9) Faith Again: Conclusion

Faith is the motivation for good deeds.  With that in mind, we might do well to return to James with a moderated eye, able, now that we have gone digging through the rest of the Bible, to decide what he very probably meant.  By saying, “Faith without deeds is dead,” he is usually taken to mean, “You had better do good deeds, or your faith will die.”  There may in fact be truth to this statement, but nevertheless it is so vulnerable to misinterpretations that it ought to be re-directed with proper emphasis.  In light of the preceding arguments, James can be taken to be saying, “There is no such thing as a faith in Jesus Christ which does not motivate you to do good deeds.”

There is a certain beauty to this re-direction, for it really allows us to affirm salvation as an undeserved grace and also the pertinence of good deeds in the New Life of the Christian.  If you say you have faith in Jesus Christ, and yet you are not motivated whatsoever to lift a finger for a brother or make a sacrifice for a friend, you are probably kidding yourself.  If you say you had better do good works or be damned, you’ve gone too far.  You need to be saved because you can’t do any good works; or at least, not anything that can overturn the nasty things you have already done, and definitely nothing which warrants being welcomed into Perfection.  It is by grace through faith that we are saved not only from the penalty of moral imperfection but also its power; we are slowly but surely being made more perfect through faith.

From a purely practical standpoint, one who believes that something is true also acts like that something is true.  You do not very often find someone walking about in broad daylight who truly believes that the apocalypse is going to begin in a few minutes, for the one who believes this will probably be found holed up in his house.  If you did indeed find someone on the street who claimed to believe this, you would have every right to doubt the strength of their belief.  So it is with Christianity.  If you believe that Jesus is the Christ – if you truly believe it – you will find yourself acting like it as time goes on.  If you resolve to follow Christ’s commands out of no conceivable motivation, pretty soon you’ll find yourself believing His truth-claims about religion and about Himself.  There is hardly any distinction between these two statements.  Neither precludes the other.  If indeed belief is true, action follows (or begins to follow) at that same moment, and vice-versa.  Faith contains both and unites both; you cannot have it with only one or the other.  It compels one to practice what they preach.  It is the method by which man imitates the practice and trusts himself to the preaching of Christ.