Devotional 73: The Acts of Faith: Receiving, Resting, and Believing

The Confession Read

By this faith a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein; and acteth differently upon that which each particular passage thereof containeth; yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God for this life and that which is to come. But the principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life, by virtue of the covenant of grace.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 14, Section 2

Introduction

There is a habit of mind, common among those who have been Christians long enough to have forgotten the astonishment of first believing, that treats the acts of faith as though they were a single, undifferentiated thing. We speak of "having faith" as though faith were a possession to be stored in a drawer, like a spare key or an insurance policy, to be taken out when needed and otherwise left undisturbed. But the Westminster Divines, with the pastoral precision that marks every line of their Confession, will not permit this reduction. Faith is not a monolith. It is a living, responsive, intelligent capacity that acts in distinct ways upon distinct objects. It does not greet a command with the same response with which it greets a promise, nor does it stand before a threat in the same posture with which it rests upon Christ. And at the center of all its operations, stands one principal act on which all the others depend: accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone. The man who has been a believer for forty years may, if he is not careful, lose sight of this. He may imagine that faith is simply the settled conviction that Christianity is true, the intellectual furniture of a mind long accustomed to orthodox propositions. He may recite the creed without his pulse quickening, read the threatenings of Scripture without a shudder, and hear the promises as though they were the faint echo of a bell rung long ago. But the faith that saves has never been mere assent. It is assent, to be sure; it believes to be true whatsoever God has revealed, but it is also trust, embrace, and surrender. It yields, it trembles, it receives. And above all, it closes with Christ, not as one truth among many but as the Truth in whom all other truths find their coherence and their end. The Confession, having established in Section 1 that faith is the Spirit's gift and that it is ordinarily wrought and strengthened by the Word, sacraments, and prayer, now turns to the question that every thoughtful believer must eventually ask: What does this faith actually do? Upon what does it fix its gaze, and how does it respond to the varied landscape of divine revelation? The answer is both more specific and more Christ-centered than many suppose. Faith believes the whole Word because God speaks it, responds fittingly to each part of that Word, and finds its center of gravity in the person and work of Jesus Christ. To understand these three movements in their proper relation is to understand what it means, not merely to be religious, but to be a Christian.

