We live by faith

[AI translation] If this well-known Word is to be understood in any way, it is first necessary to clarify what kind of faith it is that is covered by the faith by which, according to the apostle, the just man lives. Let me say at the outset that it is not just any faith that is at issue here - and it is not even faith as a spiritual function that is important here, as if there were some magical power, some animating force in faith itself - but what is more important is that something which man believes and the One in whom man believes! The faith of which the apostle speaks here is faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. So it is the faith by which man clings to God the Saviour. The essence of our faith, the Christian faith, is that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, our Saviour Lord!Christian faith is therefore not only faith in a divine power in general, but faith in the one true God who revealed Himself in Jesus of Nazareth. That is, faith in which a man comes to know the blessed, liberating truth that he has a Father in heaven, his sins are forgiven in the merit of Jesus' death, the gates of heaven are open to him through the power of Jesus' resurrection! It is faith, then, by which a man acknowledges and accepts the grace of redemption. Christian faith is the certainty that God lives and reigns and that I am His child, that Jesus Christ has adopted me, has accepted me and that I am His, both in life and in death.
Whoever believes this, whoever thus believes in God as Saviour, is a righteous man. The righteous man is not without sin, that is, he is not as one who is perfect, no longer having any defects, but one who has accepted God's redeeming grace by faith and who accepts it again and again. The righteous man is a justified man who, through faith in Christ, is himself ever more conformed to God. And this cannot happen once and for all, but in a lifelong process. That is why the apostle says that the righteous man lives by faith.
To live by faith is therefore to live a certain way of life, a certain lifestyle. To live by faith is to live as one whom Christ continually seeks to conform to himself and as one who continually seeks to conform to God in Christ. And it follows that our faith is not only involved in certain situations and problems of life, and has nothing to do with the rest of life, but it is our faith that determines our whole life, and it is our faith that shapes and develops our whole life. Let me try to explain this in more detail. In daily newspapers, in weekly or monthly magazines, it is customary to summarise the material published in different columns. There are economic, political, entertainment, sports, puzzles, theatre and so on. Quite a variety in the same newspaper, side by side. And rightly so. But it is not right if our lives are divided into such independent columns. Our problem is precisely that the spiritual life or the life of faith is only one particular column in our lives. It has nothing to do with the other aspects of our life: economic, political, financial, theatrical, sporting. This verse - "But the righteous man lives by faith" - means that there is only one area of the Christian life: the area of faith. It is faith that influences, dominates, ennobles, determines all the others. And this statement, that the true man lives by faith, is not only a statement of fact, but at the same time a task which the believer must carry out: that is, to live by faith, that is, that every manifestation of his life grows out of his faith, that is, that it is by faith that he lives.
It is not possible that there are things in our lives that we do by faith and things that we simply leave out of faith. Sometimes we want our faith to be functional, and other times we turn it off and put it aside. It's just as impossible as a vine living independently of the vine, or a fish living on after being lifted out of the water. Many times I have heard it said that faith must be turned off from this or that question. A young man once said that in the matter of engagement and marriage, it is not faith that has the decisive say, but love. And so his marriage succeeded! There are also people of faith who do not realise how much faith is left out of political issues. Or as a church trader once said: business and faith are two different things. Business is business, faith is going to church. We stumble at this, even though in practice we do it very often: we separate faith from certain events and occasions in our lives. For us, the spiritual life, the life of faith, is something that is a solemn addition to the life we live, something that is separate from the natural life. Like, for example, the dining car on a train, which can be connected to it and disconnected from it. It's good to have it on, but without it, the train is still a train. In a similar way, we also have a spiritual life, a life of faith, and in addition to this, and independently of this, we also have a life in nature, a life that we do not live by faith, for which faith is not necessarily necessary. So then, the greater part of our life is that which is outside the influence of our faith, and only the much smaller part is by faith, if that is possible! This is why on Monday morning there is no indication that we attended a church service and had communion the day before, the only difference between us and our colleagues outside the church is that they were at a football match yesterday, i.e. Sunday, and we were in church. Otherwise, however, we might as well be twins. For us, this whole life of faith, this precarious appendage of our lives, is only a means to just slip through the gates of heaven with as little struggle and effort as possible. We all want to die in faith, but without having really lived in faith.
Well, our Word warns us that the righteous man lives by faith! It is not the case, then, that we can have other, lower life besides our spiritual life. It's not that we have other questions besides questions of faith, but that our whole life is a question of faith! A Christian tailor's question of faith is just as much a question of faith to make the garment he has made well and to deliver it on time, a Christian grocer's question of faith is to serve his customers honestly, as a pastor's question of faith is to prepare a dying person for the great journey to meet God. We have to reckon radically with the question which seeks to make the life of faith an oasis where the man who has been sweating in the desert of life can be refreshed.
Where, for example, is the boundary between the spiritual life and the non-spiritual life? Where does one begin and the other end? For example, when we sit at the table and eat: while we are eating the food we are in a profane area and then we enter the area of the spiritual life when we fold our hands and pray at the end of the meal. The Apostle Paul would look at us! According to him, "Whether you eat or drink, whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God" (1 Cor 10:31) Paul cannot see it as a matter of fact that when a man eats or drinks, he is living a lower life than when he prays. Paul sees both eating and praying as equally faith-based and spiritual, which is why he says: do everything to the glory of God!
A man does not have faith as one has a car or a wife, but one can imagine life without a car and without a partner, but one has faith as one has the roots of a tree. What breath is to the body, faith is to the Christian man: not a moment without it. As the blood circulates throughout the body and can reach to the last extremity of the limbs, so faith, the will to be conformed to God in Christ and to be conformed to God in Christ, pervades our lives in every aspect, position. If our faith is not just a solemn pose, not just a tradition, not just a habit, but the basis of our life, a living relationship with Christ, then our life must be dominated not just by a particular detail, but by the whole.
The true man lives by faith. To live is to speak, to act, to write, to think, to travel, to do business, to eat and drink, to make and spend money, to give and take, to pray and work, to marry, to mourn - that is, all that happens from Sunday morning to the following Saturday evening, and all this the righteous man lives by faith. It is not possible to go to church by faith, but to go on a summer vacation by faith. We want to pray and take communion by faith, but to engage in politics or hoe corn is essentially to do so without faith. Well, that's what you can't do!
A righteous man lives by faith. So always and everywhere, in the house and on the street, in church and at work, in company and in solitude, on the sports field and in the daily Bible reading, he carries himself as a man of God, a righteous man, a redeemed man, whom God in Christ here and now conforms to himself, and who in Christ here and now conforms to God. There can be no part of our life, no manifestation of our life, that is not permeated and defined by this invisible, mysterious power: our faith in God our Saviour.
We have just seen that Paul even includes eating and drinking in the realm of faith. We eat and drink just as much as anyone else, yet we do it in a different way, because our eating is also sanctified as a sacrifice of thanksgiving in faith. For the believer, there are no more material things than there are spiritual things. A believer is no more a spiritualist than he is a materialist. The believer is neither a machine nor a bloodless angel. A believer is simply a man of God, that is, a man whom God has redeemed, reserved for himself. A prisoner of God and at the same time liberated by God - a man who is at God's disposal from head to toe! A man who asks, wants God to conform him to himself in Christ and does his utmost to conform himself to God in Christ.
The righteous man lives by faith: this is our great privilege, for those of us who have known God in Jesus Christ, and this is our great duty, for those of us who have also known God in Jesus Christ!
Amen
Date: 31 July 1955.