[AI translation] "We hold, therefore, that a man is justified by faith without the works of the law." (Rom 3:28) You must have felt, when I read these two words, how special they sound, standing side by side. As if one were saying the exact opposite of the other. And indeed, at first hearing, it does seem that one says this and the other says amar. But I have deliberately juxtaposed these two statements of the Bible in this way, because it is on the basis of these Scriptures that I would like to continue and supplement last Sunday's sermon.You may remember that last Sunday, the Apostle Paul was saying that he wants to show that our deeds, even the best, the purest, the most holy, are tainted with sin. And that by our works we can in no way stand before the judgment seat of God. In fact, as we hear and say so often in the communion liturgy, we believe and confess that we deserve punishment, death and damnation. So we are quite simply incapable of producing - however much we may pull ourselves together - something that is fully in keeping with the justice of God, the holiness of God. So by which we could be justified, made righteous before God. So says the Apostle Paul, "There is no one righteous man, so a man is justified by faith without the works of the law". Because he cannot fulfill the law, he is justified by faith in Jesus Christ without the works of the law. And behold, the apostle James seems to be saying the exact opposite when he says that a man is justified by works, and not by faith alone. Two contrary statements: which of them is true? Indeed, taking these two words out of context, one can contrast James and Paul. But if we look at these words in the spirit of the New Testament as a whole, we suddenly realise that this is not really the question.
So it is not a question of the primacy of faith or works, not of their importance for salvation. That is not the issue here, but something quite different. In both cases it is about what faith is: true faith or false faith, not true faith. Because everything turns on faith, and faith in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. There is no doubt about it. So if our faith is of such great importance for our salvation, for all eternal life, then it is really worth examining whether our faith is true or not true, but false. Because there are such things. There is therefore no doubt in James' or Paul's mind that it is only through faith in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, that we all become children of God, that is, people who have been forgiven of sin and partakers of eternal life, and that this is the work of God's grace alone. He works it in us and through us. It is not what we do or do not do, whether good or bad, that saves us, but only what Jesus did for us on Calvary and has continued to do for us ever since, through his Holy Spirit. So it is that He paid our debts, He paid our penalty, He earned for us our right to eternal life. It is in view of His merit that God can say to each of us, "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine" (Is 43:1).
So this is how God has had mercy on us, and this is grace; and this grace we do not have to earn, we do not have to earn it by some crucified good works, but this grace we simply have to accept, we can accept - by faith, through our faith. Indeed: it is precisely the acceptance of grace, precisely this faith! And so we receive God's saving grace through faith in Jesus the Saviour! So, once again, it is not our works that save us, but the works of God alone, and our faith is actually clinging to the works of God. It is in the merciful acts of God that he did on Good Friday and Easter, that he did in Jesus. And I could say that without that, our whole faith is worthless. For faith that is not directed towards this redeeming love of God, that is, faith that can ignore the redeeming love of Jesus, faith in God without it, quite simply deceives itself. Whoever believes that his sins have been forgiven him, but does not believe this because of the merit of Jesus, not because of the merit of Jesus' death, but because God must in some sense be a good God - Brothers and Sisters, if anyone believes this, he simply does not believe in a Christian way! It is not a Christian belief at all. So indeed the whole Christian faith turns on whether we can accept for ourselves what God has done for us in Jesus.
However - and here comes the big "but" - this faith must then be true faith, and Satan must not deceive us with a faith that is only a pretence, a substitute, an imitation of true faith, that is, a faith that is not true faith, but a false faith! What is false faith? Well, that is what the apostle James is talking about when he says that the faith that has no works is dead in itself. So the apostle James is not even calling faith that is not manifested in works a false faith, but an outright dead faith. Brothers and sisters, we all know very well - unfortunately, from our own experience - what a faith without works is like. A faith that can be heard but not seen. We know and profess with full conviction, for example, the great truths of the Sermon on the Mount, but we live as if we did not know them, or as if we denied them outright. We listen to the Word of God with joy and gladness, and say with full conviction at the table that we believe and confess, promise and receive - and then we almost quarrel with someone with the taste of communion wine in our mouths, or complain bitterly.
Someone said to me the other day, "I don't like to get to know a believer because I'm always afraid of being disappointed"! Well, so this is faith without works. Getting to know him, looking into the problems of everyday life and the way he relates to it, disappoints you in your life. So a false faith is a faith that is simply not justified in action. And that, as nice as it sounds in words, is not real faith, not real faith. It is dead faith, as the apostle James says. It resembles the living, just as a photograph can resemble a living person very much. It is said of a good photograph that it resembles it to the touch - only it does not speak. Of course, because he is not alive; he does not move, of course, because he is dead. Brothers and sisters, a man who professes his faith in Christ with full conviction and nourishes that faith with prayer, Bible reading, communion, but does not live it in practice, is like a man who sharpens a knife several times, constantly grinding it, but does not cut it. He boasts about it, shows it off, delights in it, but does not cut with it. You could put it in a display case. But faith is not a display case! Or it is like the man who tunes his violin to a great tune every day, but never plays it. What is the use of tuning the violin of our soul, no matter how precisely we tune its strings over and over again, if we do not let Jesus play on it the refreshing heavenly melodies of His love, His peace, His gentleness, His goodness?!
