One of the things that continues to baffle me about some forms of evangelism, and for which I have not found an answer, is when I hear that belief in the salvation that Christ wrought for us is all that is needed for any Christian to make it to heaven at the end of their life’s journey. The issue of what priority Faith and works will play in the judgment of each person at the end of their life depends on who you ask and what they choose to believe in.
I think about this issue and I think about the Beatitudes, especially the bit about how it is only the pure in heart that will see God. How does one reconcile this required purity in order to see God to the notion that someone can accept and have faith in Jesus’s death and resurrection, live a carefree life without striving to live according to God’s laws and still see God in heaven at the end of their life’s journey? How can there be no consequences for deliberately living a sinful life after one has accepted Jesus Christ?
I have read up various schools of thought about this. But once again, I find myself agreeing with the analogy of my beloved C.S. Lewis. As I always like to point out, I am a Follower of Jesus, and a great fan of C.S. Lewis. Here goes:
Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian to his heavenly home is good actions or just Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious moral effort is the only thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point; and out of that Faith in Him, good actions must inevitably come.
There are two parodies of the truth that have been believed by different sets of Christians in the past. One set was accused of saying that good actions are all that matter, and the best good action is charity…..the best kind of charity is giving money to the Church…..The answer to that nonsense, of course, would be that good actions done for that motive, done with the idea that heaven can be bought, would not be good actions at all, but only commercial speculations.
The other set was accused of saying ‘Faith is all that matters. Consequently, if you have faith, it doesn’t matter what you do. Sin away, my lad, and have a good time and Christ will see that it makes no difference in the end.’ The answer to that nonsense is that, if what you call your ‘faith’ in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what He says, then it is not Faith at all – not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him.
The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together in one amazing sentence. The first half is ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’ – which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, ‘For it is God who worketh in you’ – which looks as if God did everything and we nothing.
I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am puzzled but I am not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand, and to separate into water-tight compartments, what exactly God does and what man does when God and man are working together. And of course, we begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that you could say, ‘he did this bit and I did that.’ But this way of thinking breaks down.
God is not like that. He is inside you as well as outside: even if we could understand who did what, I do not think human language could properly express it. In the attempt to express it, different churches say different things. But you will find that even those who insist most strongly on the importance of good actions tell you that you need faith; and even those who insist most strongly on Faith tell you to do good actions…..(Culled from Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis)
Two sides of a coin. Two blades of a pair of scissors. We are not called to be just believers, beneficiaries and messengers of the salvific work of Jesus Christ; we are called to be His Followers. Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. Oswald Chambers adds a second clause to that call: Show to the other man what God has shown to you, and God will give us ample opportunities in actual life to prove whether we are perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. We know we will not reach that perfection while on earth, but we are definitely called and enabled with power from above, to begin to work towards it. And the God who does not miss anything, notices how we try to live up to that call.
Hilltop Thoughts, Valley Strengths 