In our current blog series, we are studying the Armor of God in Ephesians 6, verses 10-20. So far this week, I’ve introduced the next piece of the armor, the Shield of Faith, by describing the noun version of faith. Is that noun version of faith what Paul had in mind when he taught us to take up the Shield of Faith? In Ephesians 6 , verse 16 he writes, “Take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.”
What does Paul mean by this faith? Biblical faith, true faith, has both a passive and an active aspect. The noun faith, as I’ve described is generally passive, but now we need to examine the verb faith. We see this clearly in the phrase, “Actions speak louder than words.” It is only when we observe the choices we make, the many things we actually do, that we learn what we really believe. As Jesus once taught, “By their fruits you will know them.”
People might say they are disciples of Jesus, but if they did an audit of their time, it might reveal something different. People might say they believe in God and have faith, but when others evaluate how much of the Fruit of the Spirit is flowing from their lives, the results are pretty sparse.
Faith might start as belief and trust in the intellectual sense. But faith, to be real faith, cannot remain only intellectual. Yes, we are right to say that we believe things, ideas, concepts, such as theism, that God exists, or the resurrection of Jesus. That one, the resurrection, is a bonkers idea to many people. A man died, really died, and then came back to life? It is amazing, and because of that, some people find it irrational or crazy.
But we Christians say we believe in the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus. It is not easy in this world to say we believe in the resurrection. Yet the Apostle Paul, as we learned in our blog series through Acts a couple years ago, was constantly talking about the resurrection. He didn’t just believe it as a concept in his mind. His actions spoke louder than his words.
What actions? He constantly faced persecution and ridicule for this idea that a man, Jesus, died and came back to life by the power of God, thus defeating sin, death and the devil. What Paul wrote and taught and lived was the reality that a belief in the resurrection of the Jesus changes everything.
Paul demonstrates for us how passive noun faith will show itself to be true by active verb faith. Paul writes in Ephesians 2:8-9, “it is by grace you have been saved through faith, not by works, it is the gift of God.” Jesus did the work that we could never do. So we place our faith in him. We believe in him, as Paul writes in Romans 10:9-10. We believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead. That inward belief is the passive noun faith.
But true faith doesn’t stop there. We show our faith to be genuine faith, Paul writes in Romans 12:1-2, by offering our bodies as living sacrifices to God. This is why Paul writes in Ephesians 2:10, right after he has said that we are saved by grace through faith not by works, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” That is the active verb faith.
Faith, therefore, is not true faith if all it does is reside in the mind. Faith, to be true faith, does not stay passive. Faith leads to action. That’s why we describe people as faithful or unfaithful. When we say that a person is faithful, we are not talking about what they believe in their minds. We are saying that they are living in such a way that they show by their choices that they are striving to follow the way of Jesus. They do this, Paul writes, by doing good works.
This is why James the brother of Jesus and leader of the church in Jerusalem would write, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.”
Likewise Paul wrote to the Galatians, chapter 5, verse 26, “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”
Or like Paul said, in 1 Thessalonians 1:3, “We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
True faith produces faithfulness.
True faith is active.
If you’re hearing this thinking, “But I’m struggling with faith and faithfulness,” there is hope. We’ll find out about that hope in the next post.
Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 