snippets on how we should be living “love must be sincere…be joyful in hope…share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality…live in harmony with one another…do not be conceited…” and many more.

We could use this as a checkbox of good works to make sure that we are doing the right things to show our salvation. But that doesn’t address our hearts. If we need a checklist to make sure we are loving one another, we need to go back and look at our hearts. What we talked about in class was to pray to have our hearts changed so that living this way would come naturally out of the overflow of our hearts. And I think this relates to the faith vs works question.

If our faith is sincere, our hearts are changed, and the result of that is good works.

A checklist can be a good way for you to ask yourself – am I living as one whose heart has been changed – but I don’t think it is good to be living our lives based off of a checklist. It focuses you more on the tasks rather than the effects of what you are doing or the purpose behind it.

So maybe ask yourself if you are doing these good things, or avoiding the bad, but if you aren’t meeting the things on that list, don’t place your focus there. Instead, pray for God to change your heart and you should start to see that happen more and more.