Faith

Rescuing Grace and Faith from Churchification

Grace and Faith

You’ve heard “for by grace you are saved through faith” from Ephesians 2:8 so many times it barely registers as a sentence anymore. It’s on coffee mugs. It’s cross-stitched and hanging on someone’s wall. If someone stopped you on the street and asked you to explain, in your own words, what grace and faith are and how they work together, could you? What does it mean that grace works through faith? Would you be able to explain that? A lot of Christians would struggle because these words have been repeated so frequently, we stop thinking about what they mean. They are now “churchy” words that are almost cliché.

But you have to look past the cliché to see what this passage teaches. Once you do, the picture is both simple and solid.

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in Ephesians, Faith, Grace

The Sin That Really Kept Moses Out Of The Promised Land

Moses messed up. He did something which resulted in God banning him from the Promised Land. What did he do to warrant such a punishment?

The typical answers all have one thing in common. They all seem more like inferences or guesses than solid biblical answers.

Does the Bible reveal the sin that really kept Moses out of the Promised Land?

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in Faith, Misconceptions

What does it really mean to have faith?

To a lot of people, having faith in God means nothing more than to believe that He exists. Obviously believing in God is a big part of having faith in Him, but that’s not all faith is.

How does the Bible define faith?

The words our Bibles translate into English as “believe”, “faith”, “faithful”, “faithfulness”, etc. are from the Greek words “pistis” (πίστις, G4102, noun) and “pisteuo” (πιστεύω G4100, verb). These words link to three related ideas: belief, trust and faithfulness. In English, we don’t have just one word to convey all three of these concepts together. The Bible translators had to select the “most correct” English word to fit the context in our English Bibles. Let’s look at some passages which demonstrate that the word faith includes all three of these concepts.

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in Faith