How to Accomplish God’s Will
This is my second thought today from John 6:24-35, the gospel passage from Proper 13B. It’s a tightly packed passage!
In verses 28-29 Jesus says:
28They said to him, “What do we need to do to perform God’s works?” 29Jesus answered, “This is God’s work: That you put your trust [or believe] in the one who sent him.
My company just released The Jesus Paradigm by Dr. David Alan Black. This is a book about discipleship and the ministry we need to do as Christians. One of the questions I have heard most frequently about it is that with so much about doing, how is it that Christians are supposed to do. What happened to faith?
Well, one very Biblical answer is that faith is working. Perhaps if people studied John more, it would help mediate between the positions of Paul and James. Paul is talking about the uselessness of works apart from faith. James talks about the uselessness of faith without works. Jesus here tells us that faith is works.
Now this may sound heretical to many, but the fact is that we’ve departed from the teaching of Jesus on this. There is no sense in reading what Jesus has to say that Christians are going to sit around believing stuff. The sense is that belief is a profoundly life-altering thing. Putting one’s trust in Jesus is not easy or trivial. If you put your trust in Jesus, then he will change everything about you.
This is the answer to how we can do the work of disciples–we put our trust in Jesus and he works in us. At the risk of sounding too commercial, let me mention the title of another book that I publish–Disciples: Jesus With Us. Discipleship is you following Jesus in one sense, but in another it’s Jesus in you, following Jesus.
