In Galatians 2: 16, Paul says this: 'We know that a person is put right with God only through faith in Jesus Christ, never by doing what the Law requires.' In the Revised Standard Version of the Bible it reads as follows: 'A man is not justified by works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ.' We need to be clear what Paul means by the word 'faith'. In the full Biblical sense of the word, it means not only the acceptance by the mind of what has been revealed, but total commitment of one's self and one's life to God, with the intention of living according to God's will. God's will has been fully revealed in Jesus Christ; to have faith in Jesus Christ means to be committed to living as Jesus Christ shows us we ought to

Some modern Christians are guilty of using the phrase 'to have faith in Jesus Christ' in a superficial way. A weakness which is seen in some evangelistic meetings is that people may be exhorted to have faith in Jesus Christ without further explanation that life-commitment to God's will is involved. An emotional response is not enough. Jesus himself said, 'Whoever comes to me cannot be my disciple unless he loves me more than he loves his father and his mother, his wife and his children, his brothers and his sisters, and himself as well. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple' (Luke 14:26-27). The sayings which follow on in Luke 14:28-33 reinforce the need for total commitment to God's will. When Paul refers to faith, then, it means total commitment to God's will as revealed in Jesus Christ.

We also need to remember that in what Paul says about faith, he was trying to deal both with the tendency of the Jews to put great emphasis on outward behaviour, and the tendency of those influenced by Greek thought to put the emphasis on intellectual argument. Liberation from sin did not come either by human effort and action, or through philosophizing, but by God's grace in Jesus Christ.

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