The Fruits of Certainty
covenant, and He gives them all the blessings of salvation—the forgiveness of sins and eternal life.
He will not abandon good work begun in them but will carry it to completion. Second, through the sacramental confirmation of God's promises believers are strengthened in their faith. Along with the certainty of God's promises and their fulfillment, the strength of faith also grows. Consciousness follows being. To the extent that the child grows up into a man, he puts away childish things and ripens into clear self-consciousness and walks in the full light of knowledge. The emotions retreat into the background and all of life becomes illuminated by the steadfast certainty of faith. This once prompted
Paul to say that God's Spirit testified with his spirit that he was a child of God. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.
The Fruits of Certainty The nature of this faith, therefore, makes it impossible that those whom it engrafts into Christ will not produce fruits of thankfulness.
Those who believe in righteousness by works always seem to be afraid that a faith that rests solely on God's promises will be morally harmful. But such fear is entirely groundless and idle, for in a certain sense there is no such thing as a dead faith without works. All faith, even normal, everyday faith, and similarly in religion the so-called historical, temporal and miraculous kinds of faith, bear fruit, but fruit after its own kind. If we are away from home and receive a message that our house or family has been struck by disaster and we believe it, that does not leave us unaffected. It immediately sets us in motion and sends us speeding home. The demons, say the Scriptures, believe there is one God, and because they believe and cannot deny it, they shudder.
Historical faith, too, which used to bind all Christendom generally to the truths of the gospel, was not without fruit, for the broad crosssection of the people were captivated by it and preserved from many horrible sins. Although it is true that hypocrisy was widespread in those days and many evils were committed in secret, that hypocrisy was, nevertheless, a homage paid by error to truth, and by sin to virtue. It certainly was no worse than the horrible frankness with which the most awful abominations are shamelessly committed in contemporary society.
Consequently, every faith bears fruit according to its object and its nature. Depending on whether the object of our faith is good or bad news, a promise or threat, a story or prognostication, gospel or law, it will differ in character and so will the fruit that it bears in our lives. If this is true of all faith, how much more true it must be of the faith rooted in a spiritual renewal of the heart, which truly receives the gospel as good news, depending only on God's grace in Christ. It cannot produce careless and impious people; it bears fruit according to its own nature, fruit that glorifies the Father.
In that fruit the reality, the soundness, the power of that faith is once again revealed. Experiences and good works can never prove the truth of faith beforehand. All genuine experience and all virtuous works are not the roots, but the fruits of faith. Not until the promises of the gospel have been appropriated in faith do they exert an influence on our hearts and lives through our consciousness. The emotions follow understanding, and the will is led by both. Faith is the source of emotional life and the power animating the works of our hands. If faith, however, does not come first, no genuine experience and no true good works can follow.
As long as we aren't certain and firm in our faith and we still doubt, we will continue to experience anxiety and fear and will not have the boldness and trust of children of God. We will still be far too much concerned with ourselves to be able to devote our attention to works of love toward God and our neighbor. The eye of the soul remains
turned inward and does not have a broad, liberated vision of the world. We are still more or less subject to the spirit of fear. We still feel far from God and do not live out of fellowship with Him. Secretly we still harbor the thoughts that we must please Him with our stature and virtues, and we still act out of legalistic principles; we remain servants, not children.
But if in faith we fasten immediately onto the promises of God and take our stand in His rich grace, then we are His children and receive the Spirit of adoption. This Spirit is appropriate to our sonship; it testifies with our spirit that we are children of God. Then we feel like children; we have the stature and experience of children and as a matter of course also do good works, not for wages like servants, but out of thankfulness.
If we are children, we are also heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. The reversal of the order of salvation—that is, the separation of faith from its only proper object—also had the result in the past that the faithful concentrated more and more on themselves, meeting together in conventicles to discuss spiritual matters, leaving the world to its fate. Pietistic Christians preferred to withdraw from the turbulence of life into their own intimate circles. The religious, spiritual life was the only true life. It shunted all other activity into the background by deeming it of lesser worth. One was indeed bound to a spouse, a family, a job in society and had to devote some attention to them, but one did so reluctantly. One's life in the world formed a sharp contrast to one's spiritual life; the former always seemed more or less to involve serving the world. In any case, it was life of a lower order. To sit in quiet contemplation or to relate to the circle of the faithful what God had wrought in one's soul—this was really living, this was the ideal, this was the Christian's real destiny.
