 | The Reverend Doctor Cathy Northrup was born in Ft. Meade, MD, and was raised in a variety of places in the United State and Germany, as her father was in Counter Intelligence with the Army. She graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Hamline University in St. Paul, MN, with a double major in English and Religion. She graduated from Georgetown Law Center in Washington, DC, and practiced law with the Federal Reserve Board for a number of years before attending Union Theological Seminaryin Richmond, VA. She graduated from Union, and served several churches in North and South Carolina, at the same time obtaining her Doctor of Ministry from Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, NJ. Dr. Northrup is currently the Pastor/Head of Staff of First Presbyterian Church, Wichita, KS. She is married and has two black Labrador dogs who were rescued from abusive situations. You can contact Dr. Northrup at cnorthrup@firstpresbywichita.org or by phone at (316) 263-0248, ext. 26. |
Religion
2008-12-31 10:43:00
Accepting Jesus Christ as your Savior
Question: All my life I have heard that all one has to do is to accept our Lord Jesus Christ as his or her personal Savior, and he or she will be saved. But I also read in James 2:14-16, “What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?” Can someone tell me, saying and meaning you accept our Lord as your personal Savior seems to be a lot easier than doing that plus a non-quantified number of works. What does it really take?
Answer: Your question points up a seeming paradox in Christian faith. Are we saved by our faith or by our works, or even, are we saved by some combination of the two? This seeming paradox arises when people simply quote, out of context, two particular passages. Paul writes in Romans 10:9: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” James writes in James 2:17: “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”
The answer to this question is that we are not saved by anything that is “ours”. We are saved by God, and God alone. God justifies us by grace through faith; that is, it is even God who gives us faith. This is the Reformed Biblical position. This stands in opposition to the old Catholic position that we are saved by our works, and in opposition to the Arminian position that somehow it is our acceptance of God that saves us, that acceptance being our “work.”
Further, it is even God who allows us to do good works through faith. James writes what he writes because he is trying to show that simply saying “I believe” or “I am saved” is not what God wants. True faith lives itself out in good works. And yes, even these good works are enabled by God through the power of his spirit.
This has always been a difficult concept for we human beings to understand. That is the mystery of how God works. His ways are not our ways.
