About Jesus - Steve Sweetman Productive
Faith I maintain that
Biblical faith in Jesus is ultimately trusting Him with our lives.
Trust, by its very nature, is a passive action.
Other than our deliberate initial decision to trust Jesus, which is
an active action on our part, the goal of that decision is to rest in the
assurance that we can trust Jesus. I
have come to this conclusion, at least in part, because the Greek words
that are translated in our English New Testament as faith and believe mean
trust, and trust is passive. Does
this suggest we are to be inactive Christian couch potatoes?
Doesn't the Bible tell us to be actively involved in doing good
works? In Biblical terms,
genuine passive faith will produce genuine active works.
If you trust Jesus with your life, you have the confidence to do
what He requires. If you
struggle with trusting Jesus with your life you will struggle at doing
what He requires. Struggling
with trust either disables you from doing good works or motivates you to
do them in your
own human strength. Both are
counter-productive to what Jesus requires. James 2:14 through
18 says something about this. "What good is
it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not
have works? Can such 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, stay warm, and be well fed,' 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.'" According to this
passage, genuine faith or trust in Jesus, produces genuine good works.
To the degree, then, you trust Jesus with your life, is the degree
to which you will actively do good works that are productive in
accomplishing God's will. Despite the
thinking of many that the apostle Paul and James differed on the matter of
faith and works, Paul agreed with James as seen in Ephesians 2:10. "For we are
his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God
prepared ahead of time for us to do." As new creations in
Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17 and
Galatians 6:15) we have been created to do good works.
The only stipulation is that our good works originate from a
faithful, trusting, relationship with Jesus, and not from our own human effort
(Galatians 3:3).
Faith in Jesus is the passive action of resting and being secure in your relationship with Him. Only then will you possess the God-given confidence needed to actively do the good works He requires. In human terms, a good night of rest will produce a good day of work. In Biblical terms, a good life of rest in Jesus will produce a good life of works.
Genuine faith will produce genuine works.
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