Such a conception of the Christian's earthly task issued from the reversal of the order of salvation that we mentioned earlier. A Christian was a sighing, burdened person who could come to certainty and rest only at the end of his life after a series of inner
experiences. Certainty became the goal rather than the starting point of all his striving. To be saved was the object of all his desires.
Unsure about his own state, he had enough work looking after himself and lacked the courage and strength to turn his eyes outward and assume the work of reforming the world. It was sufficient if at the end of his troublesome life he might be taken up into heaven. He preferred to leave the earth to the servants of the world.
This tradition overestimated and overemphasized the one thing needful, which, on the other hand, is often lacking in the busyness of contemporary life. While these nineteenth century Christians forgot the world for themselves, we run the danger of losing ourselves in the world. Nowadays we are out to convert the whole world, to conquer all areas of life for Christ. But we often neglect to ask whether we ourselves are truly converted and whether we belong to Christ in life and in death. For this is indeed what life boils down to. We may not banish this question from our personal or church life under the label of pietism or methodism. What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, even for Christian principles, if he loses his own soul?
But this does not suggest that the meaning of the Christian religion may be limited to the saving of individual souls. The situation appears much different to those who in agreement with the Scriptures and with the confession of the Reformation do not place faith at the end, but at the beginning of the way of salvation. This way doesn't strive for faith, but lives out of faith. It is the way that does not work in order to believe, but believes in order to work. Such a Christian has found his standpoint in the promises of God's grace in Christ. The foundations of his hope are fixed, for they lie outside him in God's word, which will never be moved. He doesn't need to constantly examine the genuineness and strength of the foundation on which the building of his salvation has been built. He is a child of God not on the basis of all kinds of inner experiences but on the basis of the promises of the Lord. Assured of this, he can now freely look around and enjoy all the good gifts and the perfect gift that descends
from the Father of lights. Everything is his because he is Christ's and Christ is God's. The whole world becomes material for his duty.
Religious life does have its own content and independent value. It remains the center, the heart from which all the Christian's thoughts and acts proceed, by which they are animated and given the warmth of life. There, in fellowship with God, he is strengthened for his labors and girds himself for the battle. But that mysterious life of fellowship with God is not the whole of life. The prayer chamber is the inner room, although it is not the whole house in which he lives and functions. Spiritual life does not exclude family and social life, business and politics, art and science. It is distinct from these; it is also of much greater value, but it does not stand irreconcilably opposed to it. Rather it is the power that enables us to faithfully fulfill our earthly calling, stamping all of life as service to God. The Kingdom of God is, to be sure, like a pearl more precious than the whole world, but it is also like a leaven that leavens the entire dough.
Faith isn't only the way of salvation, it also involves overcoming the world.
The Christian, as he is drawn in Scripture and as he speaks in the Heidelberg Catechism, stands and works in this conviction.
Reconciled with God, he is also reconciled with all things. Because in the Father of Christ he confesses the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, he cannot be small-hearted and constricted in his affections. For God Himself so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life. And this Son came to earth not to condemn the world but to save it. In His cross heaven and earth are reconciled.
Under Him all things shall be gathered together with Him as head.
The history of all things proceeds according to His counsel toward the redemption of the church as the new humanity, toward the liberation of the world in an organic sense, toward the new heaven and the new earth. Even now, by rights, everything in principle belongs to the church, because it is Christ's and Christ is God's. As a
priest in the temple of the Lord, he who believes this is king over the whole earth. Because he is a Christian, he is human in the full, true sense. He loves the flowers that grow at his feet and admires the stars that sparkle overhead. He does not disdain the arts, which are to him a precious gift from God. Nor does he belittle the sciences, for these, too, are a gift from the Father of lights. He believes that everything God has created is good and that, taken in thanksgiving, nothing is condemned. He labors not for success and doesn't work for wages, but he does what comes to hand, seeing, by means of God's commandments, though ignorant of what the future may bring. He does good works without thinking twice and bears fruit before he realizes it. He is like a flower that spreads its fragrance unawares. He is, in a word, a man of God, perfectly equipped to all good works. And while for him to live is Christ, in the end to die is gain.
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