Devotional 72: The Grace of Faith: The Spirit's Work in the Elect

The Confession Read

The grace of faith, whereby the elect are enabled to believe to the saving of their souls, is the work of the Spirit of Christ in their hearts, and is ordinarily wrought by the ministry of the Word, by which also, and by the administration of the sacraments, and prayer, it is increased and strengthened.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 14, Section 1

Introduction

There is a woman in the pew near the back of the church who has not opened her mouth to sing the last two hymns. She is not angry, nor distracted, nor doubting the doctrines she has heard proclaimed from the pulpit for thirty years. She is overcome. The sermon this morning was on the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, that great roll call of the faithful, and as the pastor traced the line from Abel through Abraham to Moses, the names began to blur and a single question formed in her mind with the quiet force of a tide turning: Why do I believe? Not why do the martyrs believe, or why do the apostles believe, or why does the pastor who stands before her week after week believe. Why does she, a woman of ordinary intelligence and unremarkable piety whose prayers feel clumsy and whose faith flickers in the wind like a candle with too little wax, believe? And why has she kept on believing through every loss and disappointment that might have driven a reasonable person to conclude that the whole thing is a fiction? What she sensed in that moment, without having the theological vocabulary to name it, is what the Westminster Divines set down in the first sentence of their chapter on saving faith. Faith is not a native capacity of the human soul, not the product of a sufficiently rigorous examination of the evidence, not a decision the will makes from a position of neutrality. Faith is a grace. It is a gift. It is the work of Another, performed in the secret depths of the heart, as invisible to the eye as the germination of a seed beneath the soil and as irreversible as the dawn. This is the doctrine that separates the Reformed faith from every religion of human achievement and every philosophy of human autonomy, and it is the doctrine that comforts the trembling believer who looks at the weakness of her own faith and wonders whether it can possibly be enough. The Divines open their treatment of saving faith not with a definition of what faith is or a description of what faith does, but with an assertion of where faith comes from. The grace of faith is the work of the Spirit of Christ in the hearts of the elect. Everything that follows (the means by which faith is ordinarily produced, the means by which it is strengthened, the objects upon which it acts, the degrees in which it exists) rests upon this foundation. If we get this wrong, we get everything wrong. If faith is ultimately my contribution to salvation, then my confidence can never rise above the level of my own reliability, and my reliability is a broken reed. If faith is the Spirit's work, then my confidence rests upon the faithfulness of God, and the God who began the work will complete it.

