Category: Ephesians

  • # Right Belief Must Become Right Living

    Recently, I slammed my hand in a door. I’m ashamed to admit that a stream of pre-Christian expletives came out of my lips. By and large, I’ve done a good job of removing those words, but I can still slip. There are times when what I do or say doesn’t align with what I believe or who I profess to be.

    Theologians have two words for this, and you do not need a seminary degree to understand them. Orthodoxy means right belief. Orthopraxy means right living. For most of church history these two words have walked together, because they were never meant to be separated. You cannot claim one and discard the other and still call it biblical Christianity.

    Scripture is not gentle about this. What use is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but has no works? Can that faith save him? Faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself (James 2:14, 17). That is not a suggestion tucked in a side verse. James is asking us to look honestly at whether our lives back up what we say we believe.

    Before this goes somewhere it should not, let me be clear about what this is not saying. We are not saved by our good works. It is by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one may boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). Nothing about right living earns you a place at the table. But the very next verse will not let us stop there either. We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them (Ephesians 2:10). The works do not save us. They are what saved people were made for.

    This is where orthopraxy actually shows up, not in grand gestures but in the ordinary texture of a life. It is patience with the person who tests you twice in one day. It is honesty on the tax form nobody is checking. It is showing up for the friend whose crisis is inconvenient for your schedule. James puts it plainly: prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves (James 1:22). A faith that only ever lives in your head has not yet become the faith Scripture is describing.

    There is a warning built into this too, and it cuts the other direction from where we might expect. Jesus said not everyone who says to Me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father. Many will say to Me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles? And then I will declare to them, I never knew you (Matthew 7:21-23). Right belief without right living is not a small inconsistency. Jesus treats it as evidence that something never took root at all.

    So orthodoxy and orthopraxy are not in competition, and they are not optional extras for the especially devoted. They are the two halves of one whole life. Sound doctrine without a changed life is a faith that talks and never walks. A changed life without sound doctrine is a house built on whatever feels right that year. We need both, and Scripture never offers us the choice to pick only one.

    If you have spent more time defending what you believe than living it out this week, that is worth sitting with honestly before God. And if you have been busy doing good without rooting it in the truth of who Christ is and what He has done, that is worth examining too. The way we live matters, not because it earns us anything, but because it is supposed to be the visible proof of what grace has already done.

    I still catch myself in moments like that door slam, where what comes out does not match what I claim to believe. That is not proof grace has failed. It is proof I am still being made new, and that the gap between profession and practice is meant to keep shrinking, not stay the same size forever.

    Hallelu Yah (Praise God)

    Be blessed,

    Kevin

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  • The Gospel – the best news you will ever hear

    You know the silence that falls right before you open an envelope, or pick up the phone, when you have already braced for the worst. Most of the time the news matches the dread. But every now and then it does not. Every now and then you brace yourself and find out the test was clear, or the debt was settled, or the answer was yes, and for a second you just stand there rereading it, because good news that size is hard to trust on the first pass.

    That mix of disbelief and relief is about the closest thing I know, in ordinary life, to what the Bible calls the gospel.

    The word itself simply means good news. But you cannot understand why it is good until you understand the news that came before it, and that part is not pleasant. Scripture does not soften it. All of us, every last one, have fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). Not just the people we point to on the news. Us. Our sin is not a smudge to wipe off. It is a debt we cannot pay, and the wages of that debt are death (Romans 6:23).

    If the story stopped there, it would just be bad news, true and unbearable. But it does not stop there.

    Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures. He was buried, and He was raised on the third day, according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). That is the gospel in its smallest form, four facts that changed everything. And Paul will not let us read past the cost of it without feeling it. God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). Not after we cleaned ourselves up. While we were still enemies. He paid a debt He did not owe, for people who could never repay Him.

    Here is where the gospel parts ways with every other religion and every self-improvement plan you have ever tried. It is by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one may boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). You do not earn your way into this. You do not balance the scales with enough good deeds to outweigh the bad. The debt was already paid. The only question left is whether you will receive the gift.

    As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name (John 1:12). That word receive is doing a lot of work. It is not a transaction you negotiate. It is a gift you open. Faith is simply reaching out your hand and taking what Christ already purchased at the cross.

    And what happens next is not a slight improvement. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature, the old things passed away, behold, new things have come (2 Corinthians 5:17). You are not patched up. You are remade. Rescued from the domain of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom you have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Colossians 1:13-14). That is not a metaphor for self-help. That is a change of citizenship, paid for in blood, sealed by an empty tomb.

    Some people can tell you the exact day they stopped bracing for bad news and finally believed the good news was real. I hope you have a day like that to point back to as well, the day you stopped trying to pay a debt you could never settle and simply received what Christ already finished.

    If you have never reached out your hand for that gift, today is a good day to start. Tell Him you know the bad news is true of you, and ask Him to make the good news true of you too. He has already done the hard part.

    If you have already received it, do not let the wonder of it go stale. Read those four facts from 1 Corinthians 15 again slowly. Let them surprise you the way they did the first day.

    Hallelu Yah (Praise God)

    Be blessed,

    Kevin

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