Scripture Foundation

The Apostle Paul, writing to the church at Thessalonica, gives thanks to God without ceasing for this very thing: "For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe" (1 Thessalonians 2:13). Here is the foundation of the first clause of our section. Faith does not believe the Scriptures because the church commends them, nor because their moral teaching is elevating, nor because their historical reliability has been demonstrated to a reasonable probability. Faith believes the Scriptures because they are what Paul says they are: "in truth, the word of God." The ground of faith's assent is not the testimony of men but the authority of God Himself speaking. The human messenger is acknowledged, but the divine origin is asserted. And Paul adds a striking phrase: this word "effectually worketh" in those who believe. The Word is not inert; it is active, achieving the purpose for which God sent it. Faith assents to the Word because it is God's Word, and in assenting, faith discovers that the Word is already at work in the soul that receives it. No one can receive the Word as God's Word except the Spirit who inspired it opens the heart to its divine authority. This is why the Confession places this section immediately after the teaching that faith is the Spirit's work. This is precisely what the Apostle John records of the Samaritans who believed in our Lord. In John 4:42 they say to the woman who first told them of Jesus: "Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world." Their faith had passed from a mediated trust in human testimony to a direct apprehension of the truth. The Confession's language echoes this movement: the Christian "believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein." Not for the authority of the preacher, the parent, or the church, however legitimate their instrumental role, but for the authority of God. Only the voice of God, heard in and through the Scriptures, can command the assent of the soul in the way that saving faith requires. John returns to this theme in his first epistle: "He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son" (1 John 5:10). To disbelieve the Word is not merely to commit an intellectual error but to call the God of truth a liar. Yet faith does not rest in a general assent to the truth of Scripture. It acts differently upon different parts of Scripture, and the Confession enumerates three corresponding postures: yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises. The prophet Isaiah gives us a portrait of the second of these in a verse of singular force in the Old Testament. The Lord declares through the prophet: "To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word" (Isaiah 66:2). The Hebrew verb chared carries the sense of a physical shudder, a visceral reaction to the weight and majesty of what has been spoken. This is not the trembling of the slave who fears the lash and would flee if he could; it is the trembling of the creature who has heard the voice of the Creator and knows that every syllable is freighted with an authority that cannot be deflected or negotiated. The man who trembles at God's Word has not ceased to trust God's mercy; he is precisely the one upon whom God looks with favor. But he has learned that the God of mercy is also the God of judgment, and that the same Scriptures that speak of grace also speak of wrath. Faith does not edit the Bible to retain the comforting passages and discard the disturbing ones. It receives the whole counsel of God, and where God threatens, faith trembles. But trembling is not the only response, nor the final one. The author of Hebrews, cataloging the heroes of faith, describes the patriarchs in terms that illuminate the third posture of the Confession's list. "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth" (Hebrews 11:13). The Greek word translated "embraced" is aspasamenoi, from the verb aspazomai, which means to greet warmly, to welcome, to draw to oneself with affection. It is the same word used of the friends who greeted Paul at the harbor and of the affectionate farewells exchanged between believers. Faith does not merely acknowledge that the promises exist or that they are true; it runs toward them, clasps them to the heart, and refuses to let them go. And notice the context: the patriarchs embraced the promises precisely when those promises remained unfulfilled. They "saw them afar off." The embrace of faith is not contingent upon possession. It is the very act of laying hold of what God has pledged before the eyes have seen it materialize, and it is this embrace that sustains the pilgrim through the long journey toward the city whose builder and maker is God. But the Confession, having described the general office of faith and its varied responses to the different parts of Scripture, now presses deeper, and the language shifts from the descriptive to the definitive. "The principal acts of saving faith," it declares, "are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life, by virtue of the covenant of grace." Every preceding clause has been leading to this. Faith believes the Word because God speaks it, responds to commands with obedience, to threats with trembling, to promises with embrace. But the thing that makes faith saving, the thing that distinguishes the faith of the Christian from the faith of the demon who also believes and trembles, is that saving faith closes with Christ. It accepts Him, receives Him, and rests upon Him. The Apostle John, in the prologue to his Gospel, sets this forth with lapidary clarity: "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name" (John 1:12). To receive Christ and to believe on His name are parallel descriptions of the same act. The Greek elabon means to take hold of, to grasp, to make one's own. Faith is the hand that reaches out and takes what God offers; what He offers is not a set of propositions but a Person. Or more precisely, it is a Person through whom every promise becomes "yea" and "amen" to the glory of God. The Apostle Paul, writing to the Galatians, describes this same act with a personal intensity that is unmatched anywhere in his letters: "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20). Here the principal acts are compressed into a single luminous sentence: Christ loved him and gave Himself for him; Christ lives in him; his entire present existence is "by the faith of the Son of God." Faith is both the instrument and the atmosphere, the channel through which Christ's life flows into the believer and the element in which the believer moves. And all of this is "by virtue of the covenant of grace," as the Confession adds, not because Paul earned it, but because God pledged it in a covenant ordered in all things and sure.