Scripture Foundation

The Apostle Paul states the matter with an economy of words that belies the depth of the truth he is conveying. In his letter to the Ephesians he writes: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast." The entire verse turns on the little neuter pronoun touto, "that." What is the antecedent of "that"? Is it faith, or is it the entire complex of salvation by grace? The grammar permits either reading, but the logic of the passage presses toward the former. If Paul only meant that salvation is a gift, he would be repeating what he had already said. The point of adding "and that not of yourselves" is to close off every possible avenue by which a man might claim credit. If faith itself were the product of native ability (if the sinner, dead in trespasses and sins, could nevertheless produce from his own resources the act by which he lays hold of Christ), then the man who believed could distinguish himself from the man who did not, and boasting would creep in through the side door that Paul has just bolted shut. The Greek word behind "it is the gift" is dōron, a noun used throughout the New Testament for sacrificial offerings, for the unearned provisions of God's generosity. Faith is not a contribution the sinner makes to the transaction of salvation; it is itself the first installment of the gift. This is why the Apostle can say, in the same letter, that we were "dead in trespasses and sins" before God made us alive. A corpse cannot reach for the medicine, cannot sign the consent form, cannot cooperate with the surgeon's knife. The man who is spiritually dead no more contributes his faith to the process of his resurrection than Lazarus contributed his heartbeat to the command that called him from the tomb. Faith is the first breath of the new creation, and the breath is given, not achieved. Our Lord Himself taught the same truth with a starkness that left no room for negotiation. In John 6:44 He declared: "No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him." The Greek word for "draw" is helkysē, a term that carries the sense of a forceful, compelling attraction. It is the same verb used in John 21 when the disciples drag a net full of fish to shore, and in Acts 16 when Paul and Silas are dragged into the marketplace before the rulers. The Father's drawing is not a gentle invitation that leaves the will suspended in a state of equipoise, waiting for the sinner to tip the balance. It is a sovereign, effectual drawing that brings the one who is drawn infallibly to Christ. Lest anyone miss the point, our Lord repeats it a few verses later in John 6:65 : "Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father." Coming to Christ, believing in Christ, is not something any man can do. It is something that must be given. And what is given is faith. The Apostle Paul traces the same line in his letter to the Philippians, where he tells the believers that "unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake." The verb echaristhē is from the root charis, grace. To believe is a grace-gift. To suffer is a grace-gift. Both are bestowed, not manufactured. The Philippians are not commended for having produced faith from their own resources; they are told that faith was given to them on Christ's behalf, a benefit purchased by His blood and applied by His Spirit. Yet if faith is a sovereign gift, it is not a gift that descends from heaven without means. The Confession is careful to add that faith "is ordinarily wrought by the ministry of the Word." The Apostle Paul establishes this connection with unmistakable clarity in Romans 10:14, 17 : "How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." The Greek akoē means both the act of hearing and the thing heard: the report, the message, the proclamation. Faith does not arise from mystical contemplation or from an inner light independent of the Scriptures. It comes through the hearing of the gospel, the message about Christ crucified and risen, proclaimed by a human voice and carried by the Spirit into the depths of the soul. The preacher plants and waters, but God gives the increase. The Word is the instrument; the Spirit is the agent. And the ordinary pattern, the pattern the Confession calls "ordinarily wrought," is that the Spirit works faith in the heart at the moment the Word is heard and understood. This is why the missionary imperative is non-negotiable, why the church must preach, why the Scriptures must be translated and published and read aloud in every tongue under heaven. God has chosen to give faith through the Word, and those who would receive faith must sit under the Word. But the section does not stop with the origin of faith. The Confession teaches that the same means by which faith is produced are the means by which it is "increased and strengthened": the ministry of the Word, the administration of the sacraments, and prayer. The Apostle Peter, writing to believers who have already been born again, exhorts them in 1 Peter 2:2 : "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby." The word "sincere" is adolon in Greek, meaning unadulterated, without deceit, pure. The Word of God is milk for the soul, and the soul that feeds upon it grows. Faith is not a static deposit made once and left to lie dormant; it is a living thing that must be nourished, and the nourishment God has appointed is His own Word. In the same vein, as Paul takes his leave of the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:32 , he commends them "to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance among all them which are sanctified." The Word builds, edifies, strengthens. It is not only the seed from which faith springs; it is the rain and the sun by which faith matures. The apostles themselves understood that faith needed strengthening even after it had been given. In Luke 17:5 they cried out, "Lord, Increase our faith." They did not ask to be given faith; they already possessed it. But they knew its weakness, its liability to falter, its need for continual reinforcement. And they knew where the increase must come from: not from greater effort, not from more strenuous resolve, but from the Lord who had given it in the first place. The Confession captures this dynamic perfectly: faith is increased by the same Word that first produced it, nourished at the same table, sustained by the same Spirit.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly gathered in the Jerusalem Chamber in the 1640s, the doctrine of faith was a battleground. Three errors pressed upon the church from different directions, and the Divines wrote Section 1 with all three in view. The first error was the Roman Catholic teaching that faith is essentially intellectual assent (fides informis, unformed faith), which only becomes saving faith when it is "formed" by charity, by the infused habit of love. In this scheme, faith is not the instrument by which the sinner receives Christ's righteousness; it is the first step in a process of internal renovation that, if carried to completion, renders the sinner actually righteous. The ground of justification is not Christ's imputed righteousness received by faith alone, but the believer's own inherent righteousness, produced in cooperation with grace. The Reformers had recovered the biblical teaching that faith is the alone instrument of justification, not because faith has any meritorious quality; it is merely the empty hand that receives the gift, but because faith unites the sinner to Christ, in whom all righteousness resides. The Divines, standing in that Reformation tradition, open the chapter by insisting that faith is a "grace" and a "work of the Spirit," not a natural capacity or a meritorious act. It is gift from first to last. The second error was the Arminian teaching, articulated by the Remonstrants in 1610 and condemned by the Synod of Dort in 1619, that faith is the sinner's contribution to salvation. In the Arminian scheme, God gives sufficient grace to all men, enabling them to believe if they will, but the decisive factor is the human will. Faith is not a gift given to the elect; it is a possibility offered to all, actualized by those who make the right use of their freedom. The Confession's language cuts directly against this. Faith is "the work of the Spirit of Christ in their hearts," with "their" referring to the elect. It is not a universal possibility waiting to be activated by human choice; it is a particular work performed in particular hearts by a particular Spirit. And the Spirit's work is effectual: the elect "are enabled to believe to the saving of their souls." The enabling is not a mere permission or a removal of obstacles; it is a positive, creative act that produces the faith it enables. The third error was the Enthusiast claim that faith is produced immediately by the Spirit, without the instrumentality of the Word. Various radical groups in the seventeenth century taught that the Spirit speaks directly to the soul, apart from Scripture, and that those who have the inner light need no external preaching. Against this, the Divines insisted that faith "is ordinarily wrought by the ministry of the Word." The adverb "ordinarily" is carefully chosen. The Spirit is free and sovereign, and can work faith however He pleases, even apart from the preached Word in extraordinary circumstances, as with infants dying in infancy or with the elect who lack the capacity to understand the preached Word. But the ordinary, established, normative means is the ministry of the Word, and those who neglect the preaching of the gospel while claiming to have faith produced directly by the Spirit are deceiving themselves. The Spirit who inspired the Word works through the Word, and the Spirit who gives faith gives it in connection with the hearing of the gospel. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession of Faith, draws attention to the importance of the word "ordinarily." The Spirit is not bound to the Word as though He could not work apart from it, but He has bound us to the Word as the means He has appointed for our conversion and edification. To seek faith apart from the Word is to seek it apart from the means God has promised to bless. Shaw also observes the deliberate symmetry of the section: the same Word that gives faith is the Word that grows faith. The ministry of the Word is not only the delivery room for the new birth but the dining room for the new life. A.A. Hodge, in his commentary, notes that the Confession's teaching on the means of grace is directly connected to its teaching on sanctification in the previous chapter. Faith is the root of sanctification, and whatever strengthens the root strengthens the whole tree. The Word, the sacraments, and prayer are not merely rituals to be performed but channels through which the Spirit nourishes the faith He has planted. Hodge observes that the inclusion of the sacraments in this section is significant: baptism and the Lord's Supper are not bare symbols but means by which, through the Spirit's blessing, faith is confirmed and strengthened. The Lord's Supper, in particular, is Christ's appointed feast for the nourishment of His people's faith, a visible sermon in which Christ is set forth as crucified and the believer feeds upon Him by faith.

