Two Sides of the Same Coin

Luke 17:5-10 and 2 Timothy 1:1-14
Paul reminds Timothy that salvation is a gift. It is undeserved. We don’t do something to achieve it. It only comes because God is gracious.
And salvation is received through faith.
Now there’s something important for us to understand about faith. We use the word faith to describe what we believe. Faith is content, information, in our use of the word. But in New Testament Greek, faith is both what we believe and the response that we make to God because of what we believe. We use two English words: Faith and faithfulness, what we believe and the response we make to God. In the Greek of the New Testament, they are both contained in one word, PISTIS, faith and faithfulness.
What we believe and the faithful response we make are two sides of the same coin. They are inseparable from each other. What we believe is inseparable from how we live faithfully.
Faith is the foundation of how we receive salvation. But what we build on that foundation is our response to God’s gift of salvation. God’s gift calls for a response.
Paul says to Timothy, “Fan into flames the gift God gave you.” Our gifts come by God’s Spirit. But they require effort on our part. We need to grow our gifts. If God gives you the gift of prayer, then it’s up to you to learn how to pray well. If God gives you the gift of leadership, you have to grow and develop your leadership skills. Whatever gift you receive, you still have a responsibility to develop it. We have to learn new skills and practice the use of our gifts.
I have been preaching now for 20 years. But I don’t think I have it all figured out. I try to find opportunities to learn new skills for preaching. I practice regularly in the hopes of improving my preaching. If I ever get to the point where I think I have it all figured out, I will know it’s time to retire. If you are not devoted to lifelong learning and growth, then you will never realize the potential God has given you!
So how we use the gifts we have from God’s Spirit is part of our response to God’s gift of salvation. A second way we respond is by the holy life we live.
Living a holy life means a life of repentance. Repentance is turning away from sin and turning to God. A holy life means rooting out all the sin in our lives and replacing it with devotion to God. Again, this is a lifelong process. I’ve been following Jesus for more than 30 years now, and I still have plenty of sin to remove from my life!
We also respond to God’s gift by a life of love for others. We are saved for the purpose of showing God’s love to each other and revealing that love to a world desperately in need of love.
And finally, we respond to God’s gift of love by guarding the deposit of faith, holding onto the pattern of right teaching we have learned. The world constantly unleashes a full scale assault on the truth. The world constantly bombards us with messages that what we believe is wrong and that we should change our ways to conform to the world. It takes a life of faithfulness to hold tightly to the truth.
All of these are ways that we respond to God’s gift of salvation. But Jesus also warns us against spiritual pride in Luke 17, the parable of the faithful servant.
I think this parable is hard for us because it is outside of our daily experiences. We say “servant” in many of these parables, but the fact of the matter is that a “servant” in these stories is really a slave. Most Bible translations avoid that word because of all the negative connotations with it. But slavery was the norm in this first century world. It is still the norm in many parts of our world today, sadly. Only about half the countries in the world have outlawed slavery, and it exists illegally in many more. But we are not used to it in our daily lives, which is good. We are used to relationships that are more equal. Now the relationship between an employer and an employee is not really equal, but it’s certainly more equal than the relationship between a master and a slave.
But that is the imagery Jesus uses. Our relationship with God is not one of equals. God doesn’t say “Thank you” because obedience to him is expected. It is essential to our relationship with God.
Spiritual pride is imagining that our obedience to God is earning us his favor. But obedience to God is not an extra to faith. It’s not something added onto our faith. It is an essential part of our faith. It is the other side of the coin. One side is the faith we have, and the other is the faithful response we make to God because of what we believe. They cannot be separated any more than a coin can be separated into heads and tails. We respond to God’s gift of salvation with our life of obedience to him.