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly took up the nature of saving faith, they were not writing in a vacuum. They were refining a century of Reformation teaching against three persistent errors, and every word of this section bears the marks of that refinement. The first error, and perhaps the most subtle, was the reduction of faith to mere intellectual assent. The Roman Catholic theology of the Counter-Reformation, codified at the Council of Trent, distinguished between fides informis (unformed faith, bare intellectual assent to revealed truth) and fides formata (faith formed by charity, which alone justifies). In this scheme, faith in the sense of believing the truths of the gospel is a necessary preliminary, but it does not itself unite the sinner to Christ or receive His righteousness. Justification requires the infusion of the supernatural habit of charity, by which the believer is made inherently righteous. The Reformers rejected this entire framework. For them, the faith that justifies is not mere assent awaiting the supplement of love; it is fiduciary — a trusting, receiving, resting faith that lays hold of Christ Himself. The Confession captures this by distinguishing between the general act of believing everything God has revealed (which even demons may do in some sense) and the principal acts that are uniquely saving: accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ. Faith assents to the truth of the whole Bible, but it does not stop at assent. It moves through assent to trust, and it trusts not a proposition but a Person. Thus the Apostle Paul can tell the Philippian jailer, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved" (Acts 16:31), and the Jerusalem Council can declare that "we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved" (Acts 15:11). The object of saving faith is Christ, and the act of saving faith is receiving Him as He is offered in the gospel. The second error was the Antinomian tendency to disregard the commands and threatenings of Scripture on the ground that believers are no longer under the law. Various groups in the seventeenth century, heirs of the radical wing of the Reformation, taught that because Christ has fulfilled the law for believers, believers need not concern themselves with the law's precepts or its sanctions. The law is for the ungodly; the gospel is for the saints, and the gospel contains no commands and no threats, only promises. Against this, the Divines insisted that faith "acteth differently upon that which each particular passage thereof containeth; yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings." The same faith that embraces the promises also obeys the commands and trembles at the threats. The Christian is not free from the law as a rule of life; he is free from the law as a covenant of works. And the threats of Scripture are not irrelevant to the believer; they are the means by which God preserves His people in the path of obedience, warning them of the consequences of sin and driving them back to Christ. A faith that can read the warnings of Hebrews and the denunciations of the prophets without a tremor is not a strong faith but a presumptuous one. The third error, less organized but perennially recurring, was the separation of faith from its specific Christological content. In every age, there are those who speak of "faith" in the abstract: faith as a psychological state, a positive attitude, a general trust in the benevolence of the universe, without reference to the historical Christ who died and rose. The Confession will not permit this abstraction. Faith has an object, and that object is Christ, and Christ is not a symbol or a principle but a Person who did specific things at a specific time and place. The principal acts are "accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone" — this is not one option among many. It is the defining core without which everything else is a frame around an empty canvas. Robert Shaw observes the careful architecture of the Divines' argument. The first clause establishes the broad foundation: faith assents to everything God reveals because God reveals it. The second clause introduces differentiation: faith responds differently to commands, threats, and promises. But the third clause is the climax, and Shaw notes that the word "principal" is carefully chosen. The other acts of faith are genuine and necessary, but they are not saving in themselves. A man may obey the commands of Scripture without saving faith, tremble at the threats without saving faith (Felix did so under Paul's preaching), and even embrace the promises in a certain sense, as the stony-ground hearers did. What distinguishes saving faith from all these counterfeits is that it accepts, receives, and rests upon Christ. Hodge draws attention to the phrase "by virtue of the covenant of grace." Faith does not operate in a legal vacuum. It lays hold of Christ as He is presented in the covenant: the Mediator who has undertaken to do for sinners what they could not do for themselves. Outside the covenant, faith would be presumption, for no sinner has any natural claim upon Christ. Within the covenant, faith is the appointed instrument: the hand stretched out to receive what the covenant promises. Hodge notes that the three terms "accepting, receiving, and resting" correspond to three aspects of one act: the voluntariness of taking Christ as offered, the passivity of receiving a gift rather than performing a work, and the permanence of leaning the whole weight of one's soul upon Christ's sufficiency.