Theological Depth

Calvin devotes a substantial portion of the Institutes to the nature of faith, and his treatment illuminates every clause of this section. In Book III, he defines faith as "a firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit." Every element of this definition is critical. Faith is knowledge, not a blind leap but a knowing that rests on God's promise. It is certain, not wavering between hope and despair but anchored in the reliability of the One who promised. It is founded on the promise in Christ, not on feelings or experiences or the testimony of the church but on the objective Word of God. And it is sealed upon the heart through the Holy Spirit, not generated by human reasoning but wrought by divine agency. Calvin's emphasis on the Spirit's work anticipates and undergirds the Confession's assertion that faith is "the work of the Spirit of Christ in their hearts." The Spirit is not merely an assistant who helps the natural man believe; the Spirit is the author of faith, the sole efficient cause without which no man would ever believe. Calvin also wrestled with the question of why some who hear the gospel believe and others do not, and his answer is uncompromising. "The difference," he writes, "is not to be ascribed to the free will of man, as though some were teachable and others not; but it is peculiar to the secret election of God and the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit." The same sermon that hardens one heart softens another, not because the sermon is different or the hearers are different in their native capacities, but because the Spirit works in one what He does not work in the other. This is a hard saying, and Calvin does not soften it. But it is also the only ground of confidence for the believer who knows the stubbornness of his own heart. If faith depended on my receptivity, I could never be sure that my receptivity would persist. If faith depends on the Spirit's work, I can be sure that the Spirit who began the work is faithful to complete it. Watson, in his Body of Divinity, takes up the metaphor of faith as a plant that must be watered. The Word of God is the rain; the sacraments are the channels; prayer is the root system that draws nourishment from the soil of God's promises. Watson warns against the error of thinking that because faith is a gift, the believer need do nothing to strengthen it. The gift must be exercised, and the means of exercise are precisely the means the Confession enumerates. "As the body is strengthened by food," Watson writes, "so faith is strengthened by the Word. Every promise is a cordial to keep faith from fainting." And he adds a pastoral observation that has comforted many a doubting soul: "Weak faith is yet true faith. The bruised reed is but weak, yet Christ will not break it. The smoking flax is but weak, yet Christ will not quench it. A weak hand may receive a rich gift. So a weak faith may receive a strong Christ." The believer whose faith seems too feeble to save him is precisely the believer for whom this doctrine is intended. The strength of faith does not lie in faith itself but in the Object to which faith clings, and that Object is Christ, who is mighty to save. B.B. Warfield, writing two centuries after the Assembly, defended the Confession's doctrine of faith against the rising tide of Pelagianism in American Protestantism. In his essay on "Faith," Warfield insisted that the New Testament consistently presents faith not as a work that merits salvation but as the receptive organ by which salvation is appropriated. "It is not faith that saves," he wrote, "but Christ who saves through faith." The distinction is vital. Faith is the hand, not the treasure. Faith is the eye, not the light. Faith is the mouth, not the bread. To confuse the instrument with the thing received is to fall into the very error the Confession was written to prevent: the error of making faith a work and the believer his own savior. Warfield also traced the history of the term pistis in classical and Hellenistic Greek, showing that the New Testament usage, faith as personal trust and reliance upon a person, drew upon the Old Testament concept of aman, the Hebrew root behind "Amen," which carries the sense of firmness, reliability, and personal commitment. Faith is not merely believing that certain propositions are true; it is entrusting oneself to the God who has spoken those propositions and has acted in Christ to save. Turretin, in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, addresses the question of whether faith is a habit infused by God or an act elicited by the believer, and he answers that it is both. As a habit, faith is the permanent disposition or principle of believing that the Spirit creates in regeneration. As an act, faith is the actual exercise of that disposition, the conscious trust in Christ that the believer performs. But both the habit and the act are the work of the Spirit. The habit is directly infused; the act is elicited by the believer, but only because the Spirit moves the will to elicit it. Turretin's careful distinction preserves both the sovereignty of God in giving faith and the reality of human agency in exercising it. The believer really believes; the act is his own, and he is responsible for it, but he believes because God has given him both the capacity and the will to do so. Owen, in his treatise on The Doctrine of Justification by Faith, takes up the question of the means by which faith is strengthened, and he argues that the sacraments occupy a special place among those means. The Lord's Supper, in particular, is not a mere memorial but a means of grace in which Christ is truly, though spiritually, present to the faith of the believer. "In the supper," Owen writes, "Christ is represented as evidently crucified before our eyes, and all the benefits of his death are tendered unto us. And by the strengthening of our faith herein, our union with him is confirmed." The Confession's inclusion of the sacraments alongside the Word and prayer as means for the strengthening of faith is not an afterthought; it is a recognition that Christ has appointed specific ordinances for the nourishment of His people, and that those who neglect the means God has appointed should not be surprised if their faith grows weak.

