Faith and works are as inseparable as sun and sunlight. Faith is the sun; good works are its rays.473<\/p>\n
I was hungry, and you formed a humanities club and discussed my hunger.<\/p>\n
I was imprisoned, and you crept off quietly to your chapel in the cellar and prayed for my release.<\/p>\n
I was naked, and in your mind you debated the morality of my appearance.<\/p>\n
I was sick, and you knelt and thanked God for your health.<\/p>\n
I was homeless, and you preached to me the spiritual shelter of the love of God.<\/p>\n
I was lonely, and you left me alone to pray for me.<\/p>\n
You seem so holy, so close to God, but I\u2019m still very hungry, and lonely, and cold.474<\/p>\n
A man who claims to have faith without works is like a man who puts all his effort into building the foundation of a house and never builds anything on it.<\/p>\n
A man who displays great works but claims no faith is like a man who builds a house on sand without any foundation.475<\/p>\n
As gloves are to a surgeon\u2019s hands, so are Christians in service for God. It is actually \u201cGod\u2019s hand\u201d doing the work. We are but used by him and therefore have nothing to boast of.476<\/p>\n
A minister was talking to a professing Christian and asked him if he was active in a local church. The man responded, \u201cNo, but the dying thief wasn\u2019t active in a church and yet he was still accepted.\u201d The minister then asked if he had been baptized. The man responded, \u201cThe dying thief was not baptized and he still made it to heaven.\u201d The minister then asked if he had partaken of the Lord\u2019s Table. The man responded, \u201cNo, but the dying thief didn\u2019t either, and Christ still received him.\u201d<\/p>\n
The minister then commented: \u201cThe only difference between you and the dying thief is that he was dying in his belief and you are dead in yours.\u201d477<\/p>\n
Doctrine and doing are like the two chemical ingredients of salt, which is composed of two poisons: sodium and chlorine. If we ingested either of the two poisons, we would die. But if we combine them properly, we have sodium chloride, which is the common table salt that gives flavor to our food and indeed life and health to our bodies. So, too, are faith and works inseparable.478<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve probably heard it said, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what you believe; it\u2019s how you live that counts.\u201d<\/p>\n
A. J. Gordon encountered this philosophy one time as he talked with a fellow passenger on a train. The man believed he could get to heaven by his good works. Pointing to the conductor who was making his way through the coach, Gordon asked his new friend, \u201cDid you ever notice how carefully he always examines the ticket but takes no pains whatever to inspect the passenger?\u201d The man immediately caught the significance of the question. He had just been saying that God was interested only in what we do and not in a \u201clittle bit of theological scrip called faith.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou see,\u201d continued Gordon, \u201cthe passenger and the ticket are accepted together. If he doesn\u2019t have one, or has the wrong one, he will be asked to get off the train\u2014no matter how honest he might appear to be. Just as the ticket stands for the man, faith stands for you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Note that the \u201cticket\u201d of faith was purchased at a great price, but not by you or me!479<\/p>\n
Martin Luther, who had made himself the apostle and champion of faith alone, wrote the following: \u201cFaith is a living, busy, active, powerful thing; it is impossible for it not to do us good continually. It never asks whether good works are to be done, but has done them before there is time to ask the question, and it is always doing them.\u201d480<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Faith and works are as inseparable as sun and sunlight. Faith is the sun; good works are its rays.473 I was hungry, and you formed a humanities club and discussed my hunger. I was imprisoned, and you crept off quietly to your chapel in the cellar and prayed for my release. I was naked, and … Continue reading “FAITH, WORKS AND”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}