Sola Fide

Philippians 3:9
"and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith".

Galatians 2:16
"yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but though faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, becasue by works of the law no one will be justified". 

Romans 5:1
"Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ". 

Salvation comes through faith alone. Not only did the Reformers confront and challenge the issue of grace or the absence of grace in the church, they also very much challenged the notion that it is more than faith alone that brings salvation. 500 years ago, faith was very absent from the doctrine of the church. People could work their way to heaven, buy their way out of hell, and do enough good to please God on their very own. Sola Fide came to challenge every single aspect of that notion. Salvation only comes to those who have faith. Even more importantly faith is not a reason someone is saved, faith just makes a way for God to extend salvation and save a person. Faith is like a conduit for God to extend a hand down and save a person by justifying them in the life and death of His Son Jesus. Yesterday's verses, along with the verses given above show the truth that salvation comes to a person through faith alone.

First, there is nothing a man can do on His own to be justified or saved. Justification is another layer of the doctrine of salvation. Justification means that God declares a person right before Him, justifies Him in His presence, and once more, through this simple declaration and act by God, a person is brought peace with God. For a person to be justified by God, they must have faith. And when a person simply has faith in God as a promise keeping God, God then can extend His legal and spiritual declaration upon the person and declare them right and make them righteous in His sight.

Second, once a person has been declared right and justified by God, the Bible is also very clear that He will never undeclare that person to be right or justified. When God saves someone He seals them and preserves them. The Bible is very clear from Genesis 3 all the way through Revelation 22, that once God declares something about someone, that declaration never goes away. So when someone is justified before God, they will, for all eternity, be justified before Him. And since faith is what gives God the declaring ability, once a person has faith in God, they will always have faith in God. Yes, sometimes a faith strains and weakens. But once a person has faith, if they truly had faith to begin with, they will always have faith in God.

Third, faith does not come from a person, but is given to the person by God. Augustine said it rightly, "what God requires of man, He always gives man". And as Ephesians 2, Romans 12, and many other places, both Old and New Testament show, faith is given to a person from God. Without God first working in the life and heart of a person, they will never have faith on their own. This means that God will always act first in the person by bringing them to life and planting a faith in Him, into their heart. And as I have already shown, once a person has faith, given to them by God, God will then extend His legal hand of justification and save the person and reconcile them to Himself. So faith alone not only teaches that faith is the only way God justifies, but faith also comes from God alone.

So the declaration of Sola Fide is huge for the salvation of souls. Faith alone brings the salvation of God; not works, not goodness, not anything. But the faith that saves alone is first a gift from God alone and second never alone itself. The book of James is all about the faith that God gives to a person is never alone, in that it always is partnered with visible fruit. But the fruit is not what saves, faith alone is what saves. So Sola Fide is a very comforting truth in that God gives us the gift of faith to start and then justifies us by the faith He has just given us alone. And since salvation is by grace from God alone, we can rest assured in the faith that saves is from God alone and in His wisdom He chose to start and complete the work of saving us, in spite of the depraved condemned guilty state we were born in. Salvation is by the grace of God alone through the faith in God alone all done by the work of Christ alone only told in the Scripture alone and all for the glory of God alone. What a great comfort it is to know that in God's plan alone, He chose us to be a part of it. This strengthens our faith alone.