Puritan Application

First, examine the origin of your faith, and let the answer humble you. The natural man wants to believe that he came to faith by his own wisdom, his own investigation, his own sound judgment in weighing the evidence. But the Scriptures will not permit this flattery. If you believe, it is because the Spirit of Christ has worked in your heart what He has not worked in the heart of your neighbor who hears the same gospel and remains unmoved. This is not a truth that should make you proud — how can a beggar be proud of a gift? — but a truth that should fill you with gratitude. Every day that you wake with faith still burning in your heart, however feebly, is a day on which the Spirit has continued the work He began. You did not earn the first spark, and you do not earn the daily supply of oil that keeps the flame alive. Second, if faith is ordinarily wrought by the ministry of the Word, then sit under the Word with a conscious dependence on the Spirit. It is possible to attend the preaching of the gospel for decades and never truly hear it, because the ear receives the sound but the heart remains closed. When you open your Bible or settle into the pew on the Lord's Day, pray the prayer of the apostles: "Lord, increase my faith." Ask the Spirit to take the words that enter your ears and carry them into the depths of your soul, to take the truth you understand intellectually and make it the truth you rest upon existentially. The same sermon that informs one hearer transforms another, and the difference is the inward work of the Spirit. Come to the Word not as a critic evaluating a performance but as a beggar holding out an empty hand. You are not there to judge the preacher; you are there to receive from God. And the God who ordained the preaching of the gospel as the ordinary means of producing faith has promised to meet the hungry soul in that preaching. Third, do not neglect the means by which faith is strengthened. The Confession mentions the sacraments and prayer alongside the Word. The Lord's Supper is not a bare symbol to be observed occasionally when convenient; it is Christ's appointed feast for the nourishment of His people's faith. When you partake of the bread and the cup, you are not merely remembering something that happened long ago; you are feeding upon Christ by faith, and that feeding strengthens the faith by which you feed. In the same way, prayer is not a mere duty to be discharged but a means by which faith is exercised and, in the exercise, strengthened. Every prayer of dependence, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief," is an act of faith, and every act of faith strengthens the habit of faith. The believer who neglects these means should not wonder why his faith is weak; he has stopped eating and is surprised that he is hungry. Fourth, learn to distinguish between the weakness of your faith and the absence of faith. This is perhaps the most pastorally urgent application of this section. The Confession teaches that faith is the work of the Spirit in the hearts of the elect. It does not teach that that work is always strong, always confident, always free from doubt. In a later section, the Divines will tell us that faith "is different in degrees, weak or strong," and that it "may be often and many ways assailed, and weakened." The believer who trembles at the threats of Scripture, who weeps over his sins, who feels the impotence of his own resolutions and cries out with the father of the demon-possessed boy, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief," that believer is not demonstrating the absence of faith but its presence. Weak faith is still faith, and the weakest faith that clings to Christ is saving faith, because it is not the strength of the faith that saves but the strength of the Savior. Take comfort in this: if you look to Christ, however feebly, however intermittently, however much your gaze is distracted by the waves and the wind, you are looking to Christ, and that look is the gift of the Spirit, and the Spirit does not give gifts only to withdraw them. Fifth, let the certainty that faith is God's gift drive you to prayer for others who do not yet believe. If faith were a matter of human decision, the appropriate response to unbelief would be argument and persuasion; and argument and persuasion have their place, for God uses means. But if faith is the work of the Spirit, the ultimate weapon against unbelief is prayer. Pray for your children who have heard the gospel and remain indifferent. Pray for your friends who are intellectually convinced but not yet committed. Pray for your neighbors who have never heard the gospel in a way they could understand. And pray with confidence, because you are asking God to do what He has promised to do: to send His Spirit to work faith in the hearts of His elect through the ministry of the Word. The missionary who lands on a foreign shore, the pastor who mounts the pulpit steps, the mother who reads the Bible to her children at bedtime: all of them are planting and watering, but it is God who gives the increase. So plant and water with diligence, and pray to the Lord of the harvest with expectation.

