“The righteous will
live by faith.” Romans 1:17
If my salvation depended on me, I would have lost it this
morning when I was impatient with my daughter.
I would have negated it last night when I chose to worry instead of
trust, and it would have sailed out of my soul yesterday afternoon when I “knew the good I ought to do and didn’t do
it”(James 4:17). I don’t know about
you (though I’ve quite a sure guess), but I’m enormously glad that my eternal
life doesn’t depend on my everyday choices.
Martin Luther thought his did, and spent years striving
through personal piety to end his spiritual uneasiness and find peace with God. Only when a verse in Romans catapulted off
the page into his heart did he realize the truth—it’s all God, not our own
goodness. “The righteous will live by faith”(Romans 1:17). And lest you think that this faith is
something you are required to conjure up and then keep strong on your own,
remember that it is “not from ourselves,
but is the gift of God”(Ephesians 2:8).
I’m so glad. I know
I’ve already said that once, but I can’t say it enough. Oh, the fear, the anxiousness, the
uncertainty which would rule my life if being right with God was contingent in
any way, shape, or form at any time on my being right. How incredibly comforting to know that “in the gospel a righteousness from God is
revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is
written, ‘The righteous will live by faith’”(Romans 1:17).
We are made right by faith, and we stay right by faith. From first to last—from the moment we
believe until the glorious day when what we know to be true we see to be
true—our right standing with God is securely bound by our belief in what our
Savior did. “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all
who believe. There is no difference, for
all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by
his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus”(Romans 3:22-24). I’m so glad—so glad that we don’t have to do
good to get saved, and so glad that we don’t have to do good to stay
saved. So glad that though such great
grace generates lots of “good works which
God has prepared in advance for us to do”(Ephesians 2:10), those are the result
of our faith and not the reason for it.
From first to last our salvation is by faith—a no-fail
faith, for it is faith in a God who will never fail and faith from a God who
will never fail.
And I’m so glad.
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