Sola Fide – Why Good Works Can Never Save Us (Why Did God Allow the Church to Split? Part 7)

Approximate Reading Time: 10 minutes

As we continue our look into the 5 “solas” of the Protestant Reformation, let’s discuss why being saved by faith isn’t just an opinion about salvation, but the only thing that makes sense.

What is faith?

I’ve done a 5 part series that digs deep into what “faith” really looks like (check it out here). For this article, let’s just get a big picture of what it means.

When we think of faith, we use it the same as believing something is true or possible. We have “faith” in our abilities as artists or athletes, treating it as some kind of force that helps us succeed. We also use “faith” as a feel-good word, hanging it on signs or tattooing it on our arms as some means of empowering ourselves.

However, biblical faith has more substance than that. To understand faith, let’s consider how we use faith when we sit down in a chair.

• First, our faith is in something. We have to see and know that a chair is really there. No one sits down in open air and just assumes a chair will be there.
• Next,  we have to examine what we’re placing our faith in. We expect chairs to meet a certain expectation before we’ll sit in them (having a seat, not held together with bubble gum, not covered in snakes, etc)
• Finally, our faith turns into action. After we’ve seen the chair and acknowledged that it looks trustworthy, we rest our weight on it.

Without these 3 things, we don’t really have faith in something. If we were to look at a chair and say it’s safe, yet be too anxious to rest in it, then we aren’t really trusting that the chair does what it claims to. Faith uses our reasoning, experience, and action to affect our lives.

Faith and Catholicism

As with all the solas, the understanding that we’re saved by faith alone was a necessary response to the Catholic church in the 1600s. So what did they believe about salvation that required men like Martin Luther to defend this biblical teaching?

Catholicism wasn’t unique in its understanding of salvation. Like every other religion, Catholicism taught that you had to do something to save yourself. Yes, Christ did an important work on the cross and made a way for us to be forgiven for our sin. However, there is a lot more to it from there.

Catholicism would agree that it was God’s grace that allows us to see our sin and need for Christ, and that faith in His death and resurrection to pay for our sins is necessary for salvation. However, faith also includes believing in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, which sees itself as the way God offers salvation to the world. In other words, salvation includes beleiving both what the Bible teachings and what the Catholic church teaches. With this, what the church says is just as binding as what God Himself has revealed.

However, forgiveness from a holy God involves even more. It’s now time to work if a person wants to earn, and keep, salvation. This first involves baptism through the Catholic church. It’s not enough to believe in Christ, because true salvation comes at this moment. It’s through baptism that sins are literally washed away and a person is justified before God.

However, that’s no guarantee of Heaven. After baptism, a person must now live a life of good works and moral living. These works include things the world would consider good and moral (being honest, helping the poor, being kind, etc). However, it also included taking part in several aspects of the church such as marriage, communion, and confession to a priest. 

There’s quite a bit involved in Catholicism, but it all breaks down to this: Christ made salvation possible, but it’s up to us to work for it. There are a number of sins we can commit to lose our sallvation, but the Church offers ways to earn “merits” to either erase past sins or act as protection against future sins. 

Think of our souls as a recharable battery – sin drains our battery, but doing good works fills it up. We can either fill our battery when it’s drained, or we can charge it up so that future sins won’t drain us too far. That’s a limited picture of how it works, but the point is to point out how up-and-down salvation is seen, and how much work is put on sinful people to keep themselves right before God. And in the end, they have to hope that they die without too much guilt on their soul, because a lifetime of good deeds can only earn so much forgiveness.

Faith and Christ

However, Catholicism gets things wrong in the same way as every other religion. The problem isn’t just that they think people need to earn their salvation, but that anyone is capable of doing any form of good that could earn favor with God by our own effort. Any religion that teaches “faith plus works” makes the fatal error of thinking that people possess any form of good on their own. 

Last time we discussed the importance of the Bible, alone, being our source of truth. So what does the Bible say about whether people are “basically good” or have the ability to do anything to contribute to their salvation?

This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. (John 3:19)

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. (Ephesians 2:1-3)

FIrst, we must recognize that everyone is guilty before God. It’s not a matter of us messing up and needing help, but that we are hopelessly in love with sin. 

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please. (Galatians 5:16-17)

We also need to see that we have no good within us. Everything about our humanity is set against God. It’s the Holy Spirit, not our innate goodness, that allows us to please God. It’s His work in our lives that brings about any kind of good thing. Our flesh, which is our natural desires and abilities, actually exist as an enemy to the work of the Spirit. 

None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. (Romans 3:10-12)

And in case it’s not clear enough, we see that we offer nothing to make ourselves right before God. We stand before Him as enemies with a lifetime of crimes standing against us. God is a good judge who must give out justice to criminals. We have no hope of being a good person, doing good deeds, or contributing any other pathetic amount of work that could ever pay for the crimes we committed. All we can do is sin, and the only thing our good deeds and moral living can grant us is death.

Christ offers everything we cannot

But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) (Ephesians 2:4-5)

Because we can do no good, God chose to intervene. He offered us a way of salvation through Jesus Christ. Not because of anything we offer (remember, we only offer sin and death), but purely because God is rich in mercy, willing to give us the complete opposite of what we deserve. It’s through Christ, alone, that He offers a way for His enemies to become His children. 

and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:6-7)

God didn’t give us a half-measure through Christ. Faith in Christ isn’t just the first step of our salvation journey – it’s through Christ that God pulls us out of our wickedness, washes our sin, and make us His own. Forever. 

For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

This is the verse we need when we’re discussing sola fide, our justification through faith alone. God so plainly tells us that we are saved by one thing, and one thing only. Faith. And it’s only through God that we can exercise true, biblical faith as we discussed in our chair example earlier.

• God shows us the depth of our sin and the Savior who came to bring us forgiveness
• He uses the Bible to show us that Christ lived the perfect life that we never could, and because of that He could take the punishment for our sin, and in exchange He offers us His righteousness
• Finally, God allows us to cry out to Jesus Christ to save us from our sin and give us the forgiveness He purchased on the cross

That faith, and absolutely nothing else, is what saves us. And because we offer nothing to earn our salvation, we also offer nothing to lose it. Our salvation is purely a gift from God, and He is too good to allow such wretched, evil-loving creatures to be responsible for earning or keeping it.

More than that, the fact that we can’t “boast” about our salvation is evidence that we can contribute absolutely nothing to the process. Even if we needed to do a little good to contribute 1% to our salvation, we would have reason to brag about that 1% that we were capable of doing. 

And before moving on, as if it wasn’t obvious enough, God literally tells us that our salvation is “not as a result of works.” Sola fide. Faith, alone, justifies us before God.

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)

And once we have our eternal security in Jesus Christ, our true life can begin. We can go beyond the basic concern of our guilt before God, because that has been dealt with forever. Now, finally, we can live the lives we were always meant to live. We can do good. Not to earn our salvation, and not because we are good, but because God grants us the Holy Spirit to enable us to be more like Christ.

In case we ever start to think that we are suddenly good people, all we need to do is return to Galatians 5:16-23. It’s the Holy Spirit, who was given to us after our faith in Christ, who enables these good works. If we want to do good and please God, we need to stop trying and simply get out of the way.

Faith, so simple and so offensive

Salvation is incredibly basic. There isn’t a series of steps like we’re applying for a bank loan. Salvation through faith shows the glory of God strictly because He doesn’t ask the impossible – instead, He sent Christ to do the impossible so that He could save people who love evil too much to care about loving God. 

And because of that, our standing before God boils down to this:

• Have you sinned? (Yes,  read Romans 3:23)
• Does sin need to be punished? (Yes, read Romans 6:23)
• Are you a good enough person to escape that punishment? (No, read Romans 3:10)
• Did God offer a way to be forgiven, even though we can’t earn it and don’t deserve it? (Yes! Read Romans 5:8)

God is good. He sent Jesus Christ, who deserved no punishment, to instead take our punishment. In exchange, Christ offers to give us the perfect life He lived. God treats Christ as though He committed  our crimes, and as a result He treats us as though we’d lived the perfect and obedient life of Christ.

Yet this righteousness isn’t just given to us, nor do we earn it. Salvation is simple, but it can also feel incredibly difficult. The hardest part about salvation isn’t earning it, but accepting that we can’t earn it. That’s because salvation is earned by Christ. 

So what do we do? What does sola fide look like?

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel. (Mark 1:15)

First, we repent of our sins. That means we turn away from those things we once thought would bring us joy and satisfaction, but instead made us enemies of God. We hate them becuase God hates them.

if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved (Romans 10:9)

As we turn away from sin, we turn to Christ. We ask Him to save us, trusting that faith in His death on the cross paid for our sin, and that His resurrection proved His victory. We ask Him to be our Savior, saving us from our sin and making us right before God.

and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. (John 10:28)

Christ offers eternal life. No one can remove our salvation, not even us.

That is sola fide. That’s what it looks like to know that our salvation is 100% faith in Christ’s work on the cross and 0% work on our part. 

Repent, believe, and live a life of finding ultimate satisfaction in God. Do nothing to impress God or earn salvation, but do everything out of a desire to love what God loves and hate what He hates.