Prayer

Almighty God and most merciful Father, who hast given unto us the grace of faith, whereby we, who were dead in trespasses and sins, have been made alive in Christ and enabled to believe to the saving of our souls, we bow before Thee in adoration and gratitude. We confess that this faith is not the product of our own wisdom or will, but the sovereign work of Thy Spirit in our hearts, a gift purchased by the blood of Christ and applied by His almighty power. Left to ourselves, we would still be strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world. But Thou hast looked upon us in mercy, and by the effectual call of Thy Spirit Thou hast wrought faith in our dead hearts, uniting us to Christ in that mystical union by which all His benefits become ours. For this we give Thee thanks, knowing that every good gift and every perfect gift cometh down from above. We thank Thee, O Lord, for the ministry of the Word, the ordinary means by which Thou hast been pleased to work faith in our hearts. We bless Thee for the faithful preachers who proclaimed the gospel to us, for the parents and teachers who instructed us in the Scriptures from our youth, for the friends and fellow-believers who spoke a word in season when our souls were hungry. We acknowledge that faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, and we pray that Thou wouldst continue to send forth labourers into Thy harvest, that the sound of the gospel may go out into all the earth and Thy elect be gathered in from every tongue and tribe and nation. Strengthen, we beseech Thee, the faith Thou hast given us. We feel its weakness, its liability to falter in the hour of trial, its readiness to shrink back when the cost of discipleship is counted. As newborn babes, we desire the sincere milk of the Word, that we may grow thereby. Feed us, O Lord, at Thy table, and let the bread and the cup be to us a true means of grace, confirming our union with Christ and nourishing our souls unto eternal life. Teach us to pray without ceasing, to cast every care upon Thee, and to exercise the faith Thou hast given in a continual dependence upon Thy promises. Increase our faith, O Lord, for apart from Thee we can do nothing, and every advance in grace is Thy gift. Have mercy, we pray, upon those who have not yet believed. We bring before Thee our children, our friends, our neighbours, and the multitudes who have never heard the name of Jesus. Thou hast ordained the preaching of the gospel as the ordinary means by which faith is produced; raise up preachers, open doors, and send forth Thy Spirit to accompany the Word with power. And in Thy sovereign freedom, we pray that Thou wouldst work faith even in the hearts of those we love, that they with us may know the joy of sins forgiven and the peace that passeth understanding. Keep us, O Lord, in the faith once delivered to the saints, and bring us at last to that blessed state where faith shall give way to sight, where the dim mirror of our present knowledge shall be exchanged for the clear vision of Thy face, and where we shall no longer need to cry, "Lord, increase our faith," because we shall see Thee as Thou art and be satisfied with Thy likeness. Until that day, we rest in the promise that He who began a good work in us will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. In His most blessed name we pray, who is the author and finisher of our faith. Amen.