To this the apostle James says, "What is the use of a man saying he has faith, but not works? Such faith will not keep anyone for salvation, for eternity. For, brethren, true faith is not only an intellectual acceptance of the great truths of divine revelation, not only an assent to the great truths of the Bible. It is only that kind of intellectual faith, it is only that kind of head-faith. And in practice it is just as worthless as, in the example of James, it is worthless to say to a hungry man that it is not good to be hungry, to have an empty stomach, but to go out and eat well, eat, for otherwise there will be trouble from all the hunger! That does not mean that he will be well fed, however much I may say this to him with love and persuasion. So what is the use of such faith? The apostle says that such faith will not make our lives different, our hearts purer, our actions more Christlike. So do the devils believe! Yes, devils have theological knowledge, much more precise and much more accurate than we humans. But what good is it to them? They only fear God all the more because they then really know who God is!
So true faith means that the power of Jesus' death and resurrection grips me, penetrates me, works in me, moves me to action, moves me, makes me alive. Jesus, through faith in Him, creates something in the believer that was not there before, as if by a creative power. He moves him to acts of love that he was previously incapable of doing. In the believer, in the man who is truly a believer in Christ, new life must begin through faith. I once said that grace is nothing but the energy of God, redemption is nothing but the energy of God. Well, then, to believe in Jesus is to have this energy of God within us. So by faith, a person's life must necessarily be different than it was without faith! He is born again in the strictest sense of the word. The death and resurrection of Jesus cannot be seen as watching a play and then going out and leaving everything as it was. By faith, that is, by faith in Jesus, the power of Jesus' death and resurrection is as it were poured out in the believer. As divine energy, it is stretched out and moved to action, it is manifested in Christlike action, in new kinds of action.
To this the apostle says, "Show me your faith by your works! For it can be shown. And the faith that cannot be shown, that cannot be seen, is not true faith. True faith is an adherence, an ingrafting into the living Christ, as when the altar is adhered to and ingrafted into the tree and then lives on by his vitality. And whether it has taken hold of the altar is immediately clear from the fact that life has sprung up in it. Because then it will immediately begin to grow and after a while it will bear fruit, blossom and then bear fruit. Of course, there are also barren cuttings, which then dry up very quickly. Well, that's what dead faith is like. Our faith, Brethren, very soon we find out whether it is real faith or dead faith. It is simply betrayed by our actions, it is betrayed by our whole behaviour, just as a thermometer shows how hot it is or how cold it is. It is not our actions that earn us salvation - just as it is not the thermometer that makes us warm - our actions only show us whether our lives are involved in the energy of Jesus' death and resurrection, that is, whether we are true believers in Christ? Well, do we? Do we believe?
Through the words of James, God is now calling us to a kind of introspection! Show me your faith by your works. Let us not deceive ourselves, Brothers and Sisters, let us simply read the thermometer. True faith is immediately manifested in deeds, and in righteous and right deeds, according to God's will. Zacchaeus, for example, did not need to use fine words to prove that he too already believed in Jesus. Everyone who saw him was convinced. After all, the man who was stingy and heartless before is going through all those whom he has wronged and compensating them fourfold. He gives back four times what he has taken from them. Everyone can see that something really happened to this man. And it was something incomprehensible, something big. This man met Jesus, started to believe in Jesus, his whole life changed. Or, for example, a believer on the cross comes to one of the greatest, most difficult admissions of all: that he is suffering deservedly. So he deserves his fate! Do you know what a great thing it is, Brothers and Sisters, when someone can accept even the most cruel fate from the hand of God? This is also a sign of true faith. Or, for example, there is the Philippian jailer who may have been cruel to Paul himself, and then such a wonderful change happened in him. He turns to the apostle with such infinite tender love. He heats water for him, washes the blood from his hands and face, bandages him up, and in the strictest sense of the word, he could be likened to a Good Samaritan. What a change in a man's life! What has happened to him? He knew and accepted as his Lord the God who in Jesus had also stooped down to him, and who with the blood of Jesus had also bound up the wounds of his soul. Where such fruit, such visible signs of faith are lacking, it must be very much questioned whether there is any real faith in that heart!
So you see, brethren, that true faith and good works, works of the law, are not opposed to each other, but are one or the other side of the same thing. They cannot be separated from each other, for they are closely related. Faith is justified in the action of the good, and it is by faith that the action of the good is made possible. In a way, Brothers and Sisters, it is like a horse pulling a cart with two harnesses, one is faith and the other is the doing of good. Both must be equally taut. For if the horse pulls with only one, the carriage will not go, or at least not go well. He who only emphasizes faith and neglects good works sinks into dead orthodoxy, and he who only emphasizes works but neglects faith in Christ falls into the trap of self-righteousness or self-salvation. A faith from which no good works flow is undoubtedly a dream-pore, an opium; and he who expects everything from his good works, without faith in Christ, falls into moralism, and later into despair.
So the right balance is precisely the tension between these two, faith and good works. Let us never separate these two! Let it not be the case that when it comes to the things of God, the acts of God, this belongs to the realm of faith, but when it comes to the hammer or the spade or the spoon or the typewriter, that is, when it comes to the small acts of everyday life, this is independent of faith. For it is always in the double harness of faith and the good deeds that flow from it that we can really pull the cart of our lives. The wagon that contains our whole life. All our burdens and all our lives. Our religion, our family, our politics, our conduct, our salvation.
Let us believe as if everything depends on our faith in Jesus, and let us act as if everything depends on our obedience to Jesus. And out of that comes what God really expects of us: obedience in faith. So let us all pray now:
Give me the strength of your spirit to understand and love
My appointed way and all thy commandments.
Leave me one desire: that I may hear and follow
Your holy justice, your holy truth.
(Canticle 512, verse 2)
Amen
Date: 22 June 1969.