Faith And Good Works What does it Mean to us this Christmas?

Part 1

This is the first part in what I hope to be several posts over this advent season.  This all started when I started reading a series of messages from Martin Luther on advent so I decided to take down my thoughts on those messages and turn them into a series of blog posts.  In so doing, I realized I probably needed to divide it into parts and which is what I am doing.

Faith

The Gospel not only encourages faith, but it demands faith; we see the coming of Christ, and no one can receive or accept Him except those who believe He is who the Scripture portrays Him to be. God in the flesh who is truly God and truly man. All those who receive and believe in Christ are saved. When Christ rode into Jerusalem, he came on a donkey and animal of peace that was used to bear the burdens of people and used to work to help people. Jesus did not come to instill fear into people, He did not come to crush us, but He came to help us and carry our burden. The King of Kings came meek and lowly.

Even when Jesus rode into Jerusalem that day, there was no terror or fear; people spread their garments on the ground, and they cut tree branches and spread them along the way. Christ came in peace, showing grace and mercy to bear the burden we could not bear. When Christ comes, he quotes the words of the prophets Isaiah “Behold, the LORD has proclaimed to the end of the earth:

Say to the daughter of Zion,

“Behold, your salvation comes;

behold, his reward is with him,

and his recompense before him.”

(Isaiah 62:11 ESV) and of Zechariah “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9 ESV) We are tenderly invited to receive Christ, and He testifies of himself. In these verses, we have Christ revealed to us, and we must believe in Him.

The verse says, “Say to the daughter of Zion,” the point being there is now a new sermon to proclaim, and that message is what follows in the verse concerning Christ, and anyone who proclaims anything different is a deceiver. This is why Paul tells us in Romans 1:2, “which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures,” (Romans 1:2 ESV). The Gospel is a sermon from Christ, centered around Christ, calling us to faith in Christ.

However, there are two kinds of faith. There is a faith in which you believe that Christ is as He is described in the gospels, but you do not believe that he is that man for you; he is that man for others, but you do not believe He is the savior for you. This faith amounts to nothing; it does not save, and it does not receive Christ, and it never enjoys Him. This, in fact, is the same faith that the demons have. Unfortunately, many are in this camp due to the blasphemy of teachers who proclaim this worthless faith is all one needs to be a Christian. It is those that teach this kind of faith the Peter alluded to when he said, “But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction (2 Peter 2:1 ESV).

But there is a second kind of faith in which the verses describes as “the daughter of Zion,” and the rest of the verse is what is to be proclaimed about Christ if this is proclaimed, someone must hear it, to receive it and to treasure, these words in their heart and this is saving faith. He doesn’t command the daughter of Zion to believe that she has Christ, but instead, she is to believe it herself, and not to doubt it that is the essence of Christian faith, a faith the believes without wavering that Christ is indeed the Savior not to the disciples only not to the saints of the gospels only but that He is our personal savior. Our salvation does not depend on the fact that we believe in Christ to be the savior of the godly person but that Christ has come to us to be our savior and has become our savior.

This faith works in us to cause us to love the Lord and find joy in Him, for where this faith is, so is the Holy Spirit. Here is what we must understand this faith is a gift from God. You do not earn it; you do not find it, you are not looking for it, there is not a day that you wake up and suddenly have this faith. No, this faith comes to you; look at what Zechariah says “your king is coming to you” You do not come to him; no one comes to bring you to him; he is too far from you for you to get to him. With all of our effort and everything we do, we can never get to him, so we can never boast about how we came to the savior. We don’t find Jesus Jesus finds us. Our salvation from beginning to end is a gift from God.

The Scripture in its entirety and in these verses stands in stark contrast to free will. Any teaching that says salvation starts in us is false. We would never seek God, never come to God, never run after God, and we would never acquire the grace of God. Beware of any poisonous doctrine of the devil that proclaims salvation starts in us. Before anyone can even begin to cry out to God and seek him, God must first come to them and find them, as Paul declares, “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” (Romans 10:14–15 ESV) God comes first, He lays the foundation; if we ever seek him and pray to him, it is because he came to us first. If he is not present, we can never seek him; we could do nothing but sin.

So how can anyone ever be godly, and what does it mean when the scripture tells us that God has begun a good work in us? We do not work to be more godly; anything that we do is sin; in fact, we can do nothing but sin, do as you wish there is nothing that we can do apart from Christ that is not sin. It may seem good on the surface; it may even seem moral, but its root is always sin. So when we teach someone to pray or tell them something they must do to be saved, we are misleading them there is nothing we can give or do to be more godly or more spiritual; we can’t seek God’s grace unless he first stirs in our heart.

Some will then say, “so I sin out of necessity because I live without God, and he has not called me. I can’t avoid sin no matter what I do. Truly everything we do in our free will is sinful, and we can never please God. That is the point, as Martin Luther has put it, we are in bondage to our will. Listen, if we could ever out of our own free will do that which please God and somehow make out way to God on our own, why would Christ die? It would be foolish for him to die if he did not have to. The teaching that we can somehow work our way to God is a lie from hell and should be eradicated from Christianity. It is God who makes us godly, and it is God who takes the first step. The King comes to us and begins to work in us. The beginning of our salvation is the relinquishing of our work and the understanding that apart from Christ, we are a wretch in need of mercy, and we receive the King in faith, and we call out to Him alone for mercy. However, when we hear the Gospel and respond to it, that is not in our own power, but by the grace of God, that causes the Gospel to be fruitful in our heart, we understand that we are nothing and we offer nothing all we do is receive it. Do you see how few there are who truly receive Christ? This is why Christ wept over Jerusalem because they lacked faith.

It is not by virtue of our power of mind that the Gospel is preached to us, and we respond God must sned the messenger. Stop and think about what this means to those to whom God still had not sent a messenger of His Gospel and leaves a people in darkness and sin we should cry out how long, O Lord, will you allow them to suffer. There is no greater grace than where God sends the Gospel. Behold your King comes you do not seek him. You do not find him, he finds you, the preachers come from him, the sermons they preach come from him, your faith comes from him, and where he does not come, you remain outside, and where there is no gospel there is no God, only sin and damnation, free will exists there, but only to bring suffering, as people work and do all they can to live as they can. May we never ask how can we begin to be godly, there is no beginning except where King Jesus enters our life and proclaims that we are his.

He comes to you. It is not enough that he is your King, but He is our possession; he is ours. It is not enough that he saves us from the tyranny of sin, and death and hell, and is our King, but he offers himself freely to be our possession, and that whatever he is and has can be ours as he freely gives us all things.