April 18

True faith produces results

“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Phil 2:12-13).
“For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also” (James 2:26).

God worketh in you, therefore you can work; otherwise it would be impossible. God worketh in you, therefore you must work; otherwise He will cease from working.
—John Wesley.

True faith should result in God’s work in us, and be quickly followed by God’s work through us. Devils believe, but they do no good works; they only tremble. That is about all some believers do, they tremble. Let us beware of a workless faith.
—Reader Harris.

Don’t wait for something to turn up, but turn it up yourself. The common apology for indolence, which clothes itself with the sanctity of a resignation to the Divine will has been too long employed. . . . To wait God’s time in this matter (revival) is not to wait at all, and that sitting still or standing still is not the submission of piety, but an expression of the sloth and recklessness of unbelief.
It is an unhappy division that has been made between faith and works. Though in my intellect I may divide them, just as in the candle I know there is both light and heat; but yet, put out that candle, and they are both gone! One remains not without the other; so it is with faith and works.
—Selden.

It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.
—Phillips Brooks.

So he died for his faith. That is fine—
More than most of us do.
But stay, can you add to that line
That he lived for it, too? . . .

But to live: every day to live out
All the truth that he dreamt,
While his friends met his conduct with doubt,
And the world with contempt—

Was it thus that he plodded ahead,
Never turning aside?
Then we’ll talk of the life that he led—
Never mind how he died.
—Ernest H. Crosby.

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