The needle of faith

Freepik

If you want to sew something you can push many different sorts of thread through cloth but they all have to have a needle at the end if they are going to go through. In the same way everything needs to be headed up with faith – all your prayers, all your actions, all you do. W
ithout faith, you'll get nowhere.

Saved through faith

Freepik

The Christian is saved through the gift of faith

Paul then adds that this grace comes through faith – and in case you are then tempted to think it is, after all, all a matter of what we do, he adds and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God. Even faith itself - putting your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, leaning on him – is a gift from God. Faith is more a matter of the means by which God's grace is received.

If I drink a milkshake with a straw I don't say I'm drinking the straw – I'm drinking the milkshake through the straw. The milkshake is the thing not the straw.

If I say to you “come and see me” I will tell you my address and you will knock on my door and I will open the door to you. The knocking on the door and the door are important but quite incidental really. It is just the means to the end.

In case there is any confusion, however, Paul says that even faith is a gift from God. You can't have it unless God grants it to you. It really is all of God's grace. The through faith is important though. To have faith is to believe. It is to put your trust in.

Faith - John Paton's Aniwan definition

John G Paton was a 19th century Scot who went as a missionary to the South Seas, to what was then the New Hebrides but is now called Vanuatu. One of the things he did was to reduce one of the languages (Aniwan) there to writing and translate the Bible into it. One of the things he discovered early on was that there was no word in Aniwan for "faith." It is pretty difficult to translate the Bible without it. One day, the story goes, he went on a hunt with one of the natives. They shot a large deer in the course of the hunt, and tying its legs together and supporting it on a pole, laboriously trekked back down the mountain path to Paton's home near the seashore. As they reached the veranda both men threw the deer down, and the native immediately flopped into one of the deck chairs that stood on the porch exclaiming (in Aniwan), “My, it is good to stretch yourself out here and rest.” Paton immediately jumped to his feet and recorded the phrase. In his final translation of the New Testament this was the word used to convey the idea of trust, faith, and belief - to stretch out and rest. That is what we need to do - to rest on Christ. That is what ministers must preach.

Faith - no place for boasting

You can't boast about your faith, either. As Paul tells us – it's not from us it is the gift of God. I suppose people do boast about gifts – hey, look what I got for Christmas; look what someone gave me. But really there is no place for boasting here. 

As for boasting about what we've done or what we're going to do, that is completely out of court because it is not through these that we are saved. It's like someone being given a birthday gift by you and looking through it and saying 'Yes, it all seems to be there. That's about what I deserve. I'm glad I made the effort to be extra nice to you last week so that you would get me exactly what I wanted and what I, after all, do deserve'! What? That was a gift not some sort of wages!