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Faith and Works

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 19, 1870

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 32, No. 5.

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Faith and Works.

By Emily L. Canright

By an act of disobedience, Adam fell from his first estate. He lost his home in Eden, and was driven from the tree of life, and so lost his hope of immortality. He was in a deplorable condition, a criminal before God, doomed from hence forth to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, and finally to die and return to dust from whence he was taken. God loved him, and the angels pitying, “cast their crowns from their heads in sorrow.” Yet the threatened doom was just, and there was no reprieve. Adam must die; and that would have been his final end, and in him the end of the whole race of mankind, had not Heaven provided means for his redemption. “God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him, should not perish but have everlasting life.” But what is it to believe on the Son of God? To believe that he was the Christ merely? No; for nearly all the civilized world believe that. To believe that he died on the cross? No; for we have history, sacred and profane to prove that statement true. To believe that he left the courts of Heaven and all the glory of the Father, and came down to this lower world, and walked in its humble sphere, and then suffered an ignominious death on the cross to redeem a fallen world? That is nearer to believing on him; but that is not all. But believe, that he died for me. Believe, that though you lost your life in Adam, through faith in Christ you are redeemed.
But with this faith you must have works. They constitute another element equally essential to the Christian character. We are not saved “by works, lest any man should boast;” yet we can never inherit eternal life without them. They are the clear stream that flows from a fountain pure, the good fruit of a good tree, that which shows our faith to be a living faith. “Ye see then how by works a man is justified and not by faith only. For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”
EMILY L. CANRIGHT.