How should we understand the role of faith in our salvation?

With a couple of plain illustrations in one of his sermons (#1126), Charles Spurgeon explains how faith does not merit or earn salvation, but the instrument which apprends God’s gracious provision of pardon:

Faith saves us just as the mouth saves from hunger. If we be hungry, bread is the real cure for hunger, but still it would be right to say that eating removes hunger, seeing that the bread itself could not benefit us, unless the mouth should eat it. Faith is the soul’s mouth, whereby the hunger of the heart is removed. Christ also is the brazen serpent lifted up; all the healing virtue is in him; yet no healing virtue comes out of the brazen serpent to any who will not look; so that the looking is rightly considered to be the act which saves. True, in the deepest sense it is Christ uplifted who saves, to him be all the glory; but without looking to him ye cannot be saved, so that “There is life in a look,” as well as life in the Savior to whom you look. Nothing is yours until you appropriate it.”

…Faith is the hand of the soul. Stretched out, it lays hold of the salvation of Christ, and so by faith we are saved. “Thy faith hath saved thee.” I need not dwell longer on that point. It is selfevident from the text that faith is the great means of salvation.

Thanks Mr Spurgeon!
Pastor David

This is the week to celebrate the great Protestant Reformation! It was a young Roman Catholic monk, MARTIN LUTHER, who had rediscovered the Gospel of grace, and publicly posted his 95 contentions on October 31, 1517 in Wittenburg, Germany.

One of the primary concerns of the budding Reformation was: how is a man justified, how is one right with God? Their answer, taken from reading the Bible, was expressed in the Latin cry of SOLA FIDE — “by faith alone!” This explosive declaration stood in stark contrast with the prevailing Roman Catholic religion, of getting yourself right with God by working the sacramental system.

Dr J. I. Packer has written: So, where Rome had taught a piecemeal salvation, to be gained by stages through working a sacramental treadmill, the Reformers now proclaimed a unitary salvation, to be received in its entirety here and now by Continue reading →