Therefore they said to Him, "What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?" 29 Jesus answered and said to them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent." John 6:28-29 (NASB)

Faith in Christ is a spiritual “work.” How is this so? Many conceive of faith as a blind leap into the unknown in hope that we might be right. Others think that belief in Christ is acknowledging key truths about him, such his suffering, death, and resurrection. But is that the version of belief to which Christ referred?

Perhaps the most important aspect of faith is our understanding through revelation who Jesus is, and this must result in something more, if our faith is genuine – our allegiance to him.

When we see him for who he is, it fundamentally changes us and inspires us want to serve him.

This is what my Father wants: that anyone who sees the Son and trusts who he is and what he does and then aligns with him will enter real life, eternal life. My part is to put them on their feet alive and whole at the completion of time." John 6:40 (MSG) 

The more we know about Jesus and what he did, does, and will do for us, the more we love him and desire to be loyal to him.

True faith produces a life of adoration, surrender, and obedience, which results in spiritual transformation.

This will continue until we die or he returns. The final piece of the puzzle will be our glorification at the resurrection. We will discuss this more later.

Many people fundamentally misunderstand of the nature of salvation, which can easily lead to legalism, which is a man-made attempt to reach God or stay right with God. Some imagine Christ’s death and resurrection provided us with a clean slate from which to begin again. Their understanding is that God erased the list of things we did wrong (sins), but since then has been writing our new sins on the blackboard. We had a clean slate, but it is starting to fill up again. This kind of thinking led Constantine to delay his water baptism until his deathbed, hoping that the slate would be clean at death, giving him a sure entrance into heaven. This feeds into the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, which is the belief that after death we enter a place of suffering until our sins are purged and we attain the moral purity required for entrance into heaven.

What is wrong with this concept? Several things, but let’s concentrate on two right now. First, we need to understand that our problem is not so much “sins” as it is “sin”.

Yes, we will be held accountable for the individual sins we commit, but the far deeper problem is our inherited sin factory which propels us into sinful thinking and behavior.

We can erase our slates clean every day, but, by nightfall, it will have begun to fill it up again. This propensity is called the “flesh” by Paul.

I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. 22  I love God’s law with all my heart. 23  But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. Romans 7:21-23 (NLT)

Thankfully, Jesus took my sins upon Himself on the cross, but my “sin” had to die, too.

My sin “nature” had to be crucified because there is no reforming it.

Like a leopard, it cannot remove its spots. This is why in the previous lesson I pointed out that we cannot actually know just how sinful we really are. Even if we are spiritually cleansed somehow, the “flesh” lurks under the surface, ever ready to rear its ugly head and do something despicable. Even our best attempts at righteous living need to be made righteous by God. (Isaiah 64:6)

Salvation then is not a mere erasing of the slate, but an execution. The old man, flesh, or sin nature had to die.

For when I tried to keep the law, I realized I could never earn God's approval. So I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ. 20 I myself no longer live, but Christ lives in me. So I live my life in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21 I am not one of those who treats the grace of God as meaningless. For if we could be saved by keeping the law, then there was no need for Christ to die. Galatians 2:19-21 (NLT) 

There had to be a complete exchange of life for life. Jesus died in our place (substitution), putting to death our old man (identification), and placed in us His Holy Spirit.

The Bible calls this receiving a “new heart” or being “born again” in the spirit. Christians are indeed “little Christs” who carry about in themselves the life of Christ.

Salvation is an exchange of our sin for His life. It is not erasing a blackboard. It is smashing the blackboard because it is irrelevant now.

God does not mark iniquities any longer.

LORD, if you kept a record of our sins, who, O Lord, could ever survive? 4  But you offer forgiveness, that we might learn to fear you. Psalm 130:3-4 (NLT) 

We have been released from the system of works that keeps track of every right and wrong for an impending day of reckoning. Jesus took the condemnation and punishment for all our failures and sins upon Himself, and instead we have been given the Christ life within. The “sin nature” still lurks, waiting for an opportunity, but it no longer has the right to control us.

We must engage in a continual battle of the spirit (Christ’s life within us) against flesh (the residual inclination toward sin that is somehow linked to our Adamic bodies) until the day of our resurrection, but our true identity now is the new life of Christ that indwells us.

Another aspect of our salvation pertains to family. For those of us who are born again, born of the Spirit, and born of the Father, what really matters is who is our Father now.

Our salvation depends on being born into the family of God.

For you have been born again. Your new life did not come from your earthly parents because the life they gave you will end in death. But this new life will last forever because it comes from the eternal, living word of God. 1 Peter 1:23 (NLT)

Rather than being weighed in the balances in a system of works in which we can never measure up, we are born into a family where our acceptance is based on our all having the same Father. Blood is thicker than water, they say, and when it comes to the Kingdom of God, I would rather be a beloved “son” than a frustrated “keeper of the rules.”

Our access to the throne and heart of our heavenly Father, our Abba, is based on our being identified with His beloved Son, the Righteous One, Jesus. Our relationship with Abba is the same as Jesus’ because it is His Spirit within us who cries out, “Abba, Father”.

God sent him [Jesus] to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children. 6 And because you Gentiles have become his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, and now you can call God your dear Father. 7 Now you are no longer a slave but God's own child. And since you are his child, everything he has belongs to you. Galatians 4:5-7 (NLT) 

To conclude, we must see salvation not as a second chance to “get it right” but as a life exchange and an adoption because we had no possibility of ever “getting it right”.

God knew we were hopelessly flawed; so, He provided a salvation that is not dependent on us but on Christ. If we are going to be good disciples, we must cast aside our vain attempts to measure up by keeping the Law and accept the marvelous provision of Christ’s life within as our only source of righteousness and acceptance and our key to obedience and victory. This is truly Good News!

The key for us, then, is faith. The way we do the works of God is by believing on Christ and His promises, declaring allegiance to him, and trusting in His Spirit to live the Christ life through us.

Questions for Further Study and Discussion

• How would describe faith or belief in Christ?
• Why does our salvation demand an execution?
• Why do some people call Christianity an “exchanged life”?
• Why does our salvation depend on being born again into God’s family?
• What would you tell someone who struggles with trying to be “good enough”?
• What do you see are the most fundamental differences between the Old and New Covenants?

Click here to see the other articles in this series.