People of God should continually be asking, “What am I going to do about it?” The answer is unique to each of us — as is the “it”.
- Maybe your “it” is the 5,600 children who died of preventable causes while we slept last night.
- Maybe it’s that 20% of American children go to school hungry.
- Maybe it’s that 2,000 languages still don’t have even a single Bible translation.
- Maybe it’s that there are 100,000 children in our country, and many more around the world, who are held as slaves to be raped for profit — many of them 10 or 15 times a day.
- Maybe it’s that almost half the world still has no one to tell them about Jesus, and most will die without hearing the Gospel even once.
“What am I going to do about it?” According to Scripture, how you answer that question is a leading indicator of whether you’re actually saved or not.
What Our Actions Say
In Romans 2:6-8, Paul writes that eternal life is given to those who persist in doing good:
He will repay each one according to his works: eternal life to those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor, and immortality; but wrath and anger to those who are self-seeking and disobey the truth while obeying unrighteousness.
In James 2:14, James states it more directly:
What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don’t show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone?
Both were echoing Jesus’s own words from Matthew 25:31-46:
“‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
“‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me; I was in prison and you visited me.’”
We are not saved by our works. We will never earn our way into heaven, just as we will never earn our way out. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Paul makes that crystal clear in Ephesians 2:8-9:
For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift— not from works, so that no one can boast.
But we are saved for works (v 10):
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.
Lesslie Newbigin put it this way:
It is a terrible misunderstanding of the Gospel to think that it offers us salvation while relieving us of responsibility for the life of the world, for the sin and sorrow and pain with which our human life and that of our fellow men and women are so deeply interwoven.
Our actions are the sign of whether we have a saving faith or not. “Each tree is recognized by its own fruit” (Luke 6:44).
What do your actions say about the genuineness of your faith?
What We All Must Be Doing
For each of us, the specific right actions for each moment are as unique as our own life situations. There are two things, though, that every one of us should be doing.
In Matthew 22:36-40, the Pharisees test Jesus with a question. His response gives us the foundation for how to live every minute of our lives:
“Teacher, which command in the law is the greatest?”
He said to him, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”
If we dedicate ourselves to obeying these two commands, everything else will fall into place naturally.
Loving God with All Our Heart, Soul, and Strength
Jesus’s first command comes from Deuteronomy 6:4-5, a passage called the Shema:
“Listen, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.”
This is “the greatest and most important command” for every single one of us, and it’s absolutely critical to understand what it means. Remember the Pharisees. They truly believed they were loving God better than anyone else — and they put him to death when he showed up in the flesh. Are you doing any better?
These very short videos from BibleProject break down each key word in the Shema to convey what it means to love God in a way you’ve probably never experienced before:
Loving Our Neighbors
“The second is like it”, because we can’t truly love God without loving our neighbor:
“If anyone says, ‘I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar.” (1 John 4:20)
So who is our neighbor? As Jesus points out in Luke 10:25-37, it’s anyone who God puts into our path. God continually provides us with the opportunities. We have to decide how we will respond.
A Daily Commitment
If we want to hear “Well done, good and faithful servant!” at the final judgment (Matthew 25:14-30), we need to be hearing it every day. If we can’t pray each night and hear our Father say that he was proud of how we loved him and loved our neighbor, then something needs to change.
“What are you going to do about it?” isn’t a rhetorical question. How you answer is a leading indicator of whether you’re actually saved or not, because saving faith always leads to action.
Feature Photo by Tyler Lastovich