How Do You Walk?
I have always found this passage to be very encouraging because we tend to receive Jesus one way and then try and walk in Him another. Let me explain. How do we receive Jesus? We receive Him by faith, according to Ephesians 2:8-9. Well since we receive Him by faith doesn’t it make sense that we walk in Him by faith as well? Paul writes in Galatians 3:3, “Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?” But this is what we tend to do, we receive Jesus by faith and then we try to walk in Him daily by our own effort and good works. We begin in the Spirit and then we try to perfect ourselves with our own human effort. This is a foolish thing for us to do according to the Scriptures. So, what do we do about it? I know the irony there; we aren’t supposed to DO anything necessarily, but there you go. I guess the question is how do we make the shift from our own fleshly works to walking in the Spirit?
On the one hand James 2 tells us that faith without works is dead, and Ephesians 2:10 tells us that God has prepared good works for us to walk in. Because of that, I am not saying that we as followers of Jesus will never do good works, that’s not it at all. What I am referring to is the fact that we cannot begin our Christian life by the power of God’s Spirit and by faith in Jesus, and then later abandon that power and our faith in favor of our own human effort. In other words, we receive Jesus by faith, we get saved because of the Spirit at work in us, therefore we have to live our lives by faith, resting in the power of the Spirit at work in us. Galatians 2:20 says it this way, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
We live by faith, just like we were saved by faith, we walk with Christ by trusting in Him and His finished work on our behalf. We were established by faith and rooted by faith and therefore we must be built up, or grow in Him by faith as well, and we must abound in faith! It is not a little thing but it is a huge thing, we must walk by faith. This is the encouragement that I would like to close with, take the pressure off of yourself, this is not a performance, your life in Christ is not about you impressing anyone else. As followers of Christ we believe Him for our salvation, and we need to believe Him for our daily walk as well. After all, it’s not about you and I, it’s about Him, and the more we focus on Him, the better off we will be.
Image Borrowed from VectorStock
