“If you’re always trying to tack “decided” works onto what you call your faith, friend, then it’s not saving faith. Saving faith moves you, and evangelicals know this.”
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Hi, you’re back to that false “faith alone.” You, me, we’re not robots. Faith doesn’t make you do anything. Plenty of people with faith have fallen and acted terribly, committed mortal sin. It is free will choice with the help of God’s grace to decide to do a “work.”
I am no writer, here is what I said, better explained.
Some Protestants insist that it is the faith that does the work in us not we ourselves. Faith (God’s gift to man through His Word / Eph 2:8; Rom 10: 17) is a necessary motivation for us to obey but it DOES NOT make us obey. Man has a choice to resist or yield, therefore the obedience is our responsibility. It is our OBEDIENCE IN RESPONSE to faith that brings justification (and Eternal Life). Justification then brings “perfect” or “complete” faith, the proof we have that Eternal Life (See John 3:36!). Further, Eternal Life is something we possess in degrees and that corresponds to how close we have grown to Christ. It is Eternal Life we are given not a promise of the eternal possession of that life. That Life, however, is so powerful that nothing in all the universe, but one’s own self will and sin, can remove us from Christ’s hand (Romans 8:35-39).
faith does not guarantee a perfect walk on earth. you have set up a straw man. faith always burns with works of some sort, however, whether they are only small ones that scarcely anyone but God can see, or large ones that are obvious to all men.
it sounds like what you are calling your own, personal faith is generating no works. the love from Christ when accepted will always move in your heart. it will not guarantee a perfect walk, but it will always move.
p.s. your “obedience in response” is at best ambiguous. is the obedience actually rooted in the faith (in which case we’d be actually talking about the same thing in different words) — or in our own human fallen self-efforts to prove that what we’ve called our faith means something.
it’s not nearly as hard as you are making it out to be. it’s the love from Christ that when accepted ignites faith, from which works come. the Lord gives you some control over the size of the faith in you, but only the Lord can actually effect its presence.
“it’s not nearly as hard as you are making it out to be. it’s the love from Christ that when accepted ignites faith, FROM WHICH WORKS COME. the Lord gives you SOME CONTROL over the size of the faith in you, but only the Lord can actually effect its presence.”
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God does not make you do anything. Any kind of “control”
would not be true love.
There is more than faith required. Your same and not to be mean, vague “from which works come.”
Where does one’s free will come in? You have to choose to act on the faith God has given you. How about the better explanation I just posted and in it, so important to you all, other Scripture verses to confirm.
blessings,