Theological Depth

Calvin, in Book III of the Institutes, defines faith with a precision that undergirds every line of this section. Faith, he writes, is "a firm and certain knowledge of the divine benevolence toward us, founded on the truth of the free promise in Christ, and revealed to our minds and sealed on our hearts by the Holy Spirit." The knowledge of which Calvin speaks is not the bare cognition of facts but a personal acquaintance that transforms the knower. And it is always knowledge of "the divine benevolence toward us," not a generic theism but a specific confidence that God is favorable to me, that His promises are addressed to me, that Christ died for me. This is the "accepting" and "receiving" of the Confession transposed into the key of personal assurance. Calvin also anticipated the Confession's distinction between the general and the principal acts of faith. In his treatment of the relationship between faith and the Word, he insists that faith embraces the whole of Scripture, commands and threats as well as promises, but that its principal gaze is fixed upon Christ, in whom all the promises converge. "We do not obtain salvation," Calvin writes, "by our promptitude to embrace as true whatever the Lord has revealed in his Word, but when we lean upon the promise of mercy, which is offered to us in Christ." The general assent is the porch; the personal trust in Christ is the temple. And no man is saved by standing in the porch. Calvin also addresses an objection that arises naturally. If faith assents to the whole Word because it is God's Word, must the believer be convinced of the divine authority of every book, every doctrine, before he can exercise saving faith? Calvin answers: faith begins with Christ, and from Christ it extends to the whole of Scripture. The believer may not answer every critical objection, but he knows Christ, and knowing Christ, he recognizes the Shepherd's voice throughout the Scriptures. The authority of Scripture is not something the believer constructs by rational investigation and then brings to Christ as a finished product; it is something he discovers as he meets Christ in the Scriptures. Watson, in his Body of Divinity, distinguishes the acts of faith with memorable clarity. Faith, Watson says, has eyes to read the commands and a will to obey; it has ears to hear the threatenings and a heart to tremble; it has hands to take hold of the promises and a mouth to feed upon Christ. But the crown of all its acts is what Watson calls "the appropriating act" — by which faith says, with Thomas, "My Lord and my God." "A man may believe that a medicine will cure the disease, yet if he does not take it, he will die. So a man may believe that Christ is a Savior, yet if he does not apply Christ to his own soul, he will perish." The principal acts are precisely this application — the movement from "Christ is a Savior" to "Christ is my Savior." Thomas Boston observes that accepting Christ involves the whole soul: the understanding perceives Christ's sufficiency, the will consents to take Christ on His terms, and the affections embrace Him with delight. Faith is not a single-faculty operation but the whole soul turning toward Christ. William Guthrie, in The Christian's Great Interest, offers a practical test: saving faith closes with Christ in all His offices — not only as Priest to atone but as Prophet to teach and King to rule. "Many embrace Christ as a priest to save them, who yet reject him as a king to rule over them." The faith that saves takes a whole Christ, for the whole Christ is offered in the covenant. So the Confession insists that faith receives Christ "for justification, sanctification, and eternal life" — not picking among His benefits but receiving Christ Himself. Turretin, in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, addresses the question of whether faith justifies as an act or as an instrument, and his answer is essential for understanding the Confession's language. Faith does not justify because of any inherent virtue in the act of believing. It justifies only as the instrument by which the believer is united to Christ, in whom all righteousness resides. Therefore the Confession describes the principal acts as "accepting, receiving, and resting" rather than "performing, achieving, and meriting." Faith is receptive: the beggar's empty hand, not the rich man's full purse. Because it is empty, it is the right instrument for receiving a salvation entirely of grace.

Puritan Application

First, learn to read the Bible as faith reads it — not as a collection of interesting documents but as the voice of the living God. The Confession declares that faith "believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein." When you open the Scriptures, you are submitting to an audience with the Almighty. His Word demands not evaluation but obedience, not negotiation but surrender. Ask yourself honestly: when you read a command that cuts against your inclinations, do you bow before it, or begin explaining why it does not apply? When you encounter a threat of judgment, do you feel the tremor Isaiah describes, or has familiarity rendered you immune? The faith that saves receives the whole Word, not the parts that suit its temperament. If your heart has grown dull, pray that the Spirit would restore your capacity to hear Scripture as God's Word — living, active, and sharper than any two-edged sword. Second, distinguish carefully between the general acts of faith and the principal acts, and examine yourself by the latter. A man may believe the Bible to be true, may obey its commands with a measure of external conformity, and may even experience fear at its threatenings, without ever having closed with Christ. The demons believe and tremble, and their orthodoxy exceeds that of many a professing Christian. What distinguishes saving faith from every counterfeit is not the breadth of its assent but the direction of its trust. Do you accept Christ as He is offered in the gospel — not a Christ of your own devising, not a Savior who forgives without transforming, but the Christ of Scripture in all His offices? Do you receive Him — not merely His gifts but His person, not merely His benefits but His lordship? And do you rest upon Him — not occasionally, when your own resources fail, but continuously, as the sole ground of your acceptance with God? These questions are searching, and they are meant to be. But they are not meant to drive you to despair. They are meant to drive you to Christ, who receives all who come to Him and casts out none. Third, let the different parts of Scripture produce their proper effects in your soul. The Confession teaches that faith yields obedience to the commands, trembles at the threatenings, and embraces the promises. A healthy faith exhibits all three. If you are obeying but never trembling, you may be drifting toward presumptuous familiarity with God. If you are trembling but never embracing, you may be sliding toward servile fear. If you are embracing but neglecting the commands, you may be fashioning a Christ who saves from sin's penalty but not its power — and that Christ is an idol. Read the commands and ask the Spirit for grace to obey. Read the threats and let them drive you to the cross, where the judgment you deserve fell upon your Substitute. Read the promises and embrace them as the pledged word of a God who cannot lie. In all of this, keep your eyes fixed upon Christ, in whom the commands are fulfilled, the threats are exhausted, and the promises are ratified. Fourth, when your faith wavers, recall that its object is not your faith itself but Christ. The believer who is most aware of his faith's weakness may still be exercising saving faith, because saving faith is not defined by its strength but by its object. A trembling hand that takes hold of Christ is a believing hand. A faltering voice that cries, "Lord, save me," is a believing voice. The principal acts are "accepting, receiving, and resting" — none of these require strength in the subject. A weak man can accept a gift; a child can receive a present; and resting is precisely ceasing from one's own efforts. If you are looking to Christ, even with the faintest glance, you are looking to the One who said a bruised reed He would not break. The only question that matters is: "Is my faith in Christ?" And if it is, then however weak, it is the faith of God's elect, and the God who gave it will sustain it. Fifth, let the covenantal context of faith fill you with confidence. The Confession adds that the principal acts are performed "by virtue of the covenant of grace." This is not a throwaway phrase; it is the theological anchor of everything that precedes it. Faith does not operate in a legal vacuum but within a covenant whose terms are entirely of grace, whose Mediator is Christ, and whose promises are ratified by His blood. When you accept Christ, you are accepting the One whom the Father has appointed for the salvation of His people. When you receive Christ, you are receiving what the covenant guarantees. When you rest upon Christ, you are resting upon the surety of a better covenant. Let this truth banish the anxiety that creeps into every believer's heart: the fear that somehow, despite God's promises, the transaction may fail. It cannot fail, because it rests not on the believer's grip upon Christ but on Christ's grip upon the believer, and Christ's grip is the grip of the covenant-keeping God who has sworn by Himself that the heirs of promise might have strong consolation.

Prayer

Almighty God, who hast revealed Thyself in the Holy Scriptures and who speakest therein with an authority that heaven and earth must obey, we bow before Thee in the confession that Thy Word is truth and worthy of our full assent. Forgive us for the times we have read Thy commands without yielding obedience, heard Thy threatenings without trembling, and considered Thy promises without embracing them. Grant us the faith that receiveth whatsoever Thou hast revealed, not because it pleases our reason, but because Thou, the God of truth, hast spoken it. And let that faith not rest in general orthodoxy, but press through to the principal acts by which it layeth hold of eternal life. We bless Thee for the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Son made flesh, in whom all the promises of God are yea and amen. We thank Thee that He is freely offered to us in the gospel, and that the principal acts of saving faith are to accept Him, to receive Him, and to rest upon Him alone for our justification, our sanctification, and our eternal life. Enable us, we beseech Thee, so to close with Christ. Let not our faith be a distant admiration of His excellencies but a personal appropriation of His person and work. We would say with the Apostle that Christ died for sinners, and more, that He loved us and gave Himself for us. And we would rest the whole weight of our souls, for time and for eternity, upon His finished work, confident that He who began a good work in us will perform it until the day of His appearing. Teach us, O Lord, to live by this faith in every circumstance. When Thy commands press hard upon our rebellious wills, grant us grace to yield the obedience that faith produces. When Thy threatenings sound in our ears, let them drive us not to despair but to the cross, where every threat was satisfied in the sufferings of our Substitute. And when Thy promises shine before us like stars in a dark sky, grant us the faith to embrace them before we possess them, to greet them from afar as the patriarchs did, confessing that we are strangers and pilgrims whose true citizenship is in heaven. Have mercy, we pray, upon those who have not yet closed with Christ. Many are they who believe the Bible and tremble at its warnings and yet have never received the Savior whom the Bible proclaims. O Spirit of Christ, who alone canst work saving faith in the hearts of the elect, do Thy sovereign work. Take the general assent of the merely orthodox and transform it into the personal trust of the truly regenerate. Take those who stand at the threshold of the kingdom and draw them in, that they may know the joy of accepting, receiving, and resting upon the Lord Jesus Christ. And keep us, we pray, in this faith until the day when faith shall give way to sight, when the Savior we now receive by faith we shall see with our eyes, and when the rest we now enjoy by trust shall be perfected in the rest that remaineth for the people of God. Until that day, grant us to live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved us and gave Himself for us. Amen.