During a youth weekend retreat in the seventh grade, my friends and I attempted to stay awake all night. Around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., we found ourselves huddled over flashlights, reading the middle chapters of the Book of Revelation. We encountered imagery of dragons, bowls of wrath, and mysterious marks. For most of us, it was our first time reading this part of the Bible, and we were terrified. However, it is easy to mistake the illusion of faith for the real thing when fear is the only motivator.
While I have grown since then, certain biblical texts remain unsettling. These passages are not scary in the same way as those childhood stories; in some ways, they are even more profound. Perhaps the most sobering text in all of Scripture is found in Matthew 7, where Jesus speaks directly about the danger of a false identity in Christ in crisis:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name, drive out demons in your name, and do many miracles in your name?’ Then I will announce to them, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you lawbreakers!’” (Matt. 7:21-23).
Now there’s a text that will make you take a second look at your life. What’s truly disturbing is the sense of absolute and complete surprise you find in these people. It never, until that very moment, entered their minds that they might be unknown to Jesus. They had lived – possibly for years, or even decades, under the delusion that they were safe. Secure. True servants of Jesus.
If Jesus said what He meant and meant what He said, then it’s not only possible but a certain reality that there will be people among us now that will go to their grave convinced they are eternally safe only to find out they had lived their entire lives in eternal danger. This is indeed a terrifying prospect.
So how do we know if our faith is real? The Bible gives us the answer:
What use is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone says he has faith, but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? In the same way, faith also, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself (James 2:14-17).
How do we know our faith is real? It’s by a changed life exhibiting good works. To be clear, it is not these works that save us; not at all. It is that these good external works show the reality of what has happened on the inside of us. If our faith is real, then our lives will show us.
But wait – doesn’t that contradict what Jesus was saying in the above passage? After all, the people in those verses were doing what seemed to be great things for God, weren’t they?
Apparently, despite the things the people in Matthew 7 were doing, they were not only lawbreakers; they were also not doing the will of the Father. What, then, is the will of the Father? Well Jesus tells us the answer to that very plainly:
“For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:40).
With that, we have a firm progression, and also the answer to our initial question: The will of God is that we believe. Those who truly believe will have their lives changed. A changed life results in visible fruit. And that visible fruit is how we know if our faith is real.
Read more from Michael Kelley »
This article originally appeared on thinke.org and is reposted here by permission.