The Primacy of Faith

Another fine post at the Gospel Coalition web site. Anyone who can quote Kierkegaard is worth reading!

From Ray Ortlund today at his blog “Christ is Deeper Still“:

The Christian life is not most profoundly a matter of ethics; most profoundly, it is a matter of faith. Abraham trusted God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. As Kierkegaard points out in The Sickness Unto Death, “The opposite of sin is not virtue but faith. Whatever is not of faith is sin (Romans 14:23).”

Ethics we can manage on our own. We can even observe biblical ethics to keep God at a safe distance. But if our hearts are believing the promises of God, we cannot say no to him. We yield to him. We suffer dislocation in this world for his sake. We feel the ground shifting under our feet and we don’t panic. Nothing seems stable, but we accept that. We surrender to God. Drawn on toward his promises, we start changing.

The most urgent question in our lives today is not moral versus immoral but true versus false, heavenly versus earthly, divine promise versus human control, trust versus possession.
Good news for sinners.

How true this is. The human sin tends to be self-reliance, rather than God-reliance. There is much "do-it-yourself" religion, even among those of us who know better. We know the absolute futility of ultimate success in the self-help movement. We know we can change our behaviors, but can we change our hearts? [SDG-JS]