Recently, this author was in a conversation with a fellow Christian who accidentally misquoted Ephesians 2:8 as saying ‘you have been saved by faith, through grace’. It was merely a slip of the tongue, and he knew that it was by grace through faith, but it got this author thinking about an important distinction.
The old hymn is timeless that says ‘this is all my hope and plea / nothing but the blood of Jesus’. After all, what do you trust in for your salvation? The answer ought not be ‘my faith in Christ’, but rather ‘that on the cross, Jesus bore the debt and punishment of my sin, and that as sure as he rose again, likewise I will have eternal life.’
In other words, you don’t trust in your faith, you trust in the cross.
This begins to make sense when you think of the Christian who loves God, but sometimes falls into pits of despair and feels themself faithless and distant from God. If their trust is in their faith, then when they appear faithless, or doubt the sincerity of their expression of faith in the past, their very assurance of salvation slips away before them like sand in the wind. However, if they trust in the steadfast love of their God, and trust that on the cross Jesus paid for their sins, then even in their pits of despair when they see their inadequacy, they can remember that God is faithful and will not abandon them. Even when you are faithless, he remains faithful.
So, faith is not the grounds of salvation, merely the instrument (some may say the instrumental cause). Faith is that gift that God gives, whereby the believer appropriates unto themselves the salvation that God has wrought for the believer. God saved you by himself, from himself and for himself.
This misunderstanding of faith can be seen in that tradition in some churches where new Christians are encouraged to write the day and hour that they trusted Christ into their Bibles, so that if they ever feel doubtful, they can look back to when they first trusted Christ. See the problem? They are being encouraged to trust their decision to trust Christ, not Christ’s work of saving them.
So, what is the grounds of your salvation? All of God, and none of you. It is that God planned in eternity past to set you apart and save you. It is that his Son went to the cross with you in mind, clearing your record and saving you. It is that the Spirit found you in your rebellion, dead and blind and dumb to the gospel truths, and caused you to be born again to a living hope to an unfading inheritance.
So when you confess sola gratia, sola fide, remember Christ. Trust the cross, not the faith.
Distilled